Have you ever really?

Midget Bad Craziness.

If you have never experienced this, well, have you ever really lived?

Explanation, though while certainly not required, will probably help make sense of this to some people.

Ralph Steadman, a Welsh artist for whom I have previously in this blog stated my unabashed admiration (and not coincidently got part of one of his artworks tattooed on my personage), did a silkscreen called Midget Bad Craziness. It is part of his Gonzo Art series.

So, yesterday, while sitting in the Diag in downtown Ann Arbor, I was watching with mild amusement a group of teenaged kids wearing some combination of punk attire while shouting random things at each other, looking to shock perhaps their friends, passer-byers or me…

**Don’t you masturbate on my tree.**
**I’m gonna write you are here on my jeans. (note: this was the crotch of her jeans)**
**Will someone draw a banana on the inside of my jeans? The insinuation is hysterical. (surprisingly, not the same girl as the statement above)**

Clearly, these are not statements I find shocking or even remotely interesting to note except that it suddenly dawned on me that it was Midget Bad Craziness. And, it stuck with me.

The thing with Gonzo is that you live it and hopefully, through it. It is about an experience, that if you’ve never happened upon it, it is terribly difficult to explain. The series of events of the rest of the afternoon only contributed to the spectacular… the very sexy, aloof photographer, the rejuvenation via wasabi, the six foot plus transvestite who kept appearing out of nowhere, the smarmy guy who smelled rather odd and sat next to me, the sudden chill in the air… not to mention other, more ominous undertones too dangerous to allude to here.

But that was yesterday, and the feeling has subsided. Washed away, perhaps, with the grime from my dirty laundry and sucked up the vacuum with the rest of the filth from the week. I find, on days when a coconut is cracked open, its water swiftly drunk down (exposure to air starts to diminish its virility) and its flesh baked and eaten, all that is bad with the world and all the weirdnesses fall away. Coconuts have that way about them.

And now, it’s just me. The cats. And Bob Dylan singing about Knockin on Heaven’s Door… it’s all about the moment. And, in this moment… I leave you with this thought:

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. ~Hunter S. Thompson

Mahalo.