It is possible to write in the rain, but not so much in the cold, at least not when it is January cold in April.

The problem could be the first hints of arthritis creeping into the knuckles, or maybe the dark cloud that keeps hovering around the brain.

The problem is, as Hunter Thompson once said, "I have no taste for either poverty or honest labor, so writing is the only recourse left for me."

Fear and Loathing was the perfect phrase for the good doctor and his time. As any half-decent philosopher or scientist knows, extremes are subject to opposites. This is best expressed in Newton's Third Law of Motion, which says, in essence, "what goes up, must come down."

The era of self-love, otherwise known as "the me generation," inevitably suffered from self-loathing.

And at a time when freedom of the individual was at its height, in the era of "free love and dope," some paranoia was also inevitable - especially if the feeling was somewhat driven by psychedelic drugs.

It is hard to imagine a better phrase to represent the truth in 2005, though, especially since our fearless leader is a very sick man-child named George W. Bush, aka the Texas Souffle.

Every time his dark green Huey helicopter flies out of D.C. north over Maryland, some of the liberals in Takoma Park flip him the bird. They wonder if the Secret Service can see them, maybe add their names to some watch list.

If Hunter Thompson was paranoid under Nixon, imagine the opportunity for fear of the technological abuse by spies today.

In today's Washington Post there's an article about a plan by the feds to embed computer chips in passports under the headline:

Privacy Advocates Criticize Plan To Embed ID Chips in Passports

Luckily, the plan is at least being opposed by travel-related businesses and privacy advocates, who say the high-tech chips would do more harm than good. If you are interested, the public comment period at the State Department ends Monday, April 4.

So much for the loathing and fear.

In the special issue of Rolling Stone dedicated to Thompson's memory, New Orleans historian Doug Brinkley says the good doctor had been despondent since the 2004 presidential election, after it became obvious that all the efforts of the smart set and the new kids fighting for the Democratic Party had been for naught.

Another four years of Bush seemed just too much to bare in a wheel chair.

Who could blame him for checking out early, before the grim reaper could come along and take him like Terri Schiavo, who hung on 11 days without a feeding tube in a Florida hospital.

Thompson would not have stomached the family infighting that characterized the Schiavo case. He was clear. He wanted his ashes shot from a gonzo fist-shaped cannon on the grounds of Owl Farm.

As I have already laid out in my own living will, which carries about as much legal weight as the copyright symbol at the end of this story, I want my ashes scattered by the Blue Angels along Alabama's Gulf of Mexico coast. I once wrote a story about the first female Blue Angel pilot. If she is still flying, I would want her to do the deed.

It was there along that great stretch of beach that in the late 1980s and early 1990s I was perhaps the most comfortable in the world for more days of the year than anywhere else.

When I say comfortable I do not mean economically. My take home pay from The Islander newspaper amounted to about $15,000 a year.

But I only paid $150 monthly rent for the cinder block cottage on Lagoon Avenue, where I tripped and drank Bloody Marys and watched the 1992 Democratic Convention in a hammock with an old TV pulled out on the patio, the waves crashing into the beach only a few yards away.

It was easy to take comfort in that scene, knowing that in spite of the Jennifer Flowers story Bill Clinton was about to walk all over George Herbert Walker Bush.

Sadly, John Kerry just did not inspire that same confidence in the winter of 2003 when I pulled up stakes in New Orleans and hunkered down in a Birmingham bunker to ride out the second Bush storm.

So far the world has not come crumbling to an end during Shrub's tenure, which must be some kind of miracle - although I suspect not the kind he is thinking about when he and pal Karl Rove discuss the issue.

Can't you see them in the hot tub together, with Jeff Gannon, talking about how blessed they are to be in the White House?

Restore dignity to the office indeed. There is not an ounce of dignity left in the White House. It all got taken out with the trash with Nixon in 1974, and only briefly returned with Jimmy Carter from 1976 to 1980.

Dog only knows what kind of strange sex the Reagan's favored, although it's easy to imagine that it involved cowboy hats, boots, leather, horses and of course the signature axe.

The thought is almost too much to bare while hanging out in the gay bars of D.C., trying to find the one honest queer who might be able to save the Republic.

Dog help us all.

GW