Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a pint of ether.

Hunter S. Thompson (the author of that passage) had a peculiar gift for synthesizing the noble and profane; it’s intensely funny, and retains a twisted kind of stentorian sagacity. In a letter, Thompson once described his “treacherous compulsion to lace everything I write with heavy, Greco-Roman wisdom”; when it appears in a narrator purported to be under the influence of extremely dangerous drugs, the effect is humorous and haunting.

Most of the time I dislike imprecise writing, but I make an exception for the passage above. I’m not sure who “the weasels” are, or what it means to operate a vehicle “like a bastard,” or how the desert sun might resemble an occupied uterus. No matter. The basic facts are clear, and the nonsense and semisense capture a sensation, one perhaps inaccessible to a reader under the influence of sobriety. Dr. Thompson mastered language in its rawest form.