Joyride Through Cyberspace By Caroline Wright

GonzoNet
 from the Internet Gazette, June 1998

Years ago, my father, on an annual basis, would convince himself that Publisher’s Clearinghouse had a million-dollar check with his name on it. When that big brown envelope arrived in the mailbox, he’d open it with careful reverence and examine its contents quite thoroughly, searching for the sticky little sheet of magazine stamps. After long periods of deliberation, he’d laboriously tear off Time and Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report. Then he’d hand me the stamps and tell me that I could pick a subscription, too.

Choices, choices. When I was a kid, it was easy. I just looked for the stamp for Humpty Dumpty Magazine. Then I became a teenager, with a craving for counterculture and a fervent yen to escape my small Adirondack hometown (population 1,108). Young Miss? Tiger Beat? Hell no! I wanted National Lampoon!

To my dismay, I couldn’t find a Lampoon stamp. The Lampoon was probably too deviant for those mainstream guys at the Clearinghouse. For some long-forgotten reason, I finally selected Rolling Stone. And that's how, as a bright-eyed, dewy 13-year-old, I first discovered the perverse world of Hunter S. Thompson, twisted love-child of American counterculture.

The great Gonzo. Perverse infiltrator and biographer of the Hell’s Angels. . . in-the-flesh inspiration for Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke. . . author of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”. I’d eagerly devour new installments of his articles, gleefully illustrated by voyeuristic madman Ralph Steadman.

This month, in honor of the new celluloid version of Gonzo’s seminal novel, I thought I’d climb into my big white cyber-landshark and take a roadtrip in search of virtual counterculture.

In Search Of Gonzo

After I gassed up the Shark, I took off on a quest for the Gonzo Grail - the steaming spore of counterculturists online. I had trouble finding an acceptably frenzied Gonzo site. I found the naiive sincerity of The Great Thompson Hunt vaguely nauseating and entirely devoid of the proper ether-drenched spirit.

Trailing vaporous clouds of virtual dust, I skidded into the lot at the GonzoWear site. Here I found great T-shirts, boldly emblazoned with Ralph Steadman cartoons. Steadman’s work contains the smelly essence of mid-America grotesquery - if it isn’t bloated and overripe, a fat trailerpark matron in polyester pants, it’s scratchy like cheap mohair.

I cruised into The Murman, home of Pox Planet and Tard Comics, with links to perennial humour zine The Onion and other tasty treats. (Be patient and wait for the animated graphic on the index page to finish loading. It’s a riot.) I next wandered through Rotten, an e-zine which pretentiously bills itself as “the soft white underbelly of the Net”. The road got rocky when I sped through the territory of John Kennedy Toole, dead literary parent of Ignatius Reilly and A Confederacy of Dunces. From one of Reilly’s Big Chief tablets: “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

I stopped and genuflected noisily at the Church of the Subgenius. Here, at the Lourdes of nineties subculture, you’ll learn how to “channel chronic procrastination into life-saving paranoia”. Bob Dobbs’ “spazz-church of macho irony” promises instruction in Frame Straightening, Gripe Elaboration, and Frenzy Techniques.

Then, for some reason, I got all edgy and started to freak out a little bit. Suddenly everybody turned into a lizard. Oh yeah! I was visiting paranoia.com, home of the World Sex Guide, the Drug Information Server, and Karl’s Battle With The IRS. I could smell the Gonzo!

Sirens wailed. I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a gyrating mosaic of flashing lights. They overtook me and then passed me, in pursuit of some speed demon up the road, leaving a scorched trail on the wet tar. With a crooked smile, I thought about my virtual radar detector, tucked inobtrusively under the trash beneath the cracked Naugahyde of the Shark’s front seat. Thanks to the WWW Speedtrap Registry, I was prepared.

SITES TO SEE

The Great Thompson Hunt
www.tekknowledge.com/gonzo/

GonzoWear (Ralph Steadman T-Shirts)
www.doodah.com/shirts.htm

The Murman
www.murman.com/sites/sites.htm

Rotten: The E-Zine
www.rotten.com

A Confederacy of Dunces & John Kennedy Toole
www.levity.com/corduroy/toole.htm

The Church of the Subgenius
www.subgenius.com

Paranoia
www.paranoia.com

WWW Speedtrap Registry
www.speedtrap.com


Caroline Wright, of WRIGHT FOR YOU Word Services, is a freelance writer. A former resident of Hawaii, she now lives in rural South Carolina. Feel free to e-mail your comments to Caroline at cw@wrightforyou.com.