TimBr
Official Well Known Greeter
- Location
- Northern Virginia
Hunter on electricity...
Lock one hand behind your back before you touch anything full of dissatisfied voltage-even a failed light bulb-because you will almost certainly die soon if you don’t.
Electricity is neutral. It doesn’t want to kill you, but it will if you give it a chance. Electricity wants to go home, and to find a quick way to get there-and it will.
Electricity is always homesick. It is lonely. But it is always lazy. It is like a hillbilly with a shotgun and a jug of whiskey gone mad for revenge on some enemy-a fatal attraction, for sure-but he won’t go much out of his way to chase the bugger down if ambush looks a lot easier.
Why prowl around and make a spectacle of yourself when you can lay in wait under some darkened bridge and swill whiskey like a troll full of hate until your victim appears-drunk and careless and right on schedule-so close that you almost feel embarrassed about pulling the trigger.
That is how electricity likes to work. It has no feelings except loneliness, laziness, and a hatred of anything that acts like resistance…like a wharf rat with its back to the wall-it won’t fight unless it has to, but then it will fight to the death.
Electricity is the same way: it will kill anything that gets in its way once it sees a way to get home quick…
Zaaappp!
Right straight up your finger and through your heart and your chest cavity and down the other side.
Anything that gives an escape route. Anything-iron, water, water, flesh, ganglia-that will take it where it must go, with the efficiency of gravity or the imperative of salmon swimming upriver…And it wants the shortest route-which is not around a corner and through a muscle mass in the middle of your back, but it will go that way if it has to.
-Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Songs of the Doomed
More notes on the death of the American Dream
Gonzo Papers Vol. 3
Tom, thanks so much for posting this; I'd never before seen or heard of it. Great bit of writing, and it seems pretty accurate. Every electrical worker should know of its existence.
I would agree that @JeffGu and @JD3000 are giving Mr. Thompson a run for his money.
Tim













