thene | telling stories

As previously indicated I've been getting into Hunter S. Thompson, for the sake of cultural touchstones and the admiration of professional trolling. I read Fear and Loathing first, and it took about half the book before I started to get the point, but it was Strange Rumblings In Atzlan (which is about the near-literal war between the police and the Chicano movement in East LA in 1970) that really got to me - something real and recent and so new to me that I frequently went 'shit, this happened?' Not simply because of the events - the Nixon era was, we hope, another country, and I knew nothing about LA's history before this, but he alluded to some traumas that I did know of - the Kent State massacre and the 1968 Chicago riots; but because they were related in such a way as to remind me that RO3K and Egil's Saga really happened too, though they were sadly not written down contemporaneously by a self-insert sue. It's the people, mostly. Thompson writes about Oscar Acosta as if he were a saga hero or bodhisattva, and I don't know if it's love, prose, acid or sheer engagement that allowed him to troll so worshipfully. It's downloadable here, if you feel like brushing up on recent history.

In other fictional news, this is what Fly, Allen and me did today. If my character 'Mirella' reminds you of anyone you may remember from the rose-tinted days of the Old Internet, I apologise.