I’ve posted, briefly, in the other thread on this.
A great writer has passed through our lives like Haley’s Comet–burning brightly, yet a strange, unnatural thing; dazzling, yet a harbringer of Doom; abnormal & brillant.
Might I suggest you join the pit thread? We don’t need to let his vibes contaminate this… if Hunter were in charge of this thread, he’d probably throw the bum out and make sure everybody who was left in the thread had a glass full of whiskey. Let’s not spoil this…
Hunter lived his life on his own terms, by his own will. And if it turns out that he didn’t shoot himself in some accident, but deliberately… well… he died on his own terms, by his own will.
The body of work he left behind is massive and powerful, often elegant, always insightful. The person who he was in life was an honorable patriot and brilliant social critic.
And there are many, many people who will miss him. And the world will be just a little less rich when the sun rises today.
While this is a shame for some reason the thought that keeps me bouyant is the way, essentially in my lifetime, I’ve seen a style of writing that I love be invented and then picked up and run with and utilised by other writers. Good writers who use HST’s style and use it well to achieve the same sorts of ends.
HST is gone, he had to go sometime, but his writing is going to live on: both his own and in the echoes of his own present in the works of others.
Read some of John Birmingham’s essays (an Aussie writer, so most of you won’t have heard of him) or the truly great rants of our own Sofa King (haven’t heard from him in a while). They and others like them can be hilarious and pointed and angry in the same way HST was, and the issue is not whether they are better or worse than HST, the point is that HST invented a whole style for them to play in, which can be enjoyed by us all regardless of whether The Man is gone.
The Duke is dead, long live the Duke.
Others have said this, but I’m commenting Officially as Moderator: This is not the Pit. If you want to say nasty things about someone, the Pit is the place. This is Cafe Society. You can say nasty things about someone’s art or writings or performance, but not about them as a person. Your comment is inappropriate for this forum. Understood?
For everyone else: when you see something like that, please DO NOT RESPOND. Replies such as “bite me” or “shut up” only add fuel to a potential fire. The proper course of action is to hit the REPORT BAD POST button (the little exclamation point [ ! ] in the upper right corner of the post.) That way, you’re not compounding the crime. Everyone clear?
You’re right C K Dexter Haven. I was angry, & very very hurt.
I apologize to the Mods & to the Board.
I have to admit that I first learned of him through Doonesbury but I was ten when the strip was first syndicated so I may not have been ready for the real thing. I don’t advocate suicide for anyone but I’m sure it was a matter of him going out on his own terms. That or he was trying to kill the giant hairy bats in his head with a custom Colt .44 magnum. I’m not a tequila person but I’ll have a shot of Cuervo for good old uncle Duke.
I think Trudeau will have to address HST’s death as Duke was important to several long running characters and I think he’ll take the high road. Zonker will cope but poor Honey.
I’m very very sad today–Thompson & Raitt & Dee.
I’m stunned. I still hoped to catch one of his lecture swings one of these days. 
There’ll be some shots of homemade wormwood liquor travelling down my throat tonight in his memory. I hope he manages to get his dope wherever he is now.
Wow.
I’m feeling grief over the loss of an author whose books were the bible of my youth. A celebrity death hasn’t hit me this hard since Jerry Garcia went in 1995.
What will Garry Trudeau do with Uncle Duke?
Saturday I sat around in the front room of my coffee house with a couple of my customers discussing Fear and Loathing and how one of them’s students at the high school he teaches at are reading it. Its going to be interesting when people start to come in today…a lot of my customers are fans, as am I.
Damn, this is beyond terrible.
He’ll be missed.
Oh my God.
This is the first Ive heard this, right here, right now. Oh, God.
There are no words.
He will be deeply, deeply missed.
I always wondered if the death of a public figure (author, celebrity, etc.) could bring me to tears. I’m practically on the verge of it now…RIP Hunter. Your words will never be forgotten.
A note: Even if he did take the mother-loving gunbarrel, twist it just right, and put it up against the soft palette… you got to do that, you know, you point it in the back of your head, you wind up a vegitable, and nobody wants to do that, you take a step like that, my friend, you want to do it right, it isn’t certified it was suicide by any means. Could have been shooting bats. They could have crawled right up his sinus passages and were breathing there, flapping moistly.
Look, it’s Hunter, I’d believe that. I’d also believe he didn’t want to deal with the god damned crap of the world anymore, because half of gonzo is screaming at the pain. The other half is inflicting more on yourself. I’d also believe a terminal illness. Hell, I’d believe he just won the lottery, too.
(The aforementioned is not intended to be useful information on how to commit suicide, but a small tribute to a man who gave me nightmares for many years on Richard Nixon playing football while eating people’s flesh.)
One had to figure HST was never going to go quietly.
Thompson’s series of reports for Rolling Stone during the '72 Presidential campaign was the reason I first considered journalism as a career (and why I immediately gave up the idea–seemed like anything less than what he did would be a hopelessly feeble compromise). One of the greatest writers I’ve ever read. His eulogy for Oscar Acosta practically brings me to tears just thinking about it. I hope someone serves him as well.
I wish he had been at the top of his form during the 2000 campaign; maybe things would have turned out different, probably not, but HST writing about GWB with the passionate loathing he had for Nixon would have been something to behold. Too bad his celebrity and well-publicized lifestyle painted him into a corner in his later years. I will hoist a glass of whisky in his honor tonight; that I am currently on painkillers for a broken arm makes it seem an appropriately Thompsonian act.
/Weeps.
I’ve had the song written for Phil Ochs running through my head ever since I read the news.
“I opened the paper, there was your picture,
Gone, gone, gone by your own hand.
I couldn’t believe it, the paper was shaking,
Gone, gone, gone by your own hand.” – Tom Paxton
Sail on, HST. I’m very sad, but not surprised. I hope you’re hanging out with Warren in the Great Hereafter, in a barroom drinking gin.
To anyone who knows what is sex on two wheels, remembers when the Ducati 916 came out. HST asked *Cycle World * to get him one for a test drive. His article Song of the Sausage Creature is the most elegant and viseral commentary I’ve ever read about going fast. The last lines of the article say;
"That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, “IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.”
I first became aware of HST when I found his “Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail” in a bar in St. Thomas, V.I. If there was ever a better place to become acquainted with HST, I don’t know where it would be. Pot and Rum are a potent mixture, and somehow his writing just seemed to soak into my brain along with the booze and the sunshine. The people I knew on St. Thomas were every bit as goofy, corrupt, funny, and stoned out as anybody HST wrote about. “Hairspray” Tom was one of my favorite locals, as was J.J., the drunken dynamiter. HST would have had a ball writing about the place and partaking of the local ganja.