It's Monday morning and cold and I've got an earache in my right ear that is kicking my ass all the way to the Tylenol bottle and Hunter S. Thompson went and shot himself in Aspen yesterday.
I didn't know Hunter personally so I can't be but so sad. In fact, I'm not that sad at all. I'm glad I wasn't really into him when I was a kid. I was way too impressionable and could not afford to get loaded 24/7.
I don't think you can get high in America ... I mean really high -- drugged out of your mind, not some measly stoned-on-a-joint high, not wine club high, not a Percoset before bed high... no I mean three sheets of acid to the wind high, I mean mixing your Xanex with No-Doze and washing the whole thing down with tequila (Pabst chasers) high... without being influenced by Thompson. Didja ever get so messed up that you saw things; things that were coming for you? That was as much Thompson as the drugs. I spent two weeks in the Alaskan wild in the summer of '95 convinced that a giant bear was following me, hiding in the shadow of the woods, waiting for the right time to scare whatever sanity I had left out of my malnourished little body. That was Thompson's doing.
But I thought he was cool 'cause Bill Murray played him in a movie. He was a world of drugs, guns, Dobermans, vodka & grapefruit, weird Samoan lawyers, football. He was a lot of fun to read.
I don't feel very Hunter-esque these days. Manic, but exhausted; I can't stifle my yawns and I can't go to sleep. Actually, maybe that's exactly how he felt. Except, he never really had to feel this way in a zombie office with flourescent hum and Monday bagels.
We wouldn't have gotten along. I have no use for the idea of a "fortified compound." I need my sobriety to keep me fixed in perpetual daydream, which in turn keeps me from following that dark path that we now know he was blazing. I feel drugged up enough on a day-to-day basis on account of my own lousy brain chemistry. But, like I said, he was a lot of fun to read.
I hope the single-gunshot-to-the-head was what he wanted. I hope he didn't just lose a bet on the Super Bowl.
