fuel - The Monday Morning Memo

“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel.
Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel.
I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights
I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about
fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.“
– Hunter S. Thompson

“War, as viewed from ground level, is about food, latrines and horror: ‘Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers.’ As if footnote to that, he (Orwell) recalls one night at the Front when he and another had crawled out into No Man’s Land — a 300-yard wide beet field with little cover — to snipe at the enemy, and been caught by the dawn:

‘We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment, a man presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran…. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.'”

- from George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, his treatise on the Spanish Civil War

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