ever ones to shirk our homage duties, our bowing and scraping in the direction of our precursors, who we so dearly wish to cannibalize a la Freud’s Totem and Taboo, via Harold Bloom’s pasty valorization of “strength,” meaning, apparently, mental strength, since it seems unlikely Bloom has done much time in the harness of a Nautilus machine . . . But I digress. Any road trip-with-drugs fiction must acknowledge Hunter S. Thompson’s contribution to this fleeting genre. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, {now a Hollywood movie, starring Johnny Depp, which, at this writing, none of us had yet seen}, surely has been, and will continue to be, echoed, knowingly and unknowingly, until this hypertext becomes the Viper (vexed) . . . you know, that song Spike Jones immortalized, or at least, rescued.

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