SONGS of Freedom Hunter S Thompson was once asked by his illustrator Ralph Steadman “what’s the meaning of life?” or some such. Hunter raised his temper & basically told Ralph never to ask that question. As a political journalist he knew all too well how deep corruption goes in our world & so ideas & idealism, great in theory really hold no water. I was just reading about a human rights lawyer who was able to win a big environmental damage suit for an Amazonian Indigenous group over a mining company who'd polluted their water supply (sound familiar?). The mining company of course has paid nothing of the fine & what has happened is that the human rights lawyer has been counter sued by the mining company for more than 50 times what the mining company were sued, has been held under house arrest for years & has had his passport confiscated (so he can no longer fly to the Amazon to work with his Indigenous clients). Apparently the judge in the countersue
2pm & hanging for a drink The thing is I don’t enjoy drinking that much, it’s the effect I like – as a way of making time pass with less friction, less pain, less loneliness. In short, pleasure. Because I don’t want a couple of drinks, I want to obliterate my mind. As Beefheart put it “God, fuck my mind for good!” Being is hard work & life has little pleasure when not tricked up by booze. As Georgie Best put it “I tried not drinking. The most boring 20 minutes of my life!” Because life is a joke. Yesterday I watched a video about Lagos, Nigeria. It focused on how hard people work over there, what with a corrupt political class, the argument is that you either sink or swim on your own. Quite frankly I’m with Camus on the absurdity of life & the importance of being a rebel. To resist the status quo. To seek out freedom. For however much these people earn, mentally, they are enslaved. I see the irony of course. Because here I am working at something. I do it, however,