If there’s a wobbliness inside you that doesn’t correspond to the symbols of the world,

If you want to watch a strange and lonely figure acting out their own beliefs, playing the fool so hard that nobody takes them seriously, wrecking their life for an oblique, destructive, and deeply personal vision,

If the fall is coming on in a cold and horrible way with the wind thrashing the trees,

If the hero’s journey inside you has started rotting,

Pick up Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail ‘72.

In Fall of 2022…

The only person I’ve ever loved flew off to Minneapolis, wouldn’t return my calls, and then disappeared forever into Germany; I spent every night drinking tequila sodas in Downtown Madison with high school friends, even though I don’t like drinking and only had two real friends; I found my calling to be a poet but was very lazy about writing, and actually was afraid to write because it might have revealed that I sucked and couldn’t be a poet, and on top of that, I had a secret paranoid belief that the poetic calling was a destructive seed placed inside me by an evil force to make me forever a do-nothing, forever avoiding a real job and normal society until, eventually, my mind was torn apart.

I was absolutely-definitely not writing, not even a thing or two, not even tiny poems. I was living at home, basement-style, every day waking up disgusted to the overripe sunlight of 1p.m. slanting through my window; on one cursed day, after spending eight hours making a cassoulet (my favorite dinner in the world) and then, at dinner, eating as much of it as I could take, an extreme salt and meat migraine came down on me and quickly knocked me out; at midnight I woke up with a new, much deeper terror in my mind, somehow a conglomerate of everything I did wrong with the girl I loved, the avoidance of writing, the always-drinking and subsequent drying-out of my mind, other old voices, a terrible shimmering everywhere, and my self-disgust. I hastily made a plan to get out of town, right then. I threw some things into my car and zoomed off into the dark, driving west for 17 straight hours into Wyoming, where I parked in a dusty parking lot outside the Wind River Range and backpacked alone up into Dad’s Lake and found a secret place in the trees to read Tu Fu (whose alien wisdom made me more lonely and afraid to be alive) and asked myself do I want to be a writer do I want to be a writer do I want to be and woke up to a pink-swirled morning and the largest sky I’d ever seen, filled with deep, mean clouds gathering around me and raindrops plopping onto my face and thunder booming off the weird mountain faces and a bad wind thrashing the trees. I packed up as the thunderstorm came on me and lightning started cracking down and, eventually, after running through many flat and electro-conducive plains, got back to my car and drove to Lander, WY, picking up hitchhikers off the CDT on the way — and they were cool, but I ended up sad in their motel room watching Iron Giant, drinking out of one of their gallon jugs of sangria, everything hot and everywhere the headache-glow of my unreal life. Eventually, I left and saw my friend Galen in Dubois, and he was broken too, so I went home, nothing solved; and in a grieving and in a broken down state I applied for a job at UPS, and got it.

But the job didn’t start for a month. Right around then, my friend James invited me to his family’s annual lake trip in Northern Wisconsin. I said yes. Before leaving, I shaved my head bald again, and then I packed a bag full of clothes, Black Cat bottle rockets, a fifth of that skull-bottle tequila, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail ‘72. 

***

Campaign Trail starts at the end, the Author’s Note written by a beaten-down Thompson in ‘73, reflecting on the insanity of the Presidential Race, the inability to remember the story he had just lived, and the depressing loss to Richard Nixon, again. Right away, Thompson gets on this confusing metaphor where he compares the desire of political journalists to speak in confusing jargon with jackrabbits who streak in front of cars, wanting to die. It flops, so he tries again, on the next page of the same draft, in the classic Thompson-style of “first-draft screeds”:

The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships in Washington or anywhere else where they meet on a day-to-day basis. When professional antagonists become after-hours drinking buddies, they are not likely to turn each other in … especially not for “minor infractions” of rules that neither side takes seriously;

When I went to Washington I was determined to avoid this kind of trap. Unlike most other correspondents, I could afford to burn all my bridges behind me—because I was only there for a year, and the last thing I cared about was establishing long-term connections on Capitol Hill.

Thompson’s outright denial of the rules of engagement for a journalist feels on-point, risky, fun; it seems like an artist’s take on political coverage: to send in an informant who doesn’t need to appease any of the big-wigs. An idealist’s approach to covering a campaign. His journalistic recklessness, which is at a screaming-high pitch throughout this book and sometimes borders on unethical, doubles as an intuitive stand against the dangerous bullshit of the ruling class. 

The book is a compilation of all the bi-weekly articles he wrote for Rolling Stone during the year of the election, out on the road. At the end of the intro, Thompson offers something like a manifesto for the style and tone of his writing, an apology (in the Socratic sense) for the messiness of his story, which he will not rewrite.

What I would like to preserve here is a kind of high-speed cinematic reel-record of what the campaign was like at the time, not what the whole thing boiled down to or how it fits into history. There will be no shortage of books covering that end.

***

My senses were dead at this time in my life. For many months I couldn’t find the energy or simple focus to read, which came with a unique register of humiliation for someone who wanted to be a writer.

Instead, James and I did a lot of shit outside. The land was rich from summer; the air was cooling down. We swam to the big island and walked around it barefoot. We laid shirtless on the dock. We walked through the woods. We walked through the woods in the rain. We biked through the woods. We swam to a raft and laid on that. We found an abandoned shack and walked through it, pulling up boards. We took turns playing the guitar. We laid in a hammock and napped. We played basketball even though we were bad. We played a lot of Bags. We didn’t shower once, which was a secret we kept between us. 

What else did we do… I helped a world-renowned particle physicist get to his feet after he drunkenly fell backward in his lawn chair during a community campfire. But he was embarrassed to take my hand. 

And a lot more fires. Mojitos. Cheddar cheese and Triscuits. Multiple layers of smoke. Stars. Whippits. Wet grass.

Eventually, I felt like reading the book I packed.

When a man gives up drugs he wants big fires in his life — all night long, every night, huge flames in the fireplace & the volume turned all the way up. I have ordered more speakers to go with my new McIntosh amp — and also a fifty watt “boombox” for the FM car radio.

You want good strong seatbelts with the boombox, they say, because otherwise the bass riffs will bounce you around inside like a goddamn ping-pong ball… a very bad act in traffic; especially along these elegant boulevards of Our Nation’s Capital.

And from there, it goes into the campaign, where things get very weird. Thompson immediately starts libeling all the candidates he doesn’t like: the ones he thinks are fascists, party idiots and sellouts, pro-Vietnam thugs, etc. 

A real high point comes against “Big Ed” Edmund Muskie — a seemingly harmless old hack who somehow was an early frontrunner to represent the Democratic Party — when word comes out that he’s ingesting an obscure and dangerous drug called Ibogaine. From this point onwards, Muskie begins to slowly tank in the polls as he’s asked over and over about the drug.

The rumor, of course, was a dangerous lie started by Hunter S. Thompson — to which he admits in the book, citing the press’s inability to take a joke, their bad humor. And this cracked me up, but it was hard to tell if it was funny or horrible. Thompson rides that edge hard. Later on, during the Florida primary, a must-win state for Ed Muskie, Thompson randomly gives his press credentials for the “Sunshine Special” (a train tour for Muskie to put on speeches around the state), to some random, very unstable, drug-fueled and politically radical person he meets at the bar. And that person goes on the Sunshine Special, in real life, and unleashes hell. He drinks from the free journalists bar until he’s mean drunk, assaulting other journalists, and at the train stops for Muskie’s speeches, he lumbers off the train car to the front row with the journalists and yells horrible things as Muskie tries to speak. At times he goes so rough on Muskie that he ends the speech halfway through. The whole day goes like this; eventually, Muskie calls the Sunshine Special early. All the while, Thompson sleeps-in in his hotel room, hungover. And the next day his press credentials are revoked.

The one candidate Thompson actually liked was a far-and-away long-shot named George McGovern, a very agreeable and left-leaning “peace freak” who was polling somewhere between 6th or 7th place before the primaries started. And because McGovern was so small and nobody was interested in him, Thompson got in-depth access to his campaign that nobody else bothered with — so in-depth that he became personal friends with McGovern and many of his top strategists. But then, all of a sudden, McGovern became huge, the frontrunner. And Thompson, once at the center of the McGovern machine, was slowly pushed out of the inner circle as the campaign became more serious, more commercial, more likely presidential, because he was not a trustworthy journalist.

***

The lakes of Northern Wisconsin are the most beautiful in the world. Every morning at dawn, they shed their mist upwards to the gold-pink sky. They’re glassy, like a big mirror, and each morning when I would walk out onto the dock, I stared onto the shimmering lake with its mist and ached for something hidden and folded up into the air, the birch and pine shoreline jagging up around me. Then I would take off running, swift and barefoot and loud on the wooden boards of the dock. I’d leap, tucking my chin and knifing my arms forward, and burst face-first through the cold skin of the lake, instantly taken into its dark and silent chest, and turn into something else.

The campaign is relentless on all of its participants, and whenever Thompson is by water on the trail, he sneaks off to swim.

A strange sidelight on the McGovern victory celebration was the showing of the infamous “Zapruder film” from November 22, 1963 in Dallas. I went out of curiosity and despite the angry snarls of many McGovern staffers, and the sight of Jack Kennedy’s head exploding in a cloud of bloody-pink bone splinters was such a vicious bummer for me that I went up to my room and spent the rest of the night watching TV in a mean-drunk stupor. Sometime near dawn I went down to the beach to swim, ignoring the monsoon-rainstorm… Nobody else was on the beach—or even on the pool-patio. From two hundred yards out in the surf I could see people moving around in the dim yellow windows of the McGovern press room on the mezzanine… but they couldn’t see me, bobbing around in the rain-thrashed surf that I suddenly realized was carrying me out to sea…

Indeed, a nasty rip-tide. I can’t say for sure how long it took me to get back to the beach, but it seemed like forty years… a bad way to die… I kept thinking about this as I clawed desperately in the troughs of the long white-capped waves… holding a well-aimed sidestroke to keep my head above the foam and saying constantly to myself: “Don’t worry, old sport — you’re making fine progress, a human torpedo…”

One night, James and I got really high and took a canoe out into the dense fog. We paddled slowly, afraid of our own sound, drifting through the slimy and dark-dark air like a ghost ship. God could have been standing on the water five feet away from us; we wouldn't have seen him through the mist. We coasted into one of the thin and shallow canals that connected lake to lake. It was mossy, jungle-like, very still. Suddenly James followed through on some silent and dangerous conviction to go stand barefoot on the dream-land, and when he stood up, our canoe flipped over and dumped us into the oil-black water.

That muddy mossy growth on my arms and face; that beautifully soft mud in between my thighs and the wet denim of my jeans; that sudden sense of danger: the rush of a tiny adventure. When we finally paddled home and docked that gross canoe, James went inside to sleep, and I took off my jeans and socks and shirt and underwear, hung them all on the clothesline, and dove naked into the lake. 

***

The truth is, things were getting very peaceful for me and I was in no mood to fire off the Black Cat bottle rockets I had packed. So, instead, during the long nights, I read Campaign Trail in the quiet living room of the cabin. I love James’ family; they’re my second family; I’ve eaten like 300 bagels in their house, and maybe 175 sleeves of Zesta Whole Grain Crackers — but they’re kind of hippies, and so they go to bed very early. And so every night the cabin was quiet, creaking the comfortable creaks of a sleeping family.

I had a magic feeling reading through those long nights. I would be giggling, giggling, feeling something strange being transmitted to me from far away. I’d snap out of a 30-page stupor and put the book down and look around the dimly lit cabin, hear the wind swirling the trees outside, sense the stillness of the lake, and I’d get this strange and strong feeling that the past, and Thompson, hadn’t disappeared or gone anywhere, but were right there, beside me and living.

It’s a running joke — except it’s not a joke, so maybe it’s just a running theme — that Thompson missed his deadline for all of his stories. So, the entire vantage point of the book is from a man in his hotel room from 2-8 a.m., recapping huge and strange gaps of time that he sleep-walked through. This nocturnal craziness bleeds into every page. But there’s something else too that tracks through each chapter: a strange calmness. A resignation that one can only feel late at night, in touch with something completely separate from the crazy externalities of the political world: the internal clock, as it is; the desire to write outward from a passing moment and make it last; the work, when it comes down to it, of a writer. And always, Thompson imprints deep into the moments he’s living, mixing the fury of the writing of his stories into the stories themselves, often dragging us through his episodes of falling apart as he creates the piece we’re reading. On those late nights in the cabin, Thompson was falling apart at my elbow, within earshot.

***

As the presidential race goes on, Thompson fully breaks down. His “chapters” become incoherent; sometimes, he goes on terrible, convoluted screes about unlikely political hypotheticals; sometimes, he muses on the similarities between the Kennedys and bull elks; sometimes, he recounts harrowing stories which don’t relate at all to the campaign. But always, you get the feeling that it's the dark energy of the campaign that’s forcing him to write such strange things, and somehow the stories are important to The Story. In a late, short chapter titled “October,” you get something like this:

October

Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls…