Good Bye Hunter Thompson
I awoke this morning, as I do on many holiday mornings, late and groggy from the drinking and smoking the night before. It was past 9 before my eyes were focused enough to turn on MSNBC and get my (knowingly slanted) news of the last 12 hours; I don't usually like to be out of the news loop for too long unless I am on vacation. The news came easily enough--Bush talking to Chirac in France, a house buried under a 10 foot mud slide, even a story about my old grade school in Brooklyn P.S. 276 (something about a large number of twins at the school). I was still in a somewhat cloudy state when the bad news started coming. The first was about actress Sandra Dee; I've never been much of a fan but my mother loved her tremendously. Then something about Thompson.
Whenever I heard his name my ear always perk up; he was, to quote an anonymous author, "An island of reality in an ocean of diarrhea." Then I heard the word--the word I never thought I'd hear referring to Thompson: Suicide! I knew he was close to the end, I knew he wasn't doing well and was only getting worse; the last time I saw him was on Late Night with Conan O'Brien a few months back. He needed help up the two steps to his seat and was carrying what appeared to be a Scotch on the rocks. As I said earlier, his death was a huge tragedy in my opinion, but the surprise to me was really the method. I always thought it would have been a heart attack, or maybe a drug overdose... Hell, even a shoot-out with the police would have been less surprising. But a Suicide? I though he was bigger than that.
Why'd Ho Do It?
This is my belief as to why it happened, only time will tell if it proves to be true:
Thompson spent his entire life living by his terms and no one elses. He covered the stories that he wanted to cover, he turned them in when he wanted to (regardless of deadline), and he wrote as much as he wanted on any one topic regardless of allotted space (look up any of his Rolling Stone articles and you'll see that most of them are of epic length). My belief is that he probably found out recently that he had something (most likely) incurable or inoperable like cancer or possibly Alzheimer's. Thompson lived his life under his rules and, I believe, wanted to end it the same way.
Thompson was in many ways a hero of mine; not because of the drug induced haze that he lived in, but because of his ability to capture a moment of total inebriation in such a vivid and explicable way. He could reminisce on a time when most of us would be completely blacked-out in a fashion that made you feel as if you were in the room with him. Anybody who has ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I'm sure knows what I mean. The descriptions in that book of the Ether binges and Adreochrome are ones of pure genius whether they be fact or fiction--I prefer to think of them as the earlier.
I have always Strove to find the glorious adjectives that dotted his work to use in my own. To me Thomson was a great American treasure, a counter-culture icon that spoke to the masses in a Language we could all understand. He spoke of politics with an undaunted cynicism that allowed us to see the flaws on both sides and choose which we hated less.
In the end, Hunter Stocton Thompson died at the age of 67 in his Aspen compound of a "self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head." Thompson left this world the same way he came into it... With no regrets and no apologies. As my grandmother said while she sat looking at the casket of my recently deceased grandfather:
"Thanks for the memories"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7005168/?GT1=6190
Whenever I heard his name my ear always perk up; he was, to quote an anonymous author, "An island of reality in an ocean of diarrhea." Then I heard the word--the word I never thought I'd hear referring to Thompson: Suicide! I knew he was close to the end, I knew he wasn't doing well and was only getting worse; the last time I saw him was on Late Night with Conan O'Brien a few months back. He needed help up the two steps to his seat and was carrying what appeared to be a Scotch on the rocks. As I said earlier, his death was a huge tragedy in my opinion, but the surprise to me was really the method. I always thought it would have been a heart attack, or maybe a drug overdose... Hell, even a shoot-out with the police would have been less surprising. But a Suicide? I though he was bigger than that.
Why'd Ho Do It?
This is my belief as to why it happened, only time will tell if it proves to be true:
Thompson spent his entire life living by his terms and no one elses. He covered the stories that he wanted to cover, he turned them in when he wanted to (regardless of deadline), and he wrote as much as he wanted on any one topic regardless of allotted space (look up any of his Rolling Stone articles and you'll see that most of them are of epic length). My belief is that he probably found out recently that he had something (most likely) incurable or inoperable like cancer or possibly Alzheimer's. Thompson lived his life under his rules and, I believe, wanted to end it the same way.
Thompson was in many ways a hero of mine; not because of the drug induced haze that he lived in, but because of his ability to capture a moment of total inebriation in such a vivid and explicable way. He could reminisce on a time when most of us would be completely blacked-out in a fashion that made you feel as if you were in the room with him. Anybody who has ever read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I'm sure knows what I mean. The descriptions in that book of the Ether binges and Adreochrome are ones of pure genius whether they be fact or fiction--I prefer to think of them as the earlier.
I have always Strove to find the glorious adjectives that dotted his work to use in my own. To me Thomson was a great American treasure, a counter-culture icon that spoke to the masses in a Language we could all understand. He spoke of politics with an undaunted cynicism that allowed us to see the flaws on both sides and choose which we hated less.
In the end, Hunter Stocton Thompson died at the age of 67 in his Aspen compound of a "self-inflicted gun shot wound to the head." Thompson left this world the same way he came into it... With no regrets and no apologies. As my grandmother said while she sat looking at the casket of my recently deceased grandfather:
"Thanks for the memories"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7005168/?GT1=6190
posted by Mike | 11:18 AM
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