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Summer 2026 Slacking Off

note attached to Arthi and Maria Go Paddleboarding

A summer which I intended to spend slacking off before starting grad school in the fall, telling everyone I was trying to have a “Gen-X Slacker summer” in the vein of a Richard Linklater film like Slacker or Reality Bites. Working my loser job, being a regular at The Root, skateboarding, rotating through a myriad of recreational and prescription drugs1, reading the stack of copies of Rolling Stone magazine from the late 70s/early 80s I’d acquired from Paradise Found. When Hannah called me one afternoon a few weeks ago, I was reading Hunter S. Thompson’s essay, “Fear and Loathing in Limbo: The Scum Also Rises”2, detailing his drug-fueled days — basically a normal day for him — before Richard Nixon’s resignation. I’d picked that copy because it had Lily Tomlin and Richard Pryor3 on the cover. I told Hannah, “Oh hell yeah this could be a good thing to do before grad school.”

Notes

  1. I flew too close to the sun with this, admittedly. ↩
  2. I was staying in Hotchkiss to see the rodeo over the August 8th weekend. Paonia was the hippie mountain town 10 minutes away, so I stopped by Cool Music Shop, owned by a friend of Meaghan Garvey, an author I greatly admire and respect. She had stopped there on her book tour, but sadly I had missed it because I was in my hometown that weekend. I got a copy of High Times from 1978, which had an interview with Uncle Duke himself about this interview from 1975. ↩
  3. In my own drug-fueled delirium in Minecraft two months ago, when I was watching a lot of Richard Pryor’s filmography, I had completely misunderstood the assignment of the theme of the zine. I kinda just thought the theme was the title of our zine, which is the word “ripe.” I had completely forgotten that the theme was dream/fantasy life. I think I got it right now because it would be embarrassing to make that mistake twice. Sorry, Jacks. Anyway, I figured I might as well link that early draft: Ripe for the Picking. ↩

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