"San Francisco is a big karate town: in 1965 there were roughly seven thousand full-time fee-paying karate students roaming around the Bay Area... but in any active bar you can hear a story about a bartender who "busted up a guy who tried to pull some karate stuff." It hardly matters how many of the stories are true. The point is valid: the difference between survival and wipe-out in a physical crisis is nearly always a matter of conditioned reflexes. A bartender with scar tissue all over his knuckles will hit faster and harder than a karate-trained novice who has never been bloodied. For the same reason, a Hell's Angel who has been over the high side often enough to joke about it will ride a motorcycle with a style and abandon that comes only with painful experience."
-from Hell's Angels
Hunter S. Thompson
respect
fatmarc
5 comments:
"For reason that were never made clear, I blew out my back windows with five blasts of a 12-gauge shotgun, followed moments later by six rounds from a .44 Magnum. It was a prolonged outburst of heavy firing, drunken laughter and crashing glass. For a while I assumed that some freakish wind pocket had absorbed all the noise and carried it out to sea, but after my evicted I learned otherwise."
"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."
"My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights -- or very early mornings -- when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L.L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket ... booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) ... but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that ..."
Thought you might appreciate those Marc. Thompson was a most unusual sort of hippie; a reactionary, stoned, gun toting libertarian sort, proof that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
*But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and thats when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms.*
Jim, great quotes! But,I think the good Doctor would have been alarmed at being called a hippie. And he was not the sort who I would like to get alarmed, depending on how much dope or booze coursed through his brain, and how much fire power had on hand.
"I always drive properly. A bit fast, perhaps, but always with consummate skill and a natural feel for the road that even cops recognize."
Cops don't recognize skill, only their set limits and guides as to what is the way to handle you. With 2 million highway miles, in heavy truck, 10,000 miles on motorcycle, and 800,000 miles in a car, skill is what it is. Experience means a lot, but natural ability means more. I have seen guys with twice the mileage, but can back up for shit, or can't manuever to save thier arses. I run the road the way I see fit and always anticipate the idiots, everyone I come across on the road is an idiot as far as I am concerned, until they prove different. And anyone who wants to prove me wrong is welcome to try (but don't count on it.)
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