Does Gonzo really pay? We have to admit that this marvelous way of thinking ended in our hero philosopher blowing his brains all over the kitchen. He perches hawkishly over my stove, next to the ice box, smoking a cigarette.
"The Rifle cracked
The Pig Ran back
Then over the Cliff
To his Death
I plucked out his Eyes
And ate Them
His spirit Saluted me"
HST 10/22/94

Big bird is up in Heaven, looking straight back with the inside line on shoulda coulda woulda. Was there any choice in the matter? Or are we just doing exactly what we have to, and whistling away at free will?

Camus said:

"There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful... What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable... But it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death... killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it... It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.
What, then, is that incalcuble feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of their own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death."

The jumpsuit project is having a crisis of direction. It's a crisis of leadership. Is an embrace of the absurdity of this insane reality we have built up around ourselves really the best option under the circumstances? Is it sensible here in this post post relativistic modernity to continue to embrace meaninglessness? Can we reconcile the fact that it's meaningful and meaningless at the same time? It is, or it ain't might be more like it. Relativity produces insanity. When it means something we go up, when it's meaningless we go down. Society is bipolar. We are running out of sense.

It's a crisis of thought. I don't really want to go down the road of one of my long time heroes, HST, blowing the absurd contents of my brain out through the back of my skull. I want to live life desperately and eliminate the dark habits of decay. I like what Baudelaire said: "Let us admit for a moment that hashish gives, or at least increases, genius; they forget that it is in the nature of hashish to diminish the will, and that thus it gives with one hand what it withdraws with the other; that is to say, imagination without the faculty of profiting by it."

blah blah blah...