Something I Missed that Could Have Meaning

I saw a fantastic bumper sticker that I hunted down on the interwebs and am going to purchase in the next six months, one for each of us, but not necessarily for our cars (you may do whatever you wish with yours, but I go easy with the stickers for Goldie...). During the interwebs hunting I came across a wild article from 1966 titled A Journey into the Mind of Watts.

With such a title and time period---less than a year after the race riots---it seems reasonable that it could have been written by our late (for a decade soon enough) pal Hunter S Thompson. Turns out, if you've already followed that link, you'll see: that's our boy Pynchon.

Pynchon's life has been a little less publicized, you might say, than Hunter's, but it is established that he lived in the Los Angeles area and in Mexico during that time period, and when you read that article you can tell that he's been to the neighborhoods he mentions. Hell, shit hasn't changed that much in the 'Hood, and the availability of LSD in Hollywood is probably less widespread now than when Pynchon wrote his piece, but hen mentioned it with an air of authority on the matter.

Reading the piece itself is certainly reminiscent of Hunter's prose: the anti-brutality point-of-view; the knowledgeable drug references; the unblinking first person voice of a brave whack-job person who's spent time on the street in the neighborhood talking to folks.

That got me thinking. Both guys could have been in LA at the same time, surely, but during that specific time, Hunter was in San Francisco rolling with the Hell's Angels. Moreover, Hunter went to East LA to write a piece about the police gunning down a Latino reporter at the request of an acquaintance he befriended in Colorado, Oscar Acosta, the fiery Chicano lawyer and activist from East LA. (That piece is very good and serious, without the Gonzo panache: "Strange Rumblings in Aztlan".)

Anyway, I got kinda off the tracks there for a second. Birthdates. That's what I wanted to look up. That what I was interested in---how two of my writer heroes stack up in the cosmic birthday scheme.

May 8th is Thomas Pynchon Day---it's his birthday. Makes sense. The year was 1937. So, 5/8/37 for TP.

July 18th is the day that Hunter joined the air-breathers. What year? 1937. So 7/18/37 for HST.

Seventy-one days separate the birthdays of Thomas Pynchon and Hunter Thompson.