The Tin Man Emerges
6 April 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The Tin Man EmergesLike a hibernating bear emerging from his den after a winter of deep sleep, I am doing more and more outdoor cardio and its kicking my glutes. My enthusiasm is outstripping my current degree of cardio fitness. The sessions are too long and every morning I wake up going why am I so tired? But what the hell, it is so incredibly beautiful in the mountains this time of year that my all my early morning walks which should be limited to 30-minutes are stretching to 60 or more and though fun at the time, the result is a blanket of fatigue.
By all rights I should slow-walk the reentry process, ease into this thing, but when Im deep in the Catoctins, not a soul around for miles, it is positively transcendental, its both seductive and draining. Yesterday I turned a corner on a steep narrow trail leading upward from a swollen river (the spring run off combined with heavy rains has caused every local water source to rage and bust over the banks) and twenty feet ahead three deer, two adults and a baby, stood peacefully munching away on incredibly fragrant vegetation that lined both sides of the path. (Jasmine?) The river noise masked my steps and being an experienced woodsman I froze the instant I caught sight of them. I stood stock still and watched them for a full five minutes before a breeze carried my scent to them. They looked over in unison, priceless, and bounded away with unhurried grace. I continued on.My bodyweight is up coming off a long winter of homemade stews and soups, rich flavorful concoctions made in the crock pot, succulent roasts and loads of Purposefully Primitive peasant food.
My winter training was heavy and infrequent, my cardio spotty, catch as catch can. As a direct result my physique thickened and my power quotient soared. Now its time to eat less, walk more often and go further and faster. But as the Olympic sprinter once quipped, My performance has not yet caught up to my ego.
Time to shift gears: my lifting will become more frequent with more variety using a faster pace, higher reps, less poundage and an entirely new outlook. In the meantime, on my walks I feel like a clumsy Frankenstein wandering the Transylvanian hills, or the tin man left out in the rain now searching for my oil canstiff, ponderous, able to uproot trees but unable to catch a disabled veteran in a wheelchairitll take full month before Ill be able to pare off ten to fifteen pounds and regain my spry nimbleness. Today, if its clear, Im going to up head to High Rock and see if I can get some shots of the valley.
Talk about a sendoff: cmon, love him or detest him, Hunter Thompson had a great sense of humor and his last sendoff has a theater of the absurd flavor to it that I love. I think they should turn the space shot over his Woody Creek farm into a pay-for-view TV special: Id like to find out the exact date and time and throw a deck partylike New Years Eve. Well roast a pig, have a cookout, drink Docs favored booze, Wild Turkey, and at the exact same moment they fire his remains into the stratosphere well set off a bottle rocket and sing Sympathy for the Devil. Maybe we could make it an annual event: The Gonzo Debauchery Festival next to Festivus this could become the second biggest celebration of the PP year.
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Writer Hunter Thompson’s ashes will be shot from cannon, wife says
April 05, 2005 1:49 PM EDT
DENVER - Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes will be blasted from a cannon mounted inside a 16-meter-high (53-foot-high) sculpture of the journalist’s “gonzo fist” emblem, his wife said Tuesday. The cannon shot, planned sometime in August on the grounds of his Aspen-area home, will fulfill the writer’s long-cherished wish. “It’s expensive, but worth every penny,” Anita Thompson said. “I’d like to have several explosions. He loved explosions.” Thompson, 67, shot himself in the head on Feb. 20 after a long and flamboyant career that produced such new journalism classics as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and cast his image as a hard-charging, drug-crazed daredevil. The cannon shot will be part of a larger public celebration of Thompson’s life. Some details remain to be worked out, including the exact date, what kind of cannon will be used and the specifics of the gonzo fist, Anita Thompson said. She said the gonzo fist will be mounted on a 30-meter (100-foot) pillar, making the monument 46 meters (153 feet) high. It will resemble Thompson’s personal symbol, a fist on an upthrust forearm, sometimes with “Gonzo” emblazoned across it. Anita Thompson has said the monument will be a permanent fixture on the writer’s 40-hectare (100-acre) property. She said planning for the fist has been guided by a video of Thompson and longtime illustrator-collaborator Ralph Steadman, recorded in the late 1970s when they visited a Hollywood funeral home and began mapping out the cannon scheme. Meanwhile, Playboy magazine this week is publishing an interview with Thompson based on a series of conversations he had with magazine staffer Tim Mohr in December. In the interview, Thompson discusses a range of topics from political freedom to the best kind of snow tires to buy but offers no obvious hints of his impending suicide. “He was really enthusiastic and full of energy,” Mohr told The Associated Press on Monday. Thompson even talked about embarking on a long-term project to expand the Playboy piece into a book, “a guide to life, sort of a handbook,” Mohr said. The interview appears in the magazine’s May issue, which its newsstands Friday.
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