It is early Easter morning. Here at Starbucks I’ll write a bit before returning to home base. Among my responsibilities, to hide a bucket full of Easter eggs around the yard. Four grandchildren are to be dispatched to find the eggs, according to some rules, naturally.

I pondered for a moment what to write today. Perhaps I’ve written my fill of theological analysis of the Passion and Easter story and I have nothing left to say. That container is empty. To write with a direct connection to my life, to our condition here in America, the novel by Hunter S. Thompson came to mind. I brought my old copy with me to Starbucks. I began to read again, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas. The story is about a drug addled, alcohol binging road trip from L.A. to Las Vegas. Immediately the story impressed me as parallel to the individual we’ve placed behind the steering-wheel-of-state, who has just completed 100 days in the Oval Office.

How many more miles to go until we reach Las Vegas?

Chapt. 2

“You Samoans are all the same,” I told him.
You have no faith in the essential decency
of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago
we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio,
stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend,
when a call come through from some total stranger
in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas
and expenses be damned –
he then sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills
where another total stranger gives me $300
raw cash for no reason at all…
I tell you, my man,
   this is the American Dream in action!
   We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo
   all the way out to the end.”

Chapt. 3

Old elephants limp off
to the hills to die; old Americans
go out to the highway and
drive themselves to death
with huge cars.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson, page 11, page 18