This piece, originally written for, but never published by, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies has been one of the most popular pieces on this website ever since I first posted it, and has received many compliments.
Hunter S. Thompson
The theatre was dark and reeked with the stench of a hundred overfed accountants gorging on chemical drenched popcorn and syrup water. I’d been assigned to review No Country for Old Men for Rolling Stone, and was already a week past deadline, but had abandoned the assignment partly because when you eat as much mescaline as I had it’s very hard to focus on a predetermined task, and also because I realized what a fleecing the operation was. Fifteen dollars for a ticket. Eight dollars for popcorn. Four dollars for soda. This wasn’t art. It was a twisted perversion of the American dream, a herding of overweight suburbanites into giant pens with flashing pictures on the wall to stupefy them into paying outrageous prices for sickening foods.
Tonight I ran beneath a crescent moon, thick like a section of orange, the color of lightning, surrounded by inky night speckled sparsely with stars. Golden Beach is the best place to run in Tainan. It’s relatively close to town and there’s rarely anybody on it at night.
It had rained lightly and steadily for three days on the festival grounds, a small grassy plateau high in the mountains of Taoyuan County. The dance floor, if you could call it that, was a flat formerly grassy area blanketed in four inches of mud.