Blurbex

One Response to “In need of a deep breath?”

1. Joe Bardi Says:
   July 17th, 2008 at 12:07 am

   Hey Eric,

   I tracked down that Alan Watts/Hunter S. Thompson story I mentioned to you earlier. It can be found at:

   http://www.rotoevil.com/speak-no-evil/alan-watts

   Here’s the key passage:

   “John Clancy:

   One night Hunter and I were driving around and a deer came off the side of the hill and crashed into the car, and it had a little baby with it. The deer itself was killed, and we threw it in the back and took it back with us and hung it up and gutted it and chopped it up into meat, but the little baby deer had a broken leg, so we put a splint on it. We got it hobbling around a little bit and drinking milk from a bottle, and we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.

   A couple days later Alan Watts, the great Zen Buddhist guru who was very popular and had a lot of followers at the time, came by and looked at the deer. He said, “Oh, I think I can help the deer. This deer needs some of nature’s herbs.” He started collecting these pieces of plants and cut them up and fed them to the deer while he pronounced these weird mumbo-jumbo phrases and touched the deer. The deer lay down and went to sleep, and Watts said, “The deer’s going to be fine now.”

   Well, about an hour later the little deer stood up, cried out, went into these quick spasms, and died. Hunter was outraged. “That fucker, that quack, that fraud, that charlatan! I don’t believe in anything he speaks. He killed a deer. He murdered it, that rotten prick!”

   There’s a lot of great Alan Watts info on that website, including the animated shorts the South Park guys made to go along with a few of Watts’ spoken word bits. Check it out.