Origin Story Number Three:

I'm too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts.

Growing up in Fidel Castro’s Cuba was hard. Because of the strict rules against being cool, I understood that my love of culture was forbidden. Upon the release of Radiohead’s seminal album “Ok Computer” I stated to my friend how cool I thought they were. He stated that Fuck’s “Pardon My French” was the better album, and that I was an ‘entry-level’ kid. The SDE (Cuban Secret Police) later took him away and asked him to identify all the cool kids. Many young children were thrown into prison, but I was spared. Perhaps he decided not to reveal my coolness, or that I hadn’t reached a level considered ‘troublesome’ enough.

Upon seeing the movie “Rushmore” in an illegal underground cinema, I knew the authorities would be after me. Max’s mannerisms fit mine so perfectly, I could relate to the character so well. Yet I had to keep this cool knowledge to myself, for fear of exposing myself and others to danger. A plan began to appear in my head, of escaping this retro country to the Promised Land, America, which had bountiful amounts of independent music and cinema, a place where I might become an “authentic” consumer of haute culture.

Each night I played a flute for various stingrays. Training them to carry large objects, I earned their trust by taking good care of them. Stingrays are well-known in Cuba for being faithful servants, but few had tried what I wanted to do. My goal was to float away from the island not on a raft, but in a 57 Chevy so I could be protected from the elements and sharks.

I talked to my family about leaving. They agreed it would be for the best. Late at night, after the electricity got turned off to save gas, I scurried out at night with my Chevy. Starting to play my flute, I heard a car fast approaching. Apparently I had become indie enough for the authorities to capture me. Finally, I thought happily to myself, all that talk about music and movies wasn’t for naught. People really understood that I was cool enough to present a threat to the government. 

As they approached, I drove my car into the water and sailed on top of the mighty stingrays. What I didn’t realize was how slowly stingrays move. Though I escaped from Cuba, I suffered another fate. Floating on these creatures might be safe, but you need enough supplies of water and food to survive. 

The day I ran out of water ended up being a turning point in my life. Realizing that I was nowhere near the Florida coast, I felt defeated. Maybe I should’ve stayed in Cuba, with the malevolent dictatorship. Perhaps listening to the Macarena wasn’t that bad, and I should just become a mainstreamer. Delusion started to set in. No, I screamed to myself, I was too attractive and likable to become that.

Heading towards the edge of the car, I looked at the vast sea surrounding me. All this water, and not a drop to drink, I thought bitterly to myself. Suddenly I felt an urge to urinate as I munched on my Shredded Wheat, ready to become fully dehydrated. But an idea, a brilliant idea, popped into my head and helped me to survive.

Quickly I pulled down my pants and urinated into the bowl of cereal. Thinking that this was the lowest I’d ever go, I began to eat the urinate-soaked cereal. Drinking my own urinate saved my life. Plus, it tasted pretty good. Mixing it with shredded wheat gave it a nice edge it otherwise wouldn’t have had. 

Finally, I saw land. Thankful to my stingray companions, I promised to send those alternative CDs once I had gotten myself settled into the new country. Driving my car across a beach, blasting my Rushmore soundtrack, I got yelled at. That behavior, a well-tanned person explained to me, earned me the insult ‘entry-level’. I screamed back “Sorry, I just left a brutal communist regime. I’ll read a couple of blogs and get back to you asshole.”

Lacking any marketable skills, I feared I would fail in this new and strange land. Slowly I learned that I could sell myself to people in exchange for money. I could earn a living this way, a scantily clad woman informed me. Thanking her tremendously and almost hugging her (but then thinking twice about it) I set forth on my new business adventure.

Whoring myself out to retired Jewish Grandmothers, I learned that Florida was not the cultural center of the United States. Asking them politely after they were done smoking, they informed me that all cool people lived in New York and then moved down to Florida when they were ready to die. I earned enough money to move up to the big city, but could only afford a small place in Brooklyn, a neighborhood called Williamsburg. I wondered whether or not Williamsburg would attract the cool kids, or perhaps I should move to Queens. Asking around Manhattan (which appeared to be filled with rich people) they told me Queens was where people settled down, and Brooklyn was for pretentious indie dicks.

I enjoyed living in Brooklyn. Never before had I seen so many relevant record stores. Hoping my family was still alive in Cuba, I sent them a Doobie Brothers album, since they were apparently all the rage around that time. People listened to the Doobie Brothers in Brooklyn, I learned, but only ‘ironically’. 

For a while, I tried selling myself, like I did in Florida, but the grandparents in New York already had male prostitutes. Worrying about my future, I began writing blurbs in papers for various bands I enjoyed; along with pictures of people I thought looked cool or lame. The column ended up being a smash hit at Northsix, and someone told me to write for Vice Magazine.

Hoping to impress my future boss, I wore a suit and tie. Eating my morning breakfast of urine and shredded wheat, I looked forward to meeting the kind-hearted soul named Gavin McInnes. Those I asked about Gavin stated he was a soft-spoken and caring man who yearned to give back to the community which had done so much for him.

Entering his office, I saw him having intercourse with a woman painted like a Cat while she made a smoothie using a half-dead squirrel and Wintergreen Altoids. Seeing my face, he welcomed me into his office. First he asked me if I liked Pat Buchanan, and I said yes, since that guy hated communism, a force I had only recently escaped. Liking this answer, he smiled and nodded. He said my breath reeked of urine. I said that made sense, since I drank my urine on a regular basis, now believing it to help boost my immune system. Curious, he asked what I ate with my urine. Unsure of where this was going, I said shredded wheat. Angrily he told me to get the fuck out of his face. 

Dejected, I walked out of the office. Standing on the street, Gavin came toward me. Almost out of breath, he said I got the job. Explaining he needed to weed out the fake urine drinkers, I became a member of the Vice Magazine staff. 

Over the next several years, I learned how to mock others with wit and grace. My accent became more distinctly “New York” in feel. Even when my mentor Gavin left Vice Magazine in 2007, I continued to partake in writing many album reviews. I remained in close contact with Gavin, and he ate a bowl of cereal soaked in his own urine as a tribute to my greatness.

2010 ruined everything. I met a girl. Her name was Bethany Cosentino. After falling madly in love with her, I wrote a glowing review in Vice Magazine about her band Best Coast. But the love ended up being only a ruse. Nathan Williams, some pothead, ended up being her actual boyfriend. To add further embarrassment, she wrote about it on her blog. My career in snarky commentary was over. Vice Magazine tolerated many things, but genuine emotion wasn’t one of them.

At my favorite bar, a kid named Jordan Castro came up to me to try and interview me about it. Since I was on heavy psychedelics, I thought he was a spy from Cuba here to take away my freedom. Viciously I attacked him, and three people twitted about it. In his Tumblr, he called me a “worthless asshole”. That didn’t hurt so much, since nobody knew who he was.

Depression bit me hard. Worried about losing the last shreds of credibility, I tried to get in touch with the Jewish Grandmothers in Florida, to restart my life down there again. I learned most of them had died, but one was still sort of alive. The sort of alive grandmother told me I was the coolest person she could remember and when she passed away, she left me a pair of used underwear and $650,000.

The money gave me a second chance. Speaking to my mentor Gavin, he suggested rebuilding my street cred with a blog. A blog from the heart dedicated to those stingrays whose sloth-like movement inched me towards my current freedom. That is why so many of these posts reveal my inner most thoughts. I’m trying to mend my heart. Thanks for the hugs.

Thoughts about Hunter S. Thompson

As a young man

Hunter S. Thompson inspires me. Every time I read his work it fills me with energy I didn’t know I had. But I feel that there are a few things that people often misconstrue about him and his work.  This isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault in particular, but when you have a writer who puts himself as the main character there are bound to be a few errors.

During his life, Hunter often remarked that whenever he was going to give a speech to a class or any group, he thought whether they wanted to hear him speak, or his alter-ego Raoul Duke. Sometimes Mr. Thompson concerned himself about this, about how much space should be between the observer and the actual event. Should the observer be responsible for the said event?

These questions plagued him from his childhood until his death. Even as a young recruit in the army, he was summarized as: “This airman, although talented, will not be guided by policy.” Some might find it strange that he even served in the army in the first place, since his anti-conformist streak would’ve set off numerous red flags. Keep in mind this is before his creation of his true literary child, gonzo journalism.

In fact, when I type ‘gonzo’, I don’t see anything indicating that I had misspelled it in any way, shape or form. By spell checking acknowledging it as an actual word, it shows how far Thompson’s original intent has gotten.

Originally he created gonzo journalism when he realized that he couldn’t see anything at the Kentucky Derby. Rather than ruing this misfortunate that the cruel hand of fate shoved towards him, he shook that hand. For several days he and his illustrator Ralph Steadman got debauched and wrote about getting debauched.

What most know about Hunter S. Thompson comes from his famous book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. If you read the book, you got the clear picture of someone coming to terms with the end of the hippie era. Sadly, the movie about this book ruined most of what made the book so special. Instead, the film focused exclusively on him abusing all sorts of drugs seeking something that never got explicitly mentioned. By editing out the thought behind it, the movie shows Hunter as an empty husk of a man in desperate need of mind-altering substances.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote so well not because he did drugs on a fairly frequent basis, but because he was an actually accomplished writer. Gavin McInnes, someone who I normally avoid discussing, phrased it best: writing while on drugs makes you a terrible writer and editor in general. Those who think that simply producing content (writing, typing, etc.) while not in the right mind will produce excellent content are dead wrong. Writers known for their various habits and addictions (like Hunter S. Thompson, William S. Burroughs) suggest that you should write about what you know. Mind altering substances don’t automatically do that for you, it requires actual practice, re-writes, and so on. So there’s one misconception of Hunter removed. 

Another one that I hear so much about was how difficult he could be. This isn’t true. In his stories he over-exaggerates things to make them more engaging for the reader. Watching interviews with him, you get the distinct impression that he actually thought before he spoke. Compare his disdain for Nixon or George W. Bush with the absolute cruel vitriol that Keith Olbermann has for the same people. No contest, Thompson definitely used a little thing called restraint when dealing with people he didn’t see eye to eye with.

 Examples of each abound even within his writing. Writing in “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72” he writes that how despite Nixon being a disgusting excuse of a human being, he knew a lot about football. So he’s willing to actually grant his ideological enemies some leeway. Writing about Bush, he wishes the “child” President some luck in finding the 9/11 attackers in a blog post. It’s interesting to note how in that same blog post, he mentions how the US will almost immediately think of attacking places like Afghanistan, Iraq,  and Pakistan, which now comes across as particularly wise of him. So not only is he soft on someone he considers much worse than his hated Nixon, but even hopes the best for him. 

Thompson belonged to a bizarre fringe of pure freedom believers. Intensely against all forms of government control (if he ever made it to Sheriff, he promised to renamed Aspen “Fat City” and remove all roads, leaving only grassy knolls. He almost won), gun-loving, and pure privacy, something now lost on us. His generation wondered what happened to all that energy released in the late 60s and where those people had gone, what they had become, and what they were going to be. Most people remained content with what they had around them and felt confined by their limitations. Even in his death Thompson remained true to his belief that only you could define how you live. 

Perhaps sometime soon we might be fortunate enough to have another writer of his sheer verve and vigor bestowed upon us mere mortals.