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Eulogy For Hunter S. Thompson
2005-02-21 - 12:22 a.m.


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Euology For Dr. Hunter S. Thompson


 


Hunter, you son-of-a-bitch.  You did it again, to us, shocking us when we least expected it.  But did the third act have to be so final?


You left us fatherless, once again, like papa hemmingway, starved for affection, guidance, us starving struggling wanna-be writers, who now feel like we had part of our soft underbelly ripped away in the stark cold night. 


You were my hero, you know.  Many's the time I dreamed of going up to Aspen, snooping around for you, seeing if I could pick up some tid-bits of wisdom.  Something that could help me succeed in the game, if not in real life, in writing, or anything else.  There was a time when I thought I could drink as well as you, do the things you do, and do them at a high level.


Because I know.  I know your secret.  The truth is not in you.  It was all around you, and you were a raw nerve, plugged into the switch, unable to tune it out, sensitive to all the fine vibrations, shocked repeatedly, daily.  I know.  And all the booze and drugs, weren't really to help you have the perceptive eyes, or the keen sense of what the truth was, it was to blind you.  To soften the daily jolts, to numb you.  And you never learned to get by without it.


You were a mad bastard, as are all geniuses, who trod the fine line between madness and genius like a tightrope act.  We never thought you'd fall off.


No, some people have the constitution, the fortitude to make a few ventures out into the abyss, stare deep into its inky blackness, and leave, shivering in the soul, afraid of what they found, and happy to rejoin the rat race, the life of lemmings, the human-suck-tide, as you called it, finding solace in the fact that they made it back.  And a few stay out there a little longer than the rest.


But you, Hunter, you made your life there.  You lived on the edge, raw and aware, a blinking neon sign to all the rest of us of the injustice, the hate, malice, atavistic stupidity of our culture.  You camped out on the edge of the abyss and ran a diner, while the rest of us only have t-shirts to show for it.


Goddamit Hunter.  You were my fuckin' hero, man.  You, and Kerouac, and Bukowski, Burroughs.  Even papa hem.  But did you have to take hem so goddam seriously?  Your stories were poetery in my ears, and an awakening, that writing can be a dangerous, active art, and the truth did not lay in any one of us.  You blazed a trail, crazy with a whipsaw and a .45. You had a fluid language all of your own.


And I'm so fuckin' saddned by your loss.  Its hit me like a punch in the gut.  Its sad.


Hunter was the canary in the cage.  A measure of how sick our society had become, and now, in that proverbial mineshaft, the canary has died from the noxious fumes.  What do we do now?


Well, life belongs to the living, even as much as we don't appreciate it or take advantage of the richness of experience.  Most don't.


So what now?  I suppose I'll have to find a sac and shove my balls in it, so I can take on the government like you did.  Or the cruel stupidity of the New Dumb. Or the greedheads in Fat City.  Or do an expose' on the Hells's Angel's, and admire their savage brutality.  Maybe I could champion Freak Power.


But I if I did all of that, I'd just be a cheap hack, an unoriginal prick, following in the flat footsteps of a giant, down a well blazed path that you led us down.  You magnificent soul.  You raw nerve of excruciating sensitivity.


You cruelly beautiful man.


 


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