Hunter S. Thompson (d. 2/20/05)

[barsoomcore]

Oddly appropriate words from WH Auden (whose birthday today is):

A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

 

[Tarrasque Wrangler]

"I took another big hit off the amyl, and by the time I got to the bar my heart was full of joy. I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger ... a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." - closing lines of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

As a young writer growing up my divine pantheon was Steinbeck, Wolfe and the good Doctor. I lived and breathed Fear and Loathing; after I read it for the first time I went and had my own gonzo moments on the Strip before I found myself out in the desert south of town, drunk and watching pretty lights from the air force base.

His writing was such a revelation to me that I don't know how I attempted to write before being exposed to it. He did me such a great service and I'll never get the chance to thank him for it.

I hope it was quick.

 

[Terath Ninir]

Too bad. I had hoped he would go out a bit more... dramatically. Say, in a gunfight. But at least he got to go out on his own terms. See you later, Mr. Thompson!