it's about that time

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer. Hunter S. Thompson

Of course, what he's not mentioning is that awkward period between the time you quit the El Adobe and the time you start the actual writing of the thing you're writing, a necessary period of flexible duration filled with awful, tormented, pointless, unproductive writhing and lots and lots of idle consumption of decades-old music videos online that you missed when you were a teen because you lived in the sticks and only got one channel, which was not MTV, thus making this idiotic absorption justifiable on the grounds that a cultural critic ought to have a passing familiarity with the culture, etc. Catching up, you see, on the '90s, more or less, when you were a square and didn't know any better. And then there's all the forgetting of the vague entanglements and attachments you may or may not currently have, and which may or may not float across your vision while you're trying to work, creating a state of sweet desolation that can only be sidestepped by watching precisely the right music videos online at precisely the right time and in the right order, at the risk of catatonic gloom if you get it wrong. The bar is not the only enemy, you see.

On the other hand, though: look how cute Hunter was! Dang. I bet they missed him down there at the El Adobe.