What I’m Blogging

Shakespeare tells us that “every cloud engenders not a storm”. This may be true, but last night the clouds were engendering in overdrive, and as a result I am left with the merry task of a soffit retrofit.

…Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows…

I saw the night “puff’d up with winds, Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat.” A virtual wall of water and wind was dropped on York Region resulting in downed tree branches, loss of power, and the inevitable job of tidying up afterwards. My tidying consists of a few leaves and branches and fun with aluminium siding.

It is day two of my vacation and I am in full handyman mode about the house. A reassignment of sorts from office work to manual labour. Two positive things though, the rain filled the pool, and I’m actually enjoying myself. So another bardic proverb is shown to be true, “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows”. In this case it’s enjoyment.

It’s the birthday of journalist Hunter S. Thompson, born in Louisville, Kentucky (1939). He was trying to make it as a freelance writer, living with his mother, when he was hired by The Nation magazine to write a brief investigative article about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. After his article was published, he got a call from a publisher offering him fifteen hundred dollars to write a book on the same subject.

…When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro…

Thompson used the advance to buy a motorcycle and began driving around the country, meeting bikers and writing about them. He almost died doing his research one day when five Hell’s Angels suddenly turned on him and beat him senseless. But he survived, and in 1967 he published his book Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. The experience of writing the book inspired Thompson to become a kind of outlaw journalist of the counterculture, writing about his own adventures beyond the boundaries of normal society. He went on to become one of the most prominent journalists of his generation. In 1971 he published his most famous book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Hunter S. Thompson said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”