(alternative title: “Poor Poor Pitiful Me”)
I seem to have spent most of the last week and a half coming down with a mystery viral thing, hitting one of the rockiest rock-bottoms I have ever hit, and then recovering, painfully slowly, from same. There was actually a point, around midday last Friday, when I felt as if my vital fluids had drained completely away. At that stage, I would happily (no, not “happily”; willingly might be better: “happy” does not sit well, especially when over the last couple of weeks we have seen the self-inflicted deaths of, first, Nick Kilroy, a name I did not previously know, although it turns out that his musical tastes have been an enormously positive influence on my own over the last 12 months via gabba.cc, and secondly, of course, Hunter S Thompson, who should never have lived past 35 anyway, whose “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” should be a compulsory text for all self-respecting post-adolescents everywhere, and the last words on whom should be those of long-time collaborator Ralph Steadman, as appearing in the Guardian, preferably read while having open on the other half of the screen Steadman’s drawing of HST in the New York Times of the same day) have gone to meet the maker. I don’t think I have ever felt so weak, so drained.
