Goodbye, Hunter.

[catscradle]

Last night as I was finishing up the last bit of a new necklace I was making, it came across the news that Hunter S. Thompson had committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. I was in the type of shock anyone is in when they first hear the news that someone they've come to like is dead. But the shock was short lived as if anyone who knows Hunter at all realized that this is the only way it could end. Since his book Better Than Sex, the book he wrote on the Clinton campaign trail, he predicted he wouldn't make it into the next century. He made it 5 years. Perhaps he was just hanging on out of curiousity. Perhaps the venom over his abject hatred of George W. Bush kept him alive a little longer. Perhaps he just kept it going just to see how it all would end. A lot of the old timers were crawling out of the woodwork to wage war on the Bush campaign. Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Hunter... they all came out, most of them sounding more coherent than they had in decades. A lot of them rather astonished they were still alive.

There was only one way it could end for Hunter. When you live as he lived and are still alive at 67, there's nothing that's going to take you out. You've got to do it yourself or resign yourself to an eternity of stupidity amplified though carnival horror glass mirrors.

So tonight I'll buy a cheap bottle of tequila and drink a toast. To Hunter. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

And then maybe I'll pick a couple of fights with some Republicans.

Comments

[wiebke.livejournal.com]

That was a very cool eulogy!

I just read it to my friend Storm and she was like "They should print that!"

[beeblefish.livejournal.com]

smile