Mood: Sad.
Music: Give Blood, Pete Townshend
Game: World of Warcrack. (Rogue 60...and that's a wrap!)
Book: The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco.
Muffin: Strawberry-Blackberry.
Punchline: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
I was going to write about making level 60, and then I was gonna put something in about some of the guys from ijsmp starting blogs of their own...but then...
If you hadn't heard yet, Hunter S. Thompson killed himself on Sunday. Going out in true Duke style, he shot himself in the head with a .45 pistol.
I can't exactly explain to you how much HST meant to me developmentally, not just as a writer, but as a person. I feel that my style of writing comes directly from Thompson. I'll put up some articles I wrote for Gamertagdatabase.com...which they've since taken down because they're now run by a bunch of tasteless heathens. (I still love 'em...but it doesn't mean that they aren't tasteless heathens.)
Curiously, I came to reading Thompson via Doonesbury. My mother was/is a huge Garry Trudeau fan, and as a result, I was exposed to it at a very early age. At that point, Vietnam was still going on, and Thompson was in his prime. Trudeau put a character in his strip named "Uncle Duke"...being Zonker Harris' uncle. Duke went on to go to China, become the governor of Samoa (making his nephew Zonker Lt. Governor), and did all manner of very Thompsonlike things...including looking exactly like him.
I was so intrigued with this character, that I picked up Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. And the rest, as they say, is history.
What can be said about Fear and Loathing that hasn't been said a million times by writers, critics, and journalists? Thompson didn't break through the objective third wall of journalism...he blew a huge gaping hole in it with an M1 tank, and rode, drunk and drugged through it, cackling madly the entire time. Bill Murray, who remained a friend of Thompson's until his death, played Thompson in "Where the Buffalo Roam", Hollywood's first crack and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Johnny Depp played Thompson in, you guessed it, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"(Terry Gilliam directing!) Depp also remained friends with Thompson until his death, and, in fact, delivered Thompson's eulogy of Allen Ginsberg at Ginsberg's funeral, as Thompson was too ill to attend. Apparently, the audience was in stitches.
Thompson was unquestionably larger than life...his huge fascination with living life, taking massive quantities of drugs and alcohol, sports (Richard Nixon agreed to be interviewed by Thompson when Thompson promised only to ask the former president questions about Football), owning and firing huge weapons, and making everyone laugh along the way. Everyone who came in contact with him, no matter how famous, apparently came away from him a lifelong friend and supporter.
Thompson taught me many things...that being radical was OK. That being a non-conformist wasn't just acceptable...it was fun, and important. He was incredibly successful...but he was successful HIS way. He missed deadlines, he sent in scraps of paper with scrawl on it as stories, he ran up enormous expense bills with nothing to show for it. In short, he was living life the way he wanted.
While no comment was made as to why he might have taken his own life, it was known that he had been in poor health over the last few years, and in a fair amount of pain. His son Juan was quoted as saying that he and his mother know it was a suicide, and that settles it.
In a way, blogging is all because of Thompson. Ignore the technical and the internet phenomenon...but the way that bloggers immerse themselves in their own lives and share it with an audience who, with greater or lesser interest, looks on with involved fascination. Subjective journalism. Showing the world by living in it.
Good night, Hunter. Thanks for everything.
"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold."
Posted by Glenn at February 22, 2005 09:42 AM