"Soufflaculs! Pétengueule!" Pooler Jones is drooling at the French of it all. He's been thru the "Offrande anale" as well as the eponymous "Baise cul" and the lesser appreciated "Roi lécheur." He's got that medieval tint to him & he bristles at the langue as well as its intentions. Festum fatuorum, festum stultorum, festum hypodiaconorum - the Feast of Fools in the Middle Ages was a highly ritualized dose of insanity in a world where license and buffoonery were deeply proscribed. The fête had a handful of names. Besides the Feast of Fools it was called the Feast of Asses, the Feast of the Boy Bishop and the aptly named Festival of the Subdeacons. Pooler claims the feast went back to the Roman Saturnalia and other celebrations of "Decembrian license." These were dead of the winter celebrations which often as not quickly turned to Orgy. The common denominator between all of these feasts is the idea of the reversal of the social order. For a few days the little people got to lord over the powerful: peasants became ersatz bishops, drunkards became masters, whores became a duchess or Grandes Dames de Maison, priests served sinners at their tables, the Bishop slopped stables or emptied the bed pans of lepers & idiots. At the Winter Solstice the sun itself stopped in the heavens and then reversed its course. On earth this retrograde gesture became the blueprint and even in the sacred celebration of the Mass the normal hierarchy of Christian sentiment became inverted for the festival as blasphemous Vespers and licentious Antiphonies were roared by the drunken crowds. Here a Conductus became an invitation to fornicate with beasts. Here the "esclaffardi" - the lower clergy - turned benediction into malediction and the Kyrie Eléison - the last bit of Greek in the Latin Mass - became the Kyrie Asini in the "Misse des Fous." Jesus Lord became Jesus the Ass.

"Introibo ad altare bachi, ad eum qui letificat cor hominis. Potemus. Aufer a nobis, quaesumus, Bache, cuncta vestimentia nostra; ut ad taberna poculorum, nudis corporibus, mereamur introire. Per omnia pocula poculorum. Amen." I shall go unto the altar of Bacchus, unto him who giveeth joy unto the heart of man. Let us drink. Take from us, we beseech thee, Bacchus, all our clothes, that we may be worthy, with naked bodies, to enter into the tavern. Unto us all, drink without end, Amen.

"Introibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. Oremus, Aufer a nobis,quaesumus, Dominie, initquitatibus nostras: ut ad Sancta sanctorum puris mereamur mentibus introire. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen" I shall go unto the Altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth. Let us pray. Take from us, O Lord, our sins, that we may enter with pure minds in the Holy of Holies. Through Christ our Lord, Amen

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man"

Dr. Johnson - quoted in Hunter S. Thompson's

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"Probably no other 20th Century author seemed so inseparable from his own stories as Hunter S. Thompson. His best-known book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is a landmark, defining work. Like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, it peers into the best and worst mysteries of the American heart. But Fear and Loathing is also the story of the sort of life Hunter Thompson lived. The drugs and drink should have killed him, the anger should have worn him down, and maybe in the end, it all contributed to how he died that night in February. But Thompson never regretted how he lived. It was essential to how he did the work that he did. In a dark time, he sought to understand how the American dream turned a gun on itself. Nobody in modern literature has come closer to answering that question, and perhaps Thompson came closer than anybody should. He would have had it no other way. He never flinched, even in his last moments."

Mikal Gilmore, "The Last Outlaw - Hunter S. Thompson, 1937-2005

from Rolling Stone Magazine