Hunter S Thompson

[Jared at Pelican Parts]

Originally posted by CJFusco
gotta hand it to him, though... at least he went out on his terms, when he decided it was time.

Exactly, wouldnt have expected anything less from him

[DonDavis]

It's sad that he's gone but I don't feel bad for him. It's the ones that were closest to him that get my empathy.

Suicide is the ultimate form of "selfishness" and is the coward's way of dealing with life.

[SteveStromberg]

I agree with Don
Chicken Sh t way out

[Overpaid Slacker]

Fear and Loathing
My night with Hunter Thompson.

By Austin Ruse

Hunter Thompson shot himself in the head sometime on Saturday and a few things are certain. He was either stoned or hung over, and his work will be forgotten.

Ask almost anyone today about Hunter Thompson and he will have no idea who you are talking about. Ask someone in a tiny sliver of demography, say ages 45 to 55, and all sorts of memories come conjuring up. There is the revelation of at least what we thought was his amazing ability with words, though I have not read him for years, so I no longer know if this is true. Even more than his work, however, we recall his comic-outlaw persona which many of us found quite appealing in those days. But the funny thing is that most of our memories come not from his work or even from him but from the seeming dead-on impression of Thompson by Bill Murray in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam, a period piece cobbled together from Thompson's most famous books, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

The Thompson schtick was as formally set as any Hope and Crosby road movie; Thompson, the comic yet brilliant journalistic bumbler is sent as the skunk to the garden party where he promptly drinks all the scotch, all the gin, all the tequila, gets the waitresses stoned, frightens the horses, shocks the local burghers and constabulary, and still turns in award-winning copy to his faraway editors in San Francisco or New York.

It is a blessing that his work is not now still terribly well-known for he was a net negative influence on an entire generation. His famous aphorism, "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro" was the font of more ruined GPAs than any other single source back in the 1970s. "When the going gets tough, the weird turn pro" meant that you could stay up all night doing every manner of substance and in the few milky hours between sunrise and the start of morning classes churn out a master term paper. Almost all of us discovered this was not true. Some, like Hunter himself, never learned it.

Hunter's life was littered with young "handlers" many sent from Rolling Stone to keep him on schedule. More than one crashed and burned living so close to the insanity. I worked briefly at Rolling Stone in the mid-Eighties and remained close to many Rolling Stone types for years after. All the stories you ever heard about Hunter were true. Hunter would come to town to finish a piece, hole up on a local hotel, borrow a Selectric typewriter from the magazine, and proceed to get stoned for days on end. Once a friend of mine was sent at long last to pick up the typewriter and discovered it in the hotel bathtub covered in topsoil. Go figure.

Here is my one Hunter story and with this I say goodbye to Senate confirmation. Sometime around 1990 Hunter and Jann Wenner, founder and editor-in-chief of Rolling Stone, were invited to speak at Columbia University. I sensed at that time that Hunter was on the downward slide and this could be his last hurrah and so I agree to tag along. I decide at the top of the evening to stay until the end of the end wherever that might lead.

Our small group meets in the green room at Columbia. We stand around slugging from a bottle of Chivas Regal. Around and around the bottle goes. Of course, Hunter is well ahead of us, having started much earlier. We stumble upstairs for the speech.

The hall is filled to the rafters, I mean absolutely filled. Hunter and Jann sit at a table center stage. Hunter slurs and slurs, and slugs from the Chivas and hacks up oranges with a huge machete. At one point Jann, wearing natty French cuffs, is lustily booed for being a corporate sell out. Hunter keeps passing the only bottle of scotch through the stage curtain to those of us backstage. "Speech" over, we head cross town to Elaine's, the longtime watering hole of New York writers and Hollywood outriders.

Keeping with my pledge to ride this pony right down to the ground, I plant myself right next to Hunter at our table of now about ten. We are all pretty drunk, but Hunter is wasted. Still he orders about five courses and eats every morsel. He even eats all the bread, which he heavily butters and covers with pepper. I try to engage him in conversation and I swear hardly the only words I understand are "Nixon," "Peru," and "acid." Along with everything else, Hunter is tripping.

At one point Hunter leans over to me and says something on the order that he is going to the bathroom and there is a guy staring at him from the bar and that I am to watch his back. "Errrr, O.K., Hunter." Hunter gets up and heads to the men's room, Jann follows him and sure enough the guy at the bar gets up and follows them both. I join the parade and when I round the turn I see this: The guy from the bar is leaning his full weight on the men's room door, bending it so far back I can see Jann understandably cowering inside. So, I grab the guy and pull him away from the door and back down the hallway. The whole bar descends on the cacophony in that tight little hallway; bartenders, waiters, patrons. Hunter comes out of the men's room, comes up to the guy and the guy says this, really loud; "I just wanted to get stoned with you, man."

The hallway clears, they take the guy back to the bar (they don't toss him out; Elaine's is a remarkably forgiving place), and Hunter grabs me and pulls me into the lady's room whereupon he pulls out a huge bag of cocaine. "It's not very good," he says, "but there is a lot of it." Thankfully, almost immediately Tommy-the-good-bartender yanks us out of the lady's room and puts us back at our table.

I do not remember much of the rest of the evening except that I am the last one to clear out; well, me, Hunter, and his "secretary." It is the weeist of hours. Hunter's limousine takes us downtown. He pulls up somewhere on Central Park South. Hunter gets out and weaves along the sidewalk, scotch bottle in one hand, "secretary" in the other. I yell out to him, "Hunter, where are you going?" "Take the limo," he says, "He'll take you wherever you want to go..."

I slump against the window as the car takes me the few blocks to my Upper West Side apartment. The morning joggers are jogging. People are walking briskly to work. The trash trucks are making that beeping sound that is joyful first thing in the morning but deeply depressing at the end of night. One cannot do this thing too many times or for too long and Hunter did both, and now he has a bullet in his brain.

Requiescat in pace, dude.

(Not necessarily my opinions, but it's from a reasonably informed source... JP)

[tabs]

Originally posted by Jared Fenton
I always expected him to go out shooting a bunch of Republicans

What da ya mean... Hunter was a Conservative....just look at his position on Gun Control...."THey will have to pry it out of my cold dead hand."

BTW: Hunter made it his time to go....

[Jared at Pelican Parts]

Hunter was NOT a Republican...

[Zeke]

Originally posted by DonDavis


Suicide is the ultimate form of "selfishness" and is the coward's way of dealing with life.

I want to hear you say those exact same words when you are racked with pain and the demons in your head won't cut you loose. You mention something about life, something I don't think you know much about.

Especially his.

I couldn't disagree with you more and I'm prone to believe you are a rather shallow person for whom life has been pretty smooth. I have had 3 family members and one friend commit suicide and I agree with their choice. One was my father. They were all very ill and not expected to live spare my brother in law. He was in a different kind of pain.

Oh, and you're not the first to express that position. It's not even an original thought. (Read again my comment about shallow.)

There's more to any and all of this, but that's all you're going to read here from me.

[lendaddy]

I must be an emotional stone. I get less worked up than this when family passes. No, I'm not kidding. Not sure if that's good/bad/or indifferent, just saying. None of you even knew this guy right? Please no sappy "to read him was to know him" blather, I'm actually curious?

[CJFusco]

Originally posted by tabs
What da ya mean... Hunter was a Conservative....just look at his position on Gun Control...."THey will have to pry it out of my cold dead hand."

BTW: Hunter made it his time to go....

Uh oh, Hunter is already suffering from "Orwell Syndrome" - what happens to great social commentators who had their own code of ethics when they die... namely, they get claimed by both sides as a patron saint.

As far as I can tell, Hunter's only "conservative" values involved gun control. He was decidedly anti-Bush, anti-Bush Sr., anti-Reagan, and VERY anti-Nixon. He didn't adore Clinton (I remember him deriding bubba as being nothing more than a white-trash hillbilly), but he supported him on the basis of "lesser of two evils". He was unabashedly pro-Kerry, having protested alongside him in the 1970s.

Some confusion might come from the fact that he was incredibly critical of the Democratic Party on a lot of issues... and rightly so. Of course, looking back to the 1930s, Orwell - the self-proclaimed Socialist - expressed his dismay that many Socialists were nothing more than "sandal-wearing fruit juice-drinkers"... in other words, proto-hippies. Hunter hated hippies. Just because most Republicans also hate hippies, does not mean Hunter was a Republican... actually, it was said that he only voted Republican once in his life, and it was a local election in which one of his friends was running.

No, Hunter was a left-of-center counterculturalist with his own set of values. To label him "Republican" or "Democrat" would be to take away from him much of his identity as a authorial voice.

[nostatic]

my bet is that he was sick or had a terminal disease...and decided that he was going to go out before he didn't have the choice anymore. Sounds like the son will respect his privacy though, so we may never know.

funny, I feel like having a couple fingers of Wild Turkey...

[Zeke]

Originally posted by CJFusco


No, Hunter was a left-of-center counterculturalist with his own set of values. To label him "Republican" or "Democrat" would be to take away from him much of his identity as a authorial voice.

There ya go.

And, Todd, he was suffering. Back pain still after surgery, hip replacement that wasn't that good and a broken leg from a trip to Hawaii just recently and still mending.

He was jacked up, I'm sure and had a history of bipolar type of behavior. Still, he was apparently somewhat rational about his final act. As were my relatives and friend. Hell, my friend took a walk in the garden before going inside and taking pills along with a tall stiff vodka. He had liver cancer for the second time. Not many can say for the second time.

My dad and uncle both suffered from emphasema due to heavy lifetime smoking. They were both dying a slow, miserable death.

[M.D. Holloway]

If it's true, I can't say I blame him. It's a heck of a think to do to friends and family but if it is doing on your terms or waiting to go the way of all flesh in a slow, painful, misrable way - I'd swallow a handful of momma's little helpers with an absolute chaser as well. If I'm gonna cash in, just as well leave a decent looking corpse.

[tabs]

My Granddad worked in the Ford Foundry for 43 years, 6 years after his retirement he started coughing up his lungs...big bloody chunks....he was terminally ill (given 3 months) a man who in his youth could carry a cast iron wood burning stove up a flight of stairs on his back...a bull of a man..reduced to not even being able to get out of bed to go to the can....my Grandmother found him one day with one of his hunting rifles preparing to kill himself...she said, "Is this how you want your Grandson to remember you?" He put the gun down and 3 months later he died in a nursing home...and I know other people who lived their life out full of pain and misery, that didn't bow out early....Now I don't disagree with assisted suicide, modern medicine can keep you alive far longer than your quality of life may warrant...and I can't be their judge....

I know one thing that people hang on to life until they can nolonger bear the pain or their bodies can sustain life....then when we give up hope or are tired from fighting to stay alive, it's then that we give up the fight and death comes to us as a welcome friend... to relieve us of our pain and suffering...

Life is an adventure you play out to the last card...

[M.D. Holloway]

Growing up, I saw my Great Aunt and Grandmother perish by way of the "old timers" illness - they were vibrant women who spent the last 5 to 7 years of their life is lifeless forms. I saw my Mother fade away, loosing all assemblance of life save metabolism. I remeber visiting the ladies with my Mom in the homes, she hated going and seeing them like that, she would always say "thats a heck of a way to finsh it out - make me a promise, if I ever get that sickness, don't put me in one of these homes, thats all I'm saying". Now thats some hardcore ***** to ask for from an 11yr old. She was a very creative and exceptional woman who was proud and strong and wise. She would never ever want someone let alone her family to see her so weak and dying. The lst years of her life was spent in and out of reality. The last thing I ever understood her saying to me was "you promised...".

I know what she wanted but what son could do it? What husband or friend could? I know she didn't want to die that way but according to our culture and society, assisted suicide is tatamount (sp) to murder.

If I know I am going cash it in - the only choice I have to make is to figuer out how long I should drag it out before it is the right time.

[Zeke]

Well, I'm sorry to have hijacked the thread in my criticism of Davis's statement. That was not my intention. I guess if a person does suicide, the debate will surface. There certainly is a lot more to HST than this.

Let's go there.

[limble]

Drugs, booze, firearms and fast motorcycles.
Hell, he out lived himself.

[M.D. Holloway]

Fear and Loathing was great in many ways - for one, it is a great exercise in getting into the very beast you are trying to understand and write about. A whole marketing concept was born of it - not to say HST would be cool with that but it meant that the suits would have to crawl down from the tower and live in the trenches in order to understand. He did a great job and I am not even sure he ever wanted to have that impact - thats is a stuff of icons.

[Moneyguy1]

Zeke, 77 and others..

Re: suicide

Just my thoughts, setting aside the "sanctity of life" arguments by some organized religions:

1. We show more compassion to our sick and dying pets than we do to our fellow humans

2. Suicide is messy, traumatic for the family members left behind

3. Suicide is considered necessary to those seriously contemplating it no matter what the reason because there are no legal or ethical alternatives, something like the days before legalized abortion (I am not debating morality here)

4. Therefore, shouldn't society consider what some might call a more enlightened method where an individual could have, akin to a living will that when all mental capacity is gone, such as Alzhimers, that a merciful end be available and those with cognitive capacity intact but terminal could elect to die? I bring to mind the death scene in Soylent Green with Edward G. Robinson

What would be wrong with having a choice?

Room for discussion here?

[Zeke]

Originally posted by Moneyguy1


What would be wrong with having a choice?

Room for discussion here?

There's room with me......

I think I saw a different version of Soylent Green than you. I didn't get that there was anything altrusitic.... just feeding the masses with the useless.

This is still OT. Shouldn't we start another thread?

[350HP930]

I am planning on riding things out to the bitter end, but when things get too bitter I would prefer to go out in a blaze of self inflicted glory instead of just sputtering out.