Imagine my chagrin—and chagrin is the perfect word: "disquietude or distress of mind caused by humiliation, disappointment, or failure"—upon reading of Hunter Thompson's suicide four days after my last post about his disintegration as a literary force thirty years ago due to drugs and booze.

In my youth, I loved and idolized the man. We saw eye to eye on the imperative to inebriate. He could write the fiercest prose, funny, profane, and wise all at once.

"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

And he hated Nixon.

"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---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

How sweet and eloquent and perfect and true.

With that paragraph he summed up the optimism of our collective youth, which caught fire for me when John Kennedy ran for president. I was nine years old. And after the crushing blow of his assassination three years in, Beatlemania swept the country two-and-half months later, and help mask the pain. Still our hope ran high and the dreams seemed to be coming true, so they had to kill again- this is how they do it - and RFK and Martin Luther King were gone.

And Nixon was elected president.

The wave was already receding, taking our hopes and dreams, and, sadly, taking Hunter Thompson too on an ocean of booze, in its immutable ebb.

He could still write the occasional great line over the next three decades, but he spent most of his time being a rockstar, creating meaningless spectacles and reporting on them.

Hunter Hunter Hunter, we needed more than that.

And now you are gone, too.

Comments (1)

another best mind...
written by TDrifter, December 02, 2006

of our generation destroyed by devine madness.

---but the Myth will always remain.

I knew an early Lady mate of his --
suffered similar affliction but really splashed the colors on thick.

Touching tribune. Bop on!

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