Beyond the Adventures of the 14 Day Thesis

Nightfall looms and the weasels are closing in. It’s been a week and I should be half way done. Any sane person with decent time management would be completing a first draft and rounding the final corner onto the home straight by now. Looming up on the finishing line with only an all night editing binge and the necessity to fight off the gleeful bliss of completion being the only obstacles still standing in their way.  That would be the predicament of a sane person as we enter the final stretch, but a same person I am not.

Looking at my battle plan, and comparing it to my progress, I’m still about 5000 words deeply into the red so the time for invention and philosophising has long since past. This is Desperation time; where the tools of the trade become cheap back alley tactics and the encouragement of wanton plagiarism goes unpunished. It’s time to steal, and steal good. Since his death the subject of HST’s life, times and the analysis of his body of work have become hot topics in the era of digital publication and virtual identity. Hell all I need to do is indulge in a little idea assassination and claim some others data as my own. Sheeit, I could just publish all their works on my blog using different fonts and colours and claim it as an academic exercise in “Hyper-realistic authorship using Post Modern media for publication.” Why not, I’m running out of other ideas.

For me the time has come, the last bell tolled.  This experiment in “Gonzo” academia is coming to a grinding halt and the fat is now so firmly in the fire I can hear the bastard crackle and spit. But why, where did I go wrong?

I get the sinking feeling I was doomed from the start, so afraid of failure I adapted procrastination and reading as an academic anaesthetic. If I was an actor I could pull it off. I have spent so much time consuming the character of Hunter Thompson even my speech pattern is beginning to adapt and change. I find elements of his lazy jawed, southern drawl slipping into my conversational speech, and I can mimic his answers from the UC question evening like the subconsciously rehearsed choruses of my favourite pop song.  But there is so much to the man behind the methos and mystic that I’m only just starting to understand and come to grips with. But like a some washed up, backdoor porn star when I’ve finally got my shit together it turns out to be to no avail. Dammit, if I’d gotten onto this beast earlier I could have had it worked out and unravelled this mystery well and truly by now. But now the 11^th hour bell is tolling in the background and it’s getting harder and harder to think about Thompson with all this noise.

As the sun sets on this fateful Monday evening and I look towards the sky and I’m reminded that I still have about 56 hours in which to finish this beast to some lever of academic satisfaction. I turn from the skyline to my Playbook and like a Convention Centre clearance sale everything’s gotta go. It’s Hack and Slash time now (on top of the already confessed Rape and Pillage). Pure Viking Academics, but can it be done?

I’ve got all the info I need on Blogging and the evolution of Digital Media. Combine that with the background about HST I’ve already written as a feature article in FHM Magazine. Add the remaining socio-political analysis and background on New Journalism that sits dauntingly within my Playbook and think that the only piece missing is a little direct, textual analysis… but that can be stolen right? If I get onto this right away, and work with the vigour of twelve bastards for the next 4 days, I might just be able to still pull this off!

Jesus what is this world coming to!

-H-