hunter s. thompson

as i was writing my last post, a comment notification came in from my mom, asking when i was going to write about hunter s. thompson. he was a pretty big influence on my writing. i had a weekly column in my high school newspaper, and many of them basically aped the style of dr. gonzo. many of my academic papers were steeped in gonzo experimentation, and i mostly got away with it. as a freshman at cal, away from my parents, i took to smoking dunhill reds out of a cigarette holder, a thompson affectation given me by a gorgeous and incomprehensibly hip woman named ann shy, who also gave me my first charles bukowski book. every time i was on the northside of campus, i looked at the department of journalism and said to myself, that’s where i should be, following in the footsteps of my fucking hero, not studying some mind/body dualism that descartes came up with while chronically masturbating in a dark room. i like the idea expressed in at least one of the obits i read, (and almost certainly on someone’s blog) that in some sense thompson’s influence is today felt most strongly in the medium of blogs. he was one of the first journalists to completely obliterate the notion of objective reporting as a pursuit, to forcibly inject himself into the story, which is what most good blogs do. somewhere in all that poetic license, the drugs and the boozy psychosis hitherto unknown in the field of journalism, you got a clearer, more visceral understanding of the things he reported than you would have from a laundry list of facts.
i suppose i haven’t written anything because he shot himself, and it’s always very sad and confusing when someone who is not terminally ill kills themself. having been in that mindframe a number of times over the years, i suppose i do understand it. the four people that i have known that have shot themselves were all heavy, heavy boozers, and i myself have only seriously entertained checking out while drunk and depressed. i’ll bet you anything that there was a bottle of wild turkey involved.
so, i guess i’ve just been thinking that it is a real fucking shame. my heart goes out to the man, and those he left behind .