R.I.P. HST

I feel like drinking myself stupid tonight. Because the only voice left in America that made me feel good about not being stupid has shot himself in the face.

This has been a hard year for writers. Iris Chang killed herself, as did the California writer who broke the evil CIA in South America story. John Gregory Dunne died. So did Susan Sontag.

And now Hunter S. Thompson has gone. Never have I felt it more apt to say that someone has left us behind.

Yesterday my fiancee and I were laughing out loud about the scene in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" where HST, played by Depp, was trying to step off the spinning bar. We decided it was probably time to see the movie again. I said that the first time I saw it, I probably had too high expectations, as I had just finished the book.

Hunter S. Thompson is my longest-running cool writer. He was cool when I was 12 and would read Rolling Stone magazine in the school library. He was cool when I was 15 and realized that Doonesbury's Duke was for real. He was cool when I was 19 and feeling political. He was cool after I had discovered Kerouac, and realized how influential he had been. Thompson was cool when the worst thing in the world was the decline of baseball, and he wrote his ESPN column, and he was cool when things got worse.

Hunter S. Thompson may be called the Keith Richards of literature, having endured epic chemical self abuse (not to mention being fucking cool). But his were the most compelling, honest, and liberating views that I've ever read, and he had the non-stop no-bullshit chops to express those views in ways that made me laugh and cry and think and feel moreso than any writer I've ever read, and I've read a few.

R.I.P. you son of a bitch. You left us too soon. What are we supposed to do now?

- posted by seanmh @ 12:13 PM