to Uncle Bill’s house we go!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSveRGmpIE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4nSxArk9g8&feature=youtube_gdata_player
And thanks to American politics, to give us all something to rise above.
Ya gotta love Mr. Bill. We needed a reality check just about then.
Well since this video is brought up every year, I guess that I’ll be thankful that that heroin dealing miserable old man is dead. It is telling that he needed to kill someone for inspiration. He lived his life making the world a worse place to live and then profited by writing about his experiences doing it. The kind of person that is not satisfied being miserable, but needs to spread that misery to everyone else.
So he uses the notoriety of a holiday to springboard his own droning message. Once again to weak to create anything positive, he falls back on trying to destroy. Not satisfied to be miserable and have regrets only 364 days a year, he needs to sit down at the table and complain even though he should be thankful that he wasn’t dead in the gutter one hundred times over due to his own stupidity and in fact did better than most.
Well, I think you missed the brass ring by a mile with that sentiment. And to my knowledge he was never charged with dealing, but rather, report only speaks of others procuring for him when he wasn’t doing it for himself.
And this, too:
That was an accident, if a spectacularly stupid one. Burroughs recognised this, and does indeed credit the event with really turning him into a writer (although he was in fact a writer prior to the incident), because he became obsessed with the idea of “The Ugly Spirit”, the notion of evil as a living element (whether an inherent human potential or an independent thing that seeks us, not that the distinction was necessarily important), and a risk that humanity is heir to. Having considering himself gripped by it for good either due to, or simply evidenced by, early and continuing choices in his life, he felt “writing his way out of it” was his only hope to escape its thrall. A convenient excuse? Considering that he seems not to have succeeded, I guess you have to decide. But to say that he “needed to kill someone for inspiration” sounds like a charge of intention, and I think you should be careful with that. It’s at least an unattractive oversimplification.
Burroughs had, and continues to have, a following. What can we say? I was an early fan, but I moved on once I read The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands, for while the writer in Wiki says they “came from Burroughs in a final, mature stage, creating a complete mythology”, for my money he proved to be merely a one-trick pony who had pretty much shot his wad with Naked Lunch. I used to have an autographed copy of this last, BTW; I came upon it by chance in a used book store, and of course I prized it. But despite that it still fell out of my hands, and where it went is beyond knowing.
I will say that I have never been able to listen to either of those above links completely through partly due to my boredom with Burroughs’ dreary delivery of what for me is merely an unending parade of adolescent shock imagery, but more to the point: I don’t need Burroughs to validate my own cynicism, which as it happens is still alive and kicking, and stands quite well on its own, thank you very much.
Oops, not a dealer just a junkie that had been arrested for possession. Can’t say that I payed much attention to him the first thanksgiving this clip was put up and was going off of memory. He did shoot and killed a guy, and even if it was an “accident”, it is just another irresponsible action that makes me think he might not be one to talk about past indiscretions of others.
It isn’t cynicism, it is just selectively going through history to be a wet blanket. I wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at that, but it is the same clip every other year. Is it that difficult to find a different jaded old fart once in a while? Heck, there has got to be a droning shtick about “black Friday” out there. Overall, it has always seemed a bit much for some one with his back ground to point the finger and say look what evil has been committed.
There’s always me, if you like. 
To be honest, I would rather trust such a report from the trenches than from the purportedly righteous.
Oh, dear: the time. And with that, I must sign off and arise, and go to the feast appointed. I promise to eat it tasting both its comfort and bitterness.
Well there are the vegans that do just that every thanksgiving, trying to co-opt the holiday to make their statement, so I can see your point. To me it is not about being pious, but not recognizing that he kind of got lucky and didn’t spend years behind bars and was able to do okay for himself despite sabotaging his own life. Instead he goes out of his way to be an ingrate.