Final Bouchercon thought: So, where's the depravity?

[Jon Loomis]

This is my second B'con, and compared to the big academic/literary cons of my youth it seemed incredibly tame (that median age thing coming into play, no doubt). I suspect this is true in part because Jack Getze was down for the count, and also because my own circumstances have changed: I'm happily married now with young kids, so I'm not really in the market for debauchery in the same way that I might have been. It's entirely possible that serious misbehavior was going on, but just not in my orbit: who knows what the big names might have been up to in their suites at the Westin? Still, it's not a real conference without at least a whiff of scandal--and at this one we weren't even supposed to shake hands (it's a flu thing, evidently).

[Jon Loomis]

See, that's the problem. Once word gets out that there's no depravity, only the un-depraved arrive in any numbers.

[Benjamin Sobieck]

Perhaps you just didn't pack correctly. The late Hunter Thompson describes the contents of his traveling trunk this way:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... Also, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls.

Of course, Thompson was a journalist, but in the loosest sense of the word.