They blasted Hunter Thompson’s ashes out of a cannon today. The cannon was one Thompson himself won in a bet over the presidential election of 1988. It was a beautifully restored antique and was purportedly used in the battle for the Alamo. The man who lost the bet claimed that it had fired the ball that had swept Santa Anna’s first Lieutenant clean off his horse.
Dignitaries were flown in from all over to witness the event. Nancy Regan wore a dark veil. Bono and Dan Rather had, it appeared, a little too much wine. George HW Bush and his Presidential Progeny watched on a satellite linkup from Air Force One. Maya Angelou refused to allow anyone else a chance to try out Hunter’s infamous pneumatic stilt set, but everyone forgave the selfishness because it was clear that she was barely able to hold herself together. Out near the wall where security held back the crowd a fight broke out; Michael Eisner was knifed and rushed to a Denver-area hospital.
At one point a white duck in dark Ray-Ban style sunglasses broke free from the crowd and approached the cannon. It pulled a cork from a bottle of whiskey and emptied it down the barrel. It then removed a roll of twenties from beneath a wing and dropped this and several pills of various colors down the barrel as well. Waddling away, he was heard to sniff and remark, “Now we’re even, you sweet son of a bitch.”
When they ignited the charge, the ashes did not disperse as anticipated, but clung together in a knot, which flew three hundred yards before clobbering a passing Bald Eagle. The eagle flopped around in the garden for several minutes until Tim O’Brien ended its suffering with a single stomp of his snakeskin cowboy boot.
Nearby police turned a blind eye to this event, even going so far as to drag Condoleezza Rice off into the bushes for a bit of “rogering” when she pointed out the infraction. “He was,” they said, “after all, the King of Gonzo.”
Ah, what wouldn’t I give to have something meaningful inscribed upon my tombstone such as: “He Was the King of Gonzo”?
Incidentally, I mused for quite some time about the poetic quality of the cannonball that “wept” Santa Anna off his horse, until I realized it was probably a typo.
Hey, maybe you’ve got enough s’s laying around that you can just drop them left and right, willy nilly, with no regard for s ecology but some of us have student loan payments and we have to be selective about when we might use an s and when we can probably get away without it. …and for being such a close reader, David, you missed that it was Santa Anna’s Lieutenant and not Santa Anna himself who got (s)wept clean off his horse. Y’know, sometimes I think you’re just itching for a fight and rest of the time I think you probably have some sort of mental illness.
The things we surf across.
I have read and reread books about how America handled cholera.
The one thing I came to grips with about cholera…..>
When you examine the medical community from a distance….yes they are all just practicing medicine.
And here is one 60 year old American truck driver with at least 3,000.000 miles behind the steering wheel. Unlike most truck drivers, I quit eating truckstop food 25 years ago, and whew…..glad that lesson was learned.
*frostily* Sir, I am a proofreader, not an historian. I was kind enough NOT to point out a punctuation error toward the end of your piece. I thumb my nose at you. I sentence you to a lifetime of truck stop food. I scoff at your economy of letters and your tudent loan payment. Mental illne, indeed!
Look here, pal. If you’re going to go around inciting people in this way, you’d better able to tolerate the result. But I will concede that it was deliciously diabolical, the way that you mentioned a punctuation error but did not direct me to it. I’m sure you imagined me poring for hours over the last sentences of the piece for an error that might not even exist. You giggled to yourself as my eyes went cross-ways, you cackled when I resorted in exasperation to Strunk & White, checking things for which I found my surety evaporating. Well, you little weasel, know now that I found the errant apostrophe, and I have a pretty good idea where I’d like to jam it.