Do it faggot! Shit on him, I fucking dare you! My fucking idol. You'll be sorry is all I'll say...
Yeah, you're right in a way. That phenomenon is a real thing. HST (not to be confused with HRT) brings that out in people. It's called 'devotion'. Or was it 'delusion', I can never remember. Ditto Bill Hicks.
Take them for what they are, at the point of time and space that you meet them.
Hunter was a deceptively good writer. He studied the works of Hemmingway and Faulkner and tippity tapped them out on his cranky old mechanical typewriter for hours on end. So he said anyway. I believe him. Thousands wouldn't.
He covered shit that real people were interested in like politics and motorbikes and drugs and degenerates and power structures and booze and sleaze and twisted nipples, you fool.
We were somewhere around the beginning of the 21st Century when the reality started to take hold...
He may not have been the greatest writer in the world. I'm not enough of an expert to give that opinion either way. But even for a literary dumb fuck like me I could see the subtle nuance and power in his writing. Striving, stretching for something more. Sometimes hitting the mark, the high watermark.
I remember reading the last words he wrote. It was a sports ESPN column that he had been syndicated for because no one else really wanted to touch him. He was pretty washed up by that point. But still, it was good work. He was shit-mouthing Bush et al and the whole 911 shitshow aftermath. I thought, gee, he'd better not go on like that or he'll be comitting suicide soon. Guess what? As the years have gone on I'm inclined more and more to believe he wasn't suicided but rather took the easy way out when pain had overcome his body and all those drugs he took in his youth just didn't work any more.
I've read every word he's ever written that I could find. He does comedy, he makes you laugh. He does politics, he gives you a glimpse behind the curtain. He does motorbikes, he makes you wanna ride. Fuck yeah.
There was a rumour going around about him that he was some kind of manager at an emporium where snuff films were being shown, even that he might have been involved in the making of those films. He did talk about some very rich people putting on shows with degenerates and their doggies. I'm sure he saw a lot of things. The snuff stuff has pretty much been debunked but shit sticks and here we are still talking about it, besmirching the Good Doctor's name.
I have no doubt he was a grade A fucking asshole. But he was loyal to those close to him, so it is said. Hence Johnny Depp's love for him and putting on that grand show for his finale. See also his affection for Warren Zevon - enjoy every sandwich motherfuckers because that is all there fucking is.
He was probably as much a counter-culture icon and celebrity as he was a great writer. He was also a master troll. He ran for Sheriff's office or something fucking stupid. He never was gonna win, but it put the cat among the pigeons. People feared him because he was a loose cannon. And that's not a bad thing to have under your belt whether you really are crazy or not. In his dotage he was just another cantakerous old man with his best days behind him. Yeah, more I think about it, it makes perfect sense. I'm sure he really did blow his brains out while his family were in the room next door and some poor cunt had to come in and scrape the bits off the walls. He really was that fucking selfish, I wouldn't put it past him. He was a cunt's cunt.
Will they say that he was a good man, a wise man? He goes too far sometimes, he'd be the first to admit it. Did you know that the middle word in life is 'if'? The horror.
All those words and films and books and songs of that time were meant to portray the deep insanity that people felt about the times they were living in, and what would happen if things were left unchecked. Well, here we are folks.
Hunter was at his best when he was sober. I mean, when his words were sober, whether he was actually sober at the time who can say. There's a book of his called Proud Highway. It's really a collection of essays and letters he wrote before he became famous. You can read some of the most beautiful words he wrote as he advises one of his close friends about what direction they should take in life. It's a big book. From the heart. Sometimes very pedestrian and sometimes throwing up real gems like the aforementioned piece.
Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America's most influential and incisive journalists--Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who's Who of luminaries from...
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America’s most influential and incisive journalists–Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who’s Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez–not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors–Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective. Passionate in their admiration, merciless in their scorn, and never anything less than fascinating, the dispatches of The Proud Highway offer an unprecedented and penetrating gaze into the evolution of the most outrageous raconteur/provocateur ever to assault a typewriter.
Proud Highway also showcases his photographic talent, which was not all that bad tbh. He was big in to cameras and would muse on their weak/strong points the way he would muse over a Ducati 900 not really being an essential item in life, but damn if it wasn't FUN when all you want to experience is sheer speed and exhilaration. He was a nerd and a fucking sperg. A bluffer's bluffer. He bluffed it further than any bluffer had a honest right to expect. And payed the price.
Hunter was never going to fit in to normie life. It's good that he got to live the life he did after getting kicked out of the USAF.
That time Hunter S. Thompson wrote the greatest press release in military history
Though he served just little more than a year in the U.S. Air Force, Hunter S. Thompson left an indelible mark on the service: By giving us the single greatest press release in military history.
taskandpurpose.com
You don't have to idolise the man. You don't even have to like him.
But if you look with the right kind of eyes, you can see the high watermark that he reached.
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
And now that wave has gone right back out again and is coming back in to shore in the other direction.
One of God's very own prototypes, never intended for mass production.