Was it Mencken, or Faulkner? The fuck if I know… Hunter S. Thompson keeps bringing up this “high white noise” thing. To be honest, I never read the original piece, nor do I really intend to go find it — but it’s a king-hell bastard of a line. A truth chasing us from all directions.

It’s that beautiful feeling you get when you’re lost in somebody’s words and you aren’t really aware you’re reading words at all — that rarefied feeling of perfect immersion. You’re so involved — their syntax, vocab, style — all that bullshit… it doesn’t matter. The time between you and the writer is gone. You’re there with them.

Then, if you’re an ambitious little fuck like me, you read back over their words a dozen times, trying to figure out the flow — the how of why they felt so damn good to read. What transition phrases did they use? Any sentence fragments in there? How did they start their sentences? By the time I’ve broken something down into its tiniest pieces and rebuilt it, I’m convinced that even I could write like that — but I won’t.

What gibberish am I going on about here? Well… to steal another sliver of HST’s style, let’s put it this way: It’s 12:55am in a suburb of Saigon. I have a wall of empty 333 cans next to me, and I’ve spent the last half hour arguing with a Facebook troll for the mere enjoyment of it — no scores to settle, just for a laugh. There’s a dog barking outside, and a crowd of drunks just roared by on motorbikes with exhausts ten times louder than they need to be. I’ve been writing and editing all day… but what the hell?

Stealing has to be a shitty way to live, and I don’t intend to start now. I tried… 12 years old… stood in front of a wall of Lego boxes for 45 minutes before shoving the cheapest one inside my jacket and hightailing it out of that little shop near Lake Ontario. Put it together in the basement, hiding away from Mom. She knew I couldn’t afford that Lego set. So I broke it into pieces and hid them with the rest…

It’s actually really fucking hard to not explicitly write like somebody you’ve read so thoroughly. But it has to be this way. I mean… sure, I could fool many people — but if I’m going to carve some space out for myself, it needs to be me.

But sometimes it’s fun…

The swine… the cocksuckers… the dealers and hustlers and greedheads… this atavistic endeavor… the fat is in the fire… the sharks have come home to roost…

Ahhh… that felt good.

I’ll be honest, spilling those words felt right. They flow freely in my mind — a language I’ve adopted in the privacy of my head. It’s the language of a madman pounding keys at ungodly hours, hopped up on various chemicals — mescaline, LSD, and gallons of whiskey. Thompson wrote at hours when normal people were waking up — except he’d been up all night. He wasn’t normal, and that’s why I continue to find him more interesting as the years go by… as I become less normal myself. I’ve delved deeper and deeper, getting more respect for him as I get underneath the image of Raoul Duke. He made his own way in the ruthless world of writing, and he got away with it.

There’s a common theme: “Getting away with it.”

That line reappears often in biographies and articles written about him. People couldn’t believe how he was allowed to exist. Across the world, people get years in jail — or worse — for simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Yet here was a writer who told the world about just how often he’d been in the right places at the right times, doing what the Silent Majority would consider to be monstrously wrong — the drugs, the flagrant anarchy, the fuck-off attitude…

And so what? Well… here’s the thing: being a writer is both amazing and terrifying. It’s amazing to spill my thoughts and memories into words and know that they exist outside of me — but it’s terrifying to think of the effects my words have in the minds of others. Is anything I write giving somebody out there that “high white noise” feeling? Do these words even sound like me? Is my voice something people even want to read?

I’ve made negligible money from my writing, and there’s no real hope of that changing anytime soon. Editors tell me they like what I write, but in the next line they ask me to write to their style—be boring, please… stuff that won’t scare advertisers. But I’ve looked into the depths of my motivations, and I know writing is only my passion because it’s a place where I can be myself. Scrolling up after a writing session and knowing those words didn’t exist before, that’s why I do it. They’re a mark I’ll leave behind — my finger-painting on the walls of a cave.

Reading through The Proud Highway and Fear and Loathing in America, collections of HST’s private correspondence, has changed my perspective on writing. It’s difficult to imagine that somebody who has left such an indelible mark on literature, art, society, etc… that there were long stretches when all the evidence told him to give it up — to get a job in a newsroom and pump out copy. But he knew he had to be a writer on his own (fucking hilarious) terms. He wasn’t cut out for anything else. And frankly, I’m thinking more and more every day that I’m damaged goods when it comes to normal work — sitting in traffic to go to a job I fucking hate. I’d rather be a failure than crawl back into that depression. Selah.

Thompson has also helped me realize that my weirdness — the awkwardness and introversion that I struggled with for many years — is me. Seeing what nobody else sees used to make me feel like a paranoid lunatic, but now I realize it’s my gift. I’ve gotten used to being the only person laughing at my jokes. Those absurd stories that play out in my mind are a thread of reality that is mine alone — and it’s through them that I have developed my voice.

This article began with the voice I once tried to emulate: Thompson’s brash prose, full of vitriol and barbs flung in every sacred direction. It’s the voice I tried to write in for a long time. I tried to be the drug-addled outlaw sending in telegraphs from the fringes of society — binging on substances on the dirty streets of Saigon… the wild man, forever eluding the sun. But if you know me, then you know I’m anything but an outlaw. Sure, I’ve dabbled in the illegal — but I’m not the kind of person to make a scene. I’d rather watch. I listen much more than I speak, and I read much more than I write.

I love being in wild scenes as a background player, goading on the actors so I can see them at their best — and worst. That’s who I am. Retracing Thompson’s steps — the years it took him to find his voice — has been something special. Before he could go out to The Edge of writing, he had to lay the scaffolding down. He had to put in the work. Only then could he say: “Get out of my way you bastards,” and have everyone listen.

Thanks, HST.