Hunter's Double D and Seattle Slew Kabobs, please.

In 1987, May Day fell on a Friday.

I was in Vienna (Austria, not Virginia) for the weekend, walking into the center to watch the annual parade held in honor of the world’s holiday for workers, and punctuating the experience with periodic doses of lager beer.

My exact thoughts cannot be known even now, when they’re occurring, much less 27 years later, but I’m confident that among them on this pleasant spring day in the cradle of the Habsburgs was this: “Hot damn – I’m missing Derby for this!”

In 1987, I’d barely taken note of the encroachment of ATMs on the now lost art of exchanging traveler’s checks, and so I couldn’t have foreseen the advent of Twitter, on which I recently made another installment in a seemingly endless series of disgruntlements, NCAA Meets Derby Festival Edition:

The problem with living here is when they finally stop babbling about college basketball, they begin babbling about the Kentucky Derby.

Armed and ready with an answer was Jerod Clapp of the News and Tribune.

Given my proximity to the Downs, this is my least favorite time of year. Let's brew an anti-commemorative beer. Something sour.

It was sounding more and more like a plan, and what better as bistro accompaniment to soured Derby ale than Secretariat Burgers, perhaps with some jockey-itch sauce on the side. How I detest Horse Pimp Days in these parts!

But Jerod’s final idea was the best of all:

Ya know, it's HST's year in Louisville - "Hunter's Double D." After his essay on the whole thing.

For the unenlightened, my correspondent refers to the founding document in the pantheon of gonzo, Hunter S. Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” Much to my surprise upon joyfully rereading this fabled piece, it actually is possible to lift on sentence as summary.

So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.

It’s hard for me to fathom that in 1987, I was less than two decades removed from Thompson’s visit to Churchill Downs, when I was 10 years old. In three weeks, it will have been 44 years, and while the entire planet has changed its stripes numerous times since 1970, the Kentucky Derby remains just as decadent and depraved, and likely will stay that way.

That’s both timeless and thoroughly idiotic. At least we have better local beer now.