Arthur Graham > Recent Status Updates

“They used to build nuke missiles in this town. Now it’s Frito-Lay and hipster condos.”
“Well, you’ve gotta destroy the world somehow. It’s just a longer timeframe now.”

My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world. -- Muhammad Ali
Indeed. . . And that is also as fine a definition of "Gonzo Journalism" as anything I've ever heard, for good or ill.

The Edge. . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

The fireball Chicano lawyer was on his way to becoming a half-successful writer, a cult figure of sorts -- then a fugitive, a freak, and finally either a permanently missing person or an undiscovered corpse.
Oscar's fate is still a mystery, but every time his case seems to be finally closed, something happens to bring him back to life.

My buddy Jake ran the biggest Jennifer Lawrence competitive eating fan fiction site on the web, spent all of his time belting out these absurd stories that were vaguely erotic, but strictly about JLaw eating large amounts of heavily processed foods.

One time I took five Amphetamine tablets — the gold standard in ADD meds — and played Tetris for 58 hours straight. I got to the point where I could rotate and move the pieces with my mind. I think I could, anyway. I blacked out after that and woke up in a Target men’s room with my wallet, shoes, and socks missing.

Both Carter and his wife have always been amazingly tolerant of my behavior, and on one or two occasions they have had to deal with me in a noticeably bent condition.

One of the constant nightmares of traveling with politicians is the need to keep them in sight at all times.

The only vegan I’ve ever eaten was this chick in my freshman English class, and that didn’t work out well for either of us.

I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every 24 hours, and mine is breakfast.

I took that fatal dive off the straight and narrow path so long ago that I can't remember when I first become a felon -- but I have been one ever since, and it's way too late to change now.

It is extremely difficult to concentrate on the cheap realities of Campaign '76 under these circumstances.

When I was in first grade, my teacher was killed by the KGB, a tiny chunk of polonium 210 dropped in her Ovaltine by a covert agent dressed as a Salvation Army volunteer.

We are living in very strange times, and they are likely to get a lot stranger before we bottom out.

I wrote my self-published book Atmospheres a decade ago on a caffeine-fueled, year-long manic episode that only ended when an ER doctor gave me a heavy dose of Zopiclone.

"Get drunk for 40 days and 40 nights, and then buy a fucking motorcycle. There’s a whole lot of chicks in this town who would fuck out anyone with a motorcycle, no questions asked."

Sound advice on the motorcycle, if I had money. And balance. I broke my arm one time on a bike, not sure how I’d fare on a Harley. A motorcycle purchase wouldn’t be a mid-life crisis for me; it would be an end-of-life crisis.

Looking back on all that, my only feeling for deep-sea fishing is one of absolute and visceral aversion. Hemingway had the right idea when he decided that a .45-caliber submachine gun was the proper tool for shark fishing, but he was wrong about his targets. Why shoot innocent fish, when the guilty walk free along the docks, renting boats for $140 a day to drunken dupes who call themselves "sport fishermen"?

The anglers assured me it was all a great thrill, but on the evidence, I couldn't believe it. The whole idea of fishing, it seemed to me, was to hook a thrashing sea monster of some kind and actually boat the bastard. And then eat it.

It was late Saturday night, as I recall, when we learned that Frank Oliver had officially won the tournament -- by one fish, ahead of the balls-out poor-boy crew on Lucky Striker.

It was not a good scene to confront with a head full of acid. We drank heavily, trying to act natural, but the drug set us clearly apart.

Sixteen months of straight politics had left me reeling around on the brink of a nervous breakdown. I needed a change, something totally different from my normal line of work. Covering politics is a vicious, health-ripping ordeal, so this unexpected assignment to "cover" a deep-sea-fishing tournament off the Yucatán coast of Mexico was a welcome relief from the horrors of the campaign trail in 1972.

Stunned… I guess that’s the best description, completely blindsided when my girlfriend — now ex-girlfriend, gotta get used to saying that — left the house with the clothes on her back and said she was moving to Montana to fuck a radiologist with a jet-ski. I didn’t predict this, and didn’t even know Montana had lakes. I thought that was Minnesota.

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mold-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of "the rat race" is not yet final.

Woke with a gout attack, again. A hospital trip was in my near future.

The apocalypse already happened, and nobody paid attention. There’s no use trying to predict when the Earth will end, because it did ten times this week. Everyone expected a big biblical rapture, the ultimate eschatological spectacle: the sun darkening, heavenly gates opening, trumpets and archangel voices calling, the righteous floating up into the clouds to hang with Jesus.

The corporate scam kept a roof over my head, and you’d think it would give me the security to stop worrying about money and pursue my dream of writing. But living the dual life of lowest-rung at a straight job and unknown author takes a toll.

What ever happened to the Beat Generation? The question wouldn't mean much in Detroit or Salt Lake City, perhaps, but here it brings back a lot of memories. As recently as 1960, San Francisco was the capital of the Beat Generation, and the corner of Grant and Columbus in the section known as North Beach was the crossroads of the "beat" world.

A journalist dealing with heads is caught in a strange dilemma. The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it. If there is one quick truism about psychedelic drugs, it is that anyone who tries to write about them without firsthand experience is a fool and a fraud.

Write as if your sexual organs are in flames,
until your fingers cramp, until your eyes
bleed, until you use the bathroom in your
pants, set fire to all your words, throw them
out the window, now you’re ready, proceed.

Ghost Dance warriors, united dead
and living, Sitting Bull knew how
to make war not love and love not war,
I feel a déjà vu annihilation coming.