not that it was bad- it was just the best they could do

The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories - not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten up so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeamon and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.

Sometimes I go into a bookstore and start browsing and realize there are far, far more books that I want to read than I ever will actually read. There are far more books that I haven't even heard of yet that I want to read, but never will. And my mind goes into this little loop, and I just stand there, spoilt for choice, unable to make a purchase, frightened that it might mean that one other book that I won't ever get to read.

This is why I like it when people just give me a book I've never heard of and I don't have to choose it at the expense of another.

'Happy,' I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words, like Love, that I have never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don't have much faith in them and I am no exception - especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they're scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a Priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

It occured to me, shortly into the second chapter of The Rum Diary, that it was the second book in a row I'd read by an author who had killed himself. John Kennedy Toole took his own life years before the publication of A Confederacy of Dunces. I don't know much about him. I know a fair bit about Hunter S. Thompson* who, of course, famously killed himself a short while ago, after complications due to a broken leg and a hip replacement. His last written words were: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt." I hope, fervently, that his last act was one made out of an attempt to avoid pain, not a lifetime of intelligent thinking leading to a conclusion that life was not worth living.

There was a time when I had been the same way. I wanted it all and I wanted it fast and no obstacle was big enough to put me off. Since then I had learned that some things were bigger than they looked from a distance, and now I was not so sure anymore just what I was going to get or even what I deserved. I was not proud of what I had learned but I never doubted it was worth knowing.

This is what I told myself on those hot afternoons in San Juan when I was thirty years old and my shirt stuck damply to my back and I felt myself on that big and lonely hump, with my hardnose years behind me and all the rest downhill. They were eerie days, and my fatalistic view of Yeamon was not so much conviction as necessity, because if I granted him even the slightest optimism I would have to admit a lot of unhappy things about myself.

The Rum Diary is the story of Paul Kemp, a journalist who travels to San Juan to work for a folding newspaper (much as Thompson did at the same age- I guess his novels follow the same autobiographical bent as his journalism did!). The actual plot points of the book, when stuff actually 'happens', are the weakest part of the book, as he just generally travels from place to place, getting drunk, getting in fights, chatting to characters, getting into trouble (there's an extremely misogynistic conclusion which I was really uncomfortable with). The strength of the book is the narrator's reflections on age, aging, achievement and living.

'I have a feeling that I'm following a course that somebody laid out a long time ago - and I have a hell of a lot of Company.'

I looked up at the plantain and let him go on.

'You're the same way,' he said. 'We're all going to the same damn places, doing the same damn things people have been doing for fifty years, we keep waiting for something to happen.' He looked up. 'You know - I'm a rebel, I took off - now where's my reward?'

'You fool,' I said. 'There is no reward and there never was.'

'Jesus,' he said. 'That's horrible.'

It's a sad, (cynical,) melancholy book, echoing a lot of the thoughts I have about aging and paths-not-taken in my own mind on certain grey, dull, bussy mornings. It's also a tight, cracking read, flowing smoothly and intelligently from scene to scene, evoking the lazy pace of life in San Juan without ever becoming boring or repetitive itself.

I recommend it highly.

Those were the good mornings, when the sun was hot and the air was quick and promising, when the Real Business seemed right on the verge of happening and I felt that if I went just a little faster I might overtake that bright and fleeting thing that was always just ahead.

Then came noon, and morning withered like a lost dream. The sweat was torture and the rest of the day was littered with the dead remains of all those things that might have happened, but couldn't stand the heat. When the sun got hot enough it burned away all the illusions and I saw the place as it was - cheap, sullen, and garish - nothing good was going to happen here.

Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach; they would hang in the breeze and make a sound like delicate glass bells, reminding you of something you never quite got hold of, and never would. It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to hang on until dusk and banish the ghosts with rum. Often it was easier not to wait, so the drinking would begin at noon. It didn't help much, as I recall, except that sometimes it made the day go a little faster.