No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.
Now you can see them, too, right there at your work desk — click here to read Part 1 of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as it ran in Rolling Stone magazine. As unruly as its creator, legendary madman Hunter S. Thompson, this 23,000-word howl of comic despair has apparently hopped the Stone's firewall and is running loose. (Lock up your drugs!) At its heart a demented, physical eulogy for the fading freedoms of the '60s in the age of Nixon Rising — a subtext that might've lost some of its mojo by now — it's still a hoot to read, "hot, fast and exciting," as writer John Irsfeld once put it, from its infamous opening scenes in the Mojave desert to its hallucinatory visions of Vegas. (Though not everyone agrees. Another Vegas-associated writer, Dave Hickey, writes about Fear and Loathing in his latest essay collection, Pirates and Farmers.* "So, even now, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas feels feverish, famished by amphetamines and genuinely afraid of itself. … Hunter's Vegas tastes like sucking pennies.")
Click now and read for yourself.
*Full, and possibly excessive disclosure: A version of Hickey's essay ran in the Las Vegas Weekly when I edited it.