Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson is dead. He "fatally shot himself," which the rest of the world calls suicide. I was shocked by this, and I hate it all at the same time. I'm sure most people would relate him to the quirky, drugged out character that Johnny Depp played in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I think it's okay, Depp was evidently quite true to character and I liked him. Liked it enough to read The Rum Diary, which I dare say is one of my favorite books and was a driving force in maintaining my sanity on this cross-the-globe journey I recently embarked on. Granted, it was his only novel and was written early in his life, to be published nearly thirty years later, but I think the point of the novel still struck home, speaking to people who were running, searching, traveling, hoping to find something and only finding themselves. And not in that cheesy, psychobabble kind of way, but the way where you hope for a distraction, only to find yourself sitting there waiting to be dealt with.

I have a habit of developing deep, long-lasting crushes on authors I like (imagine my disappointment when I realized that David Sedaris was gay...). I was obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson. Plus, there is always some bad-boy mystique about a guy who feels so comfortable in the void and abyss of drug induced vision. So being me, I went to the library and took out every other book they had by Thompson in order to continue our love affair. Unfortunately, I was horribly disappointed. He has become, over thirty years (but for me only a matter of days), a paranoid babbler. I do not discredit or even dislike people with radically different political views than mine, mostly because I don't think I know enough about politics or history to judge. Still, this was not a political distaste, he was just babbling! I couldn't understand how his beautiful, troubled insight of the eternal traveler had become someone who couldn't keep on one topic long enough to support his claims. Yes, he started a brand new kind of journalistic fiction, sure, but I have never been a fan of anyone becoming famous for being the first if that "first" wasn't that good. I'm sure he was a popular icon in the same way Michael Moore is today; half the people only buy it because the other half are buying it. And I'm sure it was good that he made the headway in fiction that he did. But to me, I was just disappointed to see that all his rampant drug use hadn't done anything but eat away at the mind that I had loved. He wasn't comfortable in the drugfilled abyss, he had merely fallen in headfirst.

Now to see that he commit suicide in his fortified compound in Aspen... What happened to the man that wanted to travel everywhere and never settle down? Now, that traveler who looked out onto open seas with no other desire than to cross them lived in a fortified compound. He was trapped in a world of his own making. It's just so sad. I wish his mind hadn't lost its luster. And part of me still feels bad now because he was such an intensely private man, and here I am writing like I knew him and I didn't. But the point is, I don't know that I really would have liked to. Unless it was 35 years ago and he could tell me what he saw on his travels that he wished he would have remembered. I just wish he could have reminded himself.