Hunter S. Thompson R.I.P.

Damn.

Hunter Thompson died today. By a self-inflicted shotgun no less. Another victim of his own created identity perhaps, a la Hemingway.

I started reading Thompson fairly late in life when I was less impressionable and so the glamour of the drug trips didn't affect me so much. What I did like about Hunter was and is just the sheer humour in his writing. Even when he was deadly serious about a subject, Nixon say, or guns or drugs, he was damn funny. Read any of his books and they are like nothing you've read anywhere else. Part journalism, part auto-biography, part creative fiction, part social commentary, part travelogue and all guts.

The Curse of Lono, ostensibly about the Honolulu marathon, has just about nothing to do with running races but it doesn't seem to matter because whatever Thompson did write about is far more interesting. And did I mention funny?

I mean here he is in Las Vegas to write about a stock car racing event, blasted on every drug known to man and lizard-kind and he stumbles into a national DA’s convention on narcotics…bad craziness indeed.

He could also turn a phrase with the best of them. "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro", "Generation of Swine", "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas". I think if I had ever met him I would have been scared shirtless or in such awe that I would have babbled incoherently and I would have ended up just another drunkard or failure to maybe write about or not.

He changed what a journalist could write about or which stories to cover. He put himself (or at least what he wanted us to think was himself) right in the forefront of the story and yet still kept a part of his intellect back to observe and report on the craziness. He often created the craziness even if only in his head and then put pen to paper. He demonstrated that you could literally write anything you wanted and if it was good (or very funny) people would read it.

He had a distinctive voice, both in his writing and speech. He was himself and that was the most important thing I liked about him. Still do.

Plus his road trips sounded better than mine.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

Hunter S. Thompson; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; page 3; Vintage Books 1989