Down to the river with The Boss (again)
“There were ghosts in the eyes, of all the boys you sent away”
I spent about twenty-four hours thinking about it, then flew to Los Angeles to cover the Super Bowl — but the first person I ran into down there was Ed Muskie. He was wandering around in a vortex of a big party on the main deck of the Queen Mary, telling anybody that would listen he was having a hell of a hard time deciding whether he was for the Dolphins or the Redskins. I introduced myself as Peter Sheridan, “a friend of Donald Segretti’s” — “We met on the “Sunshine Special in Florida”, I said. “I was out of my head…” But his brain was too clouded to pick up on it…so I went up to the crow’s nest and a split a cap of black acid with John Chancellor.
He was reluctant to bet on the game, even when I offered to take Miami with no points. A week earlier I’d been locked into the idea that the Redskins would win easily — but when Nixon came out for them and George Allen began televising his prayer meetings I decided that any team with both God and Nixon on their side was fucked from the start.
From the “Epitaph” of “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72”
by Hunter S Thompson
Following the screaming success of my “Regatta Trilogy” (book deals, television interviews, lurid offers of sex, ladies wailing like banshees at the end of the driveway for my autograph, recommendations for a Pulitzer Prize, nudie pictures in my DM’s — the usual kind of deal) I thought it highly appropriate to publish this brief follow up and hopefully a chilled and different looking Ironbridge than usual, as the last rays of a barely seen sun finally sets on the toy town of my life and my spiritual home.
The balloon?
Comes with an epitaph, and on a night full of them.
Not my balloon or my story to tell but with the only sincere words of this entire article — I present the following to you with respect and grace as it moved me, and spoke so eloquently for me too:
“Mum
Happy Birthday my Heavenly Angel. I Hope you’re celebrating up there. And having a cuppa and cake
Love and miss you so much Mum
Until we meet again xxx”
Thanks for reading. For more wistful, half-baked ideas that somehow feel about right, here’s one I prepared in March of this year:
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.