Woodstock in Inherent Vice

[Robin Landseadel]

On Aug 16, 2009, at 5:38 PM, Daniel Cape wrote:

> Y'know the bit?

	Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years  
later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the  
kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle  
sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it  
meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation,  
no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing  
that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world.  
Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even  
without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think  
that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a  
head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands  
at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually  
happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe  
forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half- 
crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across  
the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts  
and a Buttesheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure  
Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not  
quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always  
stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled  
for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which  
way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and  
wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the  
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La  
Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic  
universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were  
winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory  
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we  
didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point  
in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were  
riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in  
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can  
almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally  
broke and rolled back.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_in_Las_Vegas