Bill's Notes

"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," she said. "It was a problem for us."

Hunter S. Thompson was on the phone with his wife when he killed himself. What a sociopath.

Her reaction was the quote above. Top of his game?

I won't say it.

A basketball player is charged with assault for fouling an opponent during a day.

Brings new meaning to the phrase, "No charges, no foul."

I'd need to see the foul to see if this is as stupid as it sounds.

In Philadelphia we've got a bit of a scandal, where — shocker — city officials are accused of giving city contracts to businesses that pay off, er, city officials. I know that no one will believe that anything like this could happen in Philadelphia given the pristine record of honorable city government in the city, but alas, it appears to be true.

So leaving aside the scandal for a moment I started thinking about the implications of pay for play. And then it hit me, here's our solution to the trade deficit:

Why doesn't the United States, in lieu of tariffs on individual items, sell access to its markets? We could have a "pay for play" system.

Pretty easy to set up and negotiate, because we'd have all the leverage. Japan — you want to sell cars to all those American commuters? $30 billion cash gets you unlimited access to the American consumer for one year. China? $80 billion and you can go straight to the markets? France? $100 billion.

Sure, it could cause a bit of retribution, but realistically, wouldn't we have the leverage? Our markets are bigger, which is why there's a trade deficit to begin with. Our "pay for play" access fee would dramatically reduce those trade deficits and allow us to recapture the income.

And yes, some might say that we already do that when it comes to national-debt financing ... and they'd be partially right. But instead of loaning us the money, we'd make them give it to us outright.

I'm telling, it's the solution to our financial problems in this country. Pay to play.

Apparently there's a kind of music called emo. I'd never heard of it until Michele brought it up over at A Small Victory. I don't know anything about it. Apparently some kids cut themselves while listening to this music. It's a whole lifestyle thing.

Dem kids today. I guess tattooes, piercings, smoking weed, free Internet porn, school shootings and designer drugs aren't enough of an emotional rebellion/release. I guess anorexia, bulimia and suicide aren't mentally edgy enough. Now you have to cut yourself, too, and not even while attempting something as purpose-driven as suicide. What's the world coming to?

I don't get it. [I hear my ex- now: "You don't have to."]

If you want to get high, get high. If you don't, don't. If you want to kill, tell the Marines and they'll be happy to set you up. But what's this cutting yourself up?

Some blame the culture. Well, duh. Of course it's the culture. Culture merely means thought. You don't have to be a cognitive psychologist to know that your thoughts matter--if you immerse yourself in negative thoughts, you'll be in a bad mood, and people won't like you, which will cause more negative thoughts, and more bad moods. And so on.

I don't know the emo stuff, but I do know this: The problem we all face in this culture is combatting the negative and unhealthy thoughts that bombard us from all directions, which is what Pope John Paul II calls, "the culture of death." It's a whole host of issues that dislocate us from our proper relationship with God and each other, usually grouped together under the heading, "sin."

Like most reasonable people, I don't think you can pull one item out of a culture and say, "oooh, this is the cause." Kids cut themselves because they've got problems in their thought patterns, and they probably picked up those patterns somewhere. There are plenty of negative examples around, especially of people immersing themselves in negativity, whether in musical choices, their own thoughts, or their choice of friends.

Pretty good article here. I can't vouch for this guy or the science, but he seems to be onto something.

What you're left with are human beings, no different than you or me, who are, of course, sexual beings. Like you and me, their sexuality is broken in a broken world. The notion that "homosexuals" are in effect a "different species" (different genes) is ludicrous beyond belief. There is not the slightest evidence for that as anyone who actually reads the studies (not reports on the studies) knows.

Of course as one grows and changes, one "grooves" a pathway that becomes embedded and increasingly difficult to alter. Of course a different innate disposition places one at a different "risk profile" for all sorts of different paths in life. So what else is new? It is also true that people do sometimes want to change, and some do and some don't. This is true of everything. It's also true that few good things in life are easy, and no achievement is ever perfect.

That said, we should remember that homosexuality has risen to the top of the social-policy agenda because of the utter wreck we all have made of family life over the past 50 years. This horror cannot be blamed on anyone but us. -

I recall back in grad school running into a Matt Groening cartoon where he did a brilliant take on grad school.

The two items in the cartoon I remembered most --

(1) a character telling you that it's okay to procrastinate on your thesis by "reading another book." It was perfect. I'd been procrastinating half the semester using that exact strategy. You can always do more reading for your thesis. You can always justify one more book, even though in the back of your mind you know you're just putting off until tomorrow what you should be doing today.

(2) a sad-sack character identified as the "bitterest person in the world" -- the grad school dropout. He was identified as "currently unable to enjoy anything." I recalled the enormous fatigue I had that day, well, every day in grad school, the enormous efforts I was making, and I thought, yeah, if I quit, I'd be bitter,

Now, as a three time grad student (two-time quitter) and one-time undergrad, I know something about the topic of university education. I also know better than to argue with someone who's got a bad case of post-grad school bitterness. So I'll just make a promise: Chris, buddy, it gets better. The bitterness will pass, and the light will shine again, and you'll walk in the sun. I can't promise you that you'll walk on the skulls of your enemies. I can't. You probably won't. But I can promise you that you haven't wasted your time in college either as an undergrad or grad student and that what you've learned matters.

*****

Now, to change the subject and no longer applying at all to my co-blogger or to anyone in particular, I want to talk about what a professor of mine used to call the preparation necessary for one to speak. If one is a room of Klingons and you're an 18-year-old kid who has never been in anything more than a playground fist-fight, you are not in a position to speak to them about battle, regardless of the merits of your point of view. If you ignore this advice, you may be immediately initiated into both battle and death in battle. You may also be laughed at with impunity, again regardless of the merits of your argument. However, if one is in a room of fellow 18-year-olds with similar levels of experience, you have every right to speak. Context is important.

In some circumstances, you have to not only earn your right to speak, you have to earn your right to listen. Sometimes I've gotten my nose out of joint forgetting that.

Had a rambling conversation with an old friend, who hadn't heard from me in months but apparently guessed correctly that with the death of HST he'd be getting a call from me.

We had a free-ranging conversations about the good doctor, writing, politics and paranoia the 2008 race, (Clinton v. Rice) and finally on the flaws of John Kerry. He summed him up thusly:

"It's not enough to have a fire in the belly. You need balls in the pants."

Lileks (via Instapundit — who else?) does a good summing up.

Wow. My initial thought was, "Yeah, I suppose Hunter S. Thompson has to die, too." If Johnny Carson, certainly the good doctor. Perhaps in the back of mind I imagined the drugs and alcohol would preserve him.

But suicide? I wrote here about Thompson. As for suicide, I quoted Thompson himself on Hemingway at Ketchum. I'll reproduce the quote here:

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years....

Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him--not even when his friend came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So, finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

Thompson used a pistol.



UPDATE: Lots of good links here.
ZombyBoy has some good thoughts here.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson shot himself. Just like Hemingway.

RIP.