Too weird to live...

[Electronic_Chaos]

…too rare to die.

5 years ago today, a great journalist and author chose to take his own life. The world has seemed much less weird ever since.

Let’s all raise our beer mug, shot glass, joint, or blotter tab in memoriam. Here’s to you, Hunter.

The original thread.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

I just went and dropped a tab of acid, went outside and shot bottle rockets into the air wearing only cowboy boots, a kilt, and a Philadelphia policeman’s hat. The neighbors all came outside and cheered!

Hunter, we miss you, buddy. RIP

[Hazle_Weatherfield]

You better take care of me Lord, if you don’t you’re gonna have me on your hands.
Hunter S. Thompson

[Marley23]

Wow, has it really been that long?

This is one of the couple of famous person deaths that really did get me down. He peaked in the '70s and became kind of a caricature, sure, but there was a time when he was a definite original and had something to say. And as much as people talk about the drugs, he could really write. And I don’t know who else could have told his stories the way he did and made them half as memorable.

I’m not one for re-reading, but I do read “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” every year on Derby day. One year I tried to do this while drinking a mint julep, but it tasted horrible and cost $12. As for his other work- Fear and Loathing has developed so much of a reputation it’s hard to read on its own terms. But the '72 campaign book is very intense and I think it communicates the best parts of his style in a way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn’t, because the Vegas book can’t be compared to the historical record the same way. Strange Rumblings in Aztlan is really and truly eerie. In The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat, he either really captures (or just honestly reprints) his confusion at the death of his “Samoan Attorney” friend. On the other hand, his Muhammad Ali piece and Freak Power in the Rockies are just fun.

Some writers are better in small doses, but I think Thomson is an exception: you have to read several different stories before you get a sense of what’s real, what’s exaggerated, and why he’s telling the story this way. And once you do that it becomes something more than a weirdo first person story with a lot of drinking and drugging in it. I’ve probably posted about this before, but I remember reading some of his work in a literary journalism college in class - I’d already read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but nothing else - and out of a group of about 12 or 15 people, only two of us got Thomson and liked him.

[Snowboarder_Bo]

Campaign Trail is my favorite, but I’ve always been partial to Generation of Swine as well. The tale of the Pulitzer divorce is right on; I know I lived in South Florida at the time.

[BrainGlutton]

National Gonzo Press Club Vows To Carry On Thompson’s Work

[BrainGlutton]

There is almost a Yin/Yang clarity in the difference between the two men [Nixon and McGovern], a contrast so stark that it would be hard to find any two better models in the national politics arena for the legendary duality – the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts – that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character. This was not what Nixon had in mind when he said, last August, that the 1972 presidential election would offer voters “the clearest choice of this century,” but on a level he will never understand he was probably right . . . and it is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character almost every other country in the world has learned to despise. Our Barbie doll president, with his Barbie doll wife and his box-full of Barbie doll children is also America’s answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us; the bully, the predatory shyster who turns into something unspeakable, full of claws and bleeding string-warts, on nights when the moon comes too close . …

At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn . . . pauses briefly to strangle the Chow watchdog, then races off into the darkness . . . towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those four hundred identical balconies is the one outside Martha Mitchell’s apartment . . .

– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72

[BrainGlutton]

Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catchall for fuckoffs and misfits, a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy, piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

– Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

(In journalism grad-school, in a course on “Journalism as Literature,” I did my term paper on HST.)

[dropzone]

After five years it shouldn’t be threadshitting: He was a crappy writer who, like a freshman, used his so-called “experiences” to cover up that he had neither written nor experienced anything interesting. But he seems to have been fun at parties.

[lissener]

oops

[Uncle_Brother_Walker]

Wow. Has it been five years?

Sadness. I recently found a copy of Fear and Loathing in a pile of books. Maybe I should re-read it with a case of liquor.

::sniff::

[Doctor_Who]

@dropzone

After five years it shouldn’t be threadshitting: He was a crappy writer who, like a freshman, used his so-called “experiences” to cover up that he had neither written nor experienced anything interesting. But he seems to have been fun at parties.

I feel the same way about Charlotte Brontë. Your move, sir.

[gonzomax]

Whence the gonzomax. Sons middle name is Hunter. Dog named Gonzo, gone now.
Hunter S. Thompson - Wikiquote Some quotes and warnings.

[Biffy_the_Elephant_Shrew]

@Marley23

He peaked in the '70s

…quite frequently.