So why is this site called High Powered Mutant?
I guess that is a good starting point as any that should provide a inward look at myself, a person. I heard the quote to the right while watching the Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro led feature called Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie and book are a semi-autobiographical tale by author Hunter S. Thompson as his alter-ego Raoul Duke and his friend/cohort/lawyer Dr. Gonzo.
So at this point I found myself wondering what I was going to put up with, and the remainder of the movie saw the main characters in a perpetual psychedelic dreamscape within another perpetuating dreamscape of glitter and hedonism known as Las Vegas. There was a lot of cutting dialogue/narration taken from the book by Thompson which calls out the scenes outrageous artificiality mixed with gluttony that Las Vegas offers that is easily laid bare if you look too long or soberly of a look. When I lived out west, Vegas was a quick 4 hour drive through the desert on the weekends, and initially I was struck by the spectacle, and free drinks, and cocktail waitresses struggling to keep inside their uniforms, and more free drinks, and losing money, and winning money, and losing more money. Buffets, and buffets, and oh look, the world's biggest Ice Cream Sundae(or so I thought). This pattern can continue for as long as you want it to so long as you have money.
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."
So at this point I found myself wondering what I was going to put up with, and the remainder of the movie saw the main characters in a perpetual psychedelic dreamscape within another perpetuating dreamscape of glitter and hedonism known as Las Vegas. There was a lot of cutting dialogue/narration taken from the book by Thompson which calls out the scenes outrageous artificiality mixed with gluttony that Las Vegas offers that is easily laid bare if you look too long or soberly. It reminded me a lot of my experience when I lived out west, Vegas was a quick 4 hour drive through the desert on the weekends, and initially I was struck by the spectacle, and free drinks, and cocktail waitresses struggling to keep inside their uniforms, and more free drinks, and losing money, and winning money, and losing more money. Buffets, and buffets, and oh look, $2 Prime Rib, and the home of the world's biggest Ice Cream Sundae(or so I thought). This pattern can continue for as long as you want it to so long as you have money.
So when your funds are depleted before your friends and there is another day left before heading back home, clarity and perceptive thought starts to return. The knights' combat don't have the same resonance as the first night at the Excalibur. I start to question whether Luxor, Egypt truly has five dollar craps tables, and that the buildings in New York looked a lot bigger than they are at New York, New York. Not a knock on these places or Vegas itself. It does offer it's escapist escapade for the weary and the hurried, and some might say the less traveled. A cornucopia of experiences in one package just an easy walk or people mover away.
Thompson seems to see through all of this is what I took away. He saw and couldn't look away between the ascendant highs driven by mescaline and LSD giving way to lucid moments of clarity that could see through the thinning façade of the real world we live in and have aspire in. Like many of those who had participated in countercultures of eras before, Thompson witnesses that youthful exuberance, the teen spirit that Nirvana sung of, give way to practicality and uniformity. Towards the formulaic, and sterile. The fear and loathing of becoming the thing that was resisted. The wave drawing back into the sea.
"There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
Obviously this movie, and later on the book spoke to my spirit in a way that felt tangential with my beliefs of the world I lived in, but with only a mild experiencing of the drugs and situations Duke and Gonzo found themselves immersed in. I wonder what set them off on the paths they took, and were they truly like my own. Mine of feeling as always being the outsider, no matter the community. Being lost and to some extent abandoned even, a mutant without a home or group of people I felt a part of. Duke and Gonzo seem to move through a world on a different plane of temporal and spatial consciousness that they move in and out of with no coordination, which is hard to follow as a film, but probably lends more importantly to the disconnect between self and space/time that alcohol and drug usage offers
Believing the best way to find myself or maybe to even better lose myself further in the realms of my mind. I sought a feeling I may had at one time but had lost, because I had not felt that feeling ever since. Listening to others I think this is a sentiment many of us share. A personal friend of mine who at one point was a daily heroin user, was asked what was the feeling like, to which he responded "Like being in your mother's womb.". The way he said it, and the expression at that time eluded a deep sense of comfort that I know I have been chasing for what seems to be my whole life.
So in retrospect my life has at times felt hectically stagnant in ways. The consciousness of a path or goal I had been seeking felt far from the beginning, and still far from the end, or maybe I was even standing right next to it without knowing the environment has felt so dark. That's the best way I can make of my own intemperance and the lost time and sullen living in the world around me. As if I had fallen into a well a foot high but a thousand miles wide. Safe, with plenty of room to explore and get comfortable with, but still stuck inside a well.
The High Powered Mutant lives on though, with a new light source leading the way. As I rediscover my superpower that made me a mutant in the first place. Tune in later, as the tale unfolds.
