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How Can I Fill This Void In My Heart?
It has now been two months since I saw ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, undoubtedly one of the finest movies ever made, and I don’t know how to deal with it. My copy is in storage, and even if I retrieved it, I have nothing to play it on. It seems retarded to try and rent it, and even if I did, I’d have to bring it over to a friend’s house and beg them to let me watch it there, where I would inevitably be hounded by questions like, "what could possibly compel you to rent a movie you already own and have probably seen over one hundred times?"

I guess I could get it out of the storage locker and then bring it over to the friend’s house, but this still entails finding a time to watch what I’ll be the first to admit is an exceptionally intense and emotionally draining movie, so what this really amounts to is saying, "hi, can I come in, crash around your place, spend the next hour and a half watching a movie you probably don’t feel like being exposed to and then leave?"
I have access to the book, and I have a good portion of the book being read aloud by Hunter S. Thompson on mp3, but seriously, the movie is a masterpiece. I wouldn’t claim it’s better than the book, but I would say that it embodies the book absolutely, and can in no way be worse. It’s just more vivid and rich and full. The book honestly just seems to be an attempt to describe the movie to me, now. You can’t get those hotel room scenes in any other way. Anything other than that incredible, overpowering cinema is just a cheap substitute. I mean, if you were to boil the book down and shoot it directly into a vein, it might hold me over, for a little while.

I can’t understand why it isn’t still in theaters. I mean, that garbage that Lucas produced is still in theaters. I think you can still see Episode One on the big screen, and Episode One is to film what being raped by bears is to a day at the circus. But a film that manages to successfully represent, in its entirety, the nineties’ idea of what the seventies’ idea of the sixties looks like is gone within a month? Entirely unfair.
It’s pretty obvious that what this boils down to is the drug war. The trouble is that addiction is a disease, not a crime. I am being punished, not for doing anything wrong, but because my behavior, my condition, is considered offense to some, generally the same people who consider the idea of sex with adequate lighting offensive. When I wander through a crowd looking morose and talking about bat country or adrenocrome, people don’t see a fellow human being needing their help and compassion, they see a sub-human, someone to loathe and direct their general frustrations upon. This anger and hatred has manifested itself in the form of numerous laws and regulations entirely indifferent to ideals such as individualism or social welfare, used to promote ‘tough on crime’ right wing lunatics who I find far more vile in public than your average twitching meth addict.

I mean, I admit I have a problem. So do people with Terete’s Syndrome, but we don’t go out of our way to discourage their appearance in public. I could be a Trekkie, blowing tons of cash weekly to feed my habit, ignoring friends, family, work and self all in an effort to perpetuate my high. I could be some blithering Seinfeld junky, barely able to respond to normal stimuli anymore without associating it with an episode number. But I’m not. I’m just a guy who wants to see Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas again.

In a sense it could be considered society’s fault. After all, I was hardly discouraged from watching the movie. It was made specifically for public enjoyment, widely advertised and distributed nationally, with no thought as to the after effects it would have on those who watched it, once it was taken away or, more importantly, the community once it stopped turning enough profit. The big guys in Hollywood and the entertainment industry went in, got our money, fed us an addiction and then pulled out. And who thought, "oh, but what about all the helpless addicts this will create?" Probably no one, at least no one that couldn’t be convinced to ignore the problem in exchange for a taste of the all-mighty dollar. Oh, but now, years later, when those victims of their reckless capitalism suddenly take to the streets to try and ease their shattered bodies with a simple hit, not hurting anyone, not doing any damage, just being, in the eyes of the so called moral majority, distasteful (like they’re in any position to judge me, junkie or no), then people are sure as hell ready to start paying attention again. Oh, now we’re a problem, now we’re some out of control menace. I just want to watch Fear and Loathing, dammit, You were more than happy to have me watch it the first time, when big crowds handed out wads of doe, but what, my seven dollars isn’t good enough for you, now? I’ll make it ten. Seriously. Twenty, if you just put it back on the big screen. C’mon, you make money and get me off the streets. We both win. Oh, but that’s ‘immoral’, right? You could never stand to ‘support my habit’. It’s so much easier to condemn me for it, lock me up, take away my movie. You created the problem, and now you want to sweep it under the rug.

Maybe someone I know’ll rip it to DivX for me.