Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later?
Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that
never comes again. San Fransisco in the middle sixties was a very special time
and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long
run... There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could
strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we
were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't
need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting
-- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest
of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go
up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes
you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back.
-- Hunter S. Thompson
So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve....
