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2/22/2005
EAR PLUGS
Tiger! Tiger!, Peelander-Z, Immortal Lee County Killers at The Earl, and Johnny
Sketch and the Dirty Notes at Jake's Toadhouse:
http://www.degeneratepress.com/vault/ilck_feb_2005/index.html
BLASPHEMY
You may have heard Hunter S. Thompson killed himself this weekend. Or maybe you
didn’t. His passing seems to have generated only a tiny blip in mainstream
media, especially compared to his influence on the lives of most of the
degenerates I know, directly or otherwise. So here’s a little something to make
up for it, courtesy of degenerate RVI:
In Memoriam, Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson would choose to kill himself the day I have a horrible cold
so that the words I might have used to praise him would not come. But he was
like that, always doing the most unexpected things at the worst possible
moments. And as for my words, he could have cared less - the finest monument to
HST is the stack of books and articles he left behind.
But what Hunter S. Thompson meant to me, while it was no concern of his, is
important to me. I started reading his books 25 years go and in that span of
time, even though I never knew the man, I did know his words, the inspiration
they provided and the outright humor. Thompson was a man who knew he was stuck
on a Ship of Fools, that this country had betrayed every creative impulse it had
in favor of a comfortable mediocrity and a rule by people "with the morals of a
used car salesman." He knew it and said so, often and well.
In the course of stepping out of line, Hunter Thompson became part of the
counter culture of the 60s and the drug use that was endemic to that scene; the
drugs were to become the lens through which he interpreted the world for the
rest of his life. It was a practice he neither hid nor apologized for and it
featured prominently, if exaggeratedly, in many of his stories, fictional and
journalistic. One of the reasons I never felt the need to do much
experimentation with drugs past a certain point was Hunter Thompson. He was the
explorer into unknown and forbidding, dangerous territory and wrote in his
reports back to the rest of us what he saw in the hallucinatory terrain, the
flora, the fauna, the wildness, the fear. Thompson had already gone there and
done such a thorough job of mapping it, so far as I was concerned, I never
needed to.
As a 14 year old reading Thompson for the first time, I didn’t know what to make
of him. I had inherited a copy of The Great Shark Hunt, ironically enough, from
the collection of a man of very interesting reading tastes who decided he’d had
enough of this life and shot himself in the head. I could pile word atop word
here and never touch what Thompson meant for me, so I will stop with a mere
suggestion: first, he taught me, a lonely outcast in a small rural town that had
no use for creativity, that being a Freak was a badge of honor, whatever route
one had taken that brought one into the Freak Kingdom; second, he was the first
writer I read that challenged me to actually try to write better and to write
honestly about what I experienced. I don’t know that I’ve lived up to the latter
challenge to this day, but simply trying has made me a better writer than I
would have been otherwise, raised in a community where literacy was held to be
as important as learning the Zen tea ceremony and in a school where the most
popular English teacher was proud of churning out rooms full of people who could
write the cookie cutter 5 paragraph no-thought essay and who thought speed
reading the classics was a virtue. A deed best done quick, I suppose.
Thompson didn’t write cookie cutter anything, and he didn’t live a cookie cutter
life. In the past year I had the privilege of rereading nearly all of Thompson’s
books, many of which have been my companions through terrible times and have
said to me, "What would Horatio Alger do at a time like this?"
But I also read his collections of letters and saw a side of the man you will
not see if you only read his Gonzo articles, a side that reveals a more
thoughtful, rational, complex person than you’d expect otherwise. He was also a
man, one of the finest American writers of all time, whom we discover couldn’t
keep his bills paid because he couldn’t get the magazine and book editors to
turn loose of what they owed him in return for writing some of that now famous
work. He was not a demigod or an uncaring wildman - he was a writer who wanted
to be a damn good writer in a time that had decreasing use for damn good
writers, especially those that weren’t doing cookie cutter work for an
increasingly illiterate and unimaginative readership.
I don’t know why now, after his many accomplishments and after living through
all the things he did, Hunter S. Thompson decided to shoot himself Sunday night.
No one will ever really know why now, so there’s little point in asking. All I
can say is that one of my steady literary companions and inspirations decided
that this world was no longer worth his time. And maybe it wasn't, the direction
it’s taken. I just wish he had gone out in the backyard once more and shot at
the gongs he had mounted on the mountainsides and then went in and typed out
some hell-raising screed about George W. instead of deciding to hang up his
spurs with such finality. But Thompson always was like that. He did as he
pleased and staked everything on the decision.
"You buy the ticket, you take the ride."
Degenerate RVI
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