More thoughts on the great gone Gonzo.

February 22nd 2005

After Midnight:
So I’m thinking about Thompson, and wanting to read him again but a savage fear is overtaking me, the more I think about his insight and wit. It will still be great, it will still be insightful… but how much of the funny will still be there after this dark end? I cant really say.
I read on the internet, and I must agree, sometimes it just becomes too much, Hemingway, Hart Crane… there will be firearms discharged. All too strange and terrible. I feel in the grip of some loud and powerful sickness as I keep rereading the news stories.
Death is not unexpected, but the suicide shocks me to the bare raw core. I see people claiming chicken-shit and coward for it, and I’m just not sure how I feel about that savage act.
It beckons at times, especially these times, one mighty Fuck You to everyone on your own terms.

After 6 AM
Slept a few hours and its still true… shit.
I started FLLV again last night, after I’d stayed online too damn long, and its still funny. The mojo wire may be strangely silent… but HST’s laughter is ringing out through the pages with our own.

I want to run into the wilds and pretend that this is not true…

After 9 AM
Death was expected, but the suicide… call it “anti-surprise”, initial surprise but it all makes sense.
I never imagined him dying, not dying in the normal sense of laying sick, dying, and then finally slipping into the dark. Frankly, I doubt he ever saw that end for himself either. This was as quick and clean as it ever got and he was as in control of it as he ever was.
Guiding a too light, crazy fast, Ducatti down a wet Colorado mountain curve, finally feeling the speed of it when it crosses 95, its like a bullet from a gun, there is a point where you cant turn back the thing you started, the thing you controlled – all will be lost if you do. I can only feel that Hunter S. Thompson died like he lived, fast and hard, answering only to himself.
Everyone is going to speculate why, wonder, demand answers and at times I’ll probably join them but its not ours to know, or really to question. Like so many other things, he made his stand and followed up on it. He was never a fake.

I think HST meant more to me, than he did to my parents although they are more “his generation” than I. They lived through all that, sometimes the explanations just aren’t needed then, but I didn’t and I guess that’s the greatest thing I’ve gotten from HST, some further clarity of the times, an understanding of what we lost, that great tide he spoke of and its breaking and rolling back. Forever, I think I will appreciate that the most… that and the laughter.