From an email describing myself to a friend; similarly should give you fine folk a slightly better idea who/how I am.
As for now I do still call myself a poet-journalist: I want to capture everything, as best i can, but perhaps more importantly in so pursuing I want to pass indiscriminantly from the fantastical & poetic to the hard & real. I take a lot of this indirectly from Hunter S. Thompson & his Gonzo Journalism, but it's where my own personal philosophy--about which I could and have easily written endlessly elsewhere--fuses into his that the funny business can be found, and by God do I revel in it ;p (Objectivity, one must recall, is a myth--and always was--mehehe >:))
Oh, Hunter S.... I really do need to get back to reading your stuff. Still at least I can claim to have the part that counts here, the understanding of the man's work: his blurring of fact & fiction to make some greater point. (And of course this may sound like reglar ole New Journalism, and often his Gonzo is classified under that movement, but what separates his as with others from the rest is in that scope, definition, and nature given to that "blurring".
As I have written here before, Truth itself does not interest me very seriously. Beauty certainly does, and love. But of course that partly depends on how one divides up "Truth" really; there are many kinds of truth and the kinds that interest me are the ones that concern a single person about himself and his reality most seriously. But I will spare us all that discussion; no need boring you with my "Hyperbolic Solipsism" neither. This is a post about Hunter S.
He also fascinates me for who he was and what he did--not who has and had become or simply how he wrote. And I have identified with him in many respects & ways, especially last fall and again early this past winter, when I went about with aviators of my own and my still beloved London Fog trenchcoat all ready to save the world with my weird strategies and webmag. Or simply hiding; concealing who the scared, softer bits behind the hardened, piss-yellow plastic and (now semi)waterproof material, exterior I wore--brazen & rough but still also motivated, headed somewhere, searching something(s) at least, not at all lost and complacent like me nor still crying himself to sleep over boys who stop talking to me nor failing classes for some grandiose lack of purpose. But it was fun, too; not just exciting & different to pretend to be (like) my idol, but really just the pace, the productivity in itself...was all nicely exhilarating compared with how I feel from day to day now, this past month or so of despondency and listlessness.
But I really think I'll resuscitate the good, the hardy, the well meaning and honest parts of that period. Maybe even the role-playing games, though I might want some better sense of self & grounding before I do that again. But this part, the philosophies that established the gonzoid, the true embrace of "poet-journalist", seems in keeping with who I am or want to be or want to write, especially the more I've thought about it & reflected. So yes. The Gonzoid!
