Hunter S. Thompson is dead. But what about his brand of raw, bloody, beautifully
debauched journalism?
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
I am not nearly stoned enough.
I should at this moment have, at the very least, roughly four Vicodin and three Valium and two
giant nuggets of phenobarbital and a few whippets and a canister of ether and a tab of blotter acid
and half an ounce of premium hash and a nice snifter of gin playing naked volleyball in my addled
brain right now to properly pay homage to the late great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why I
ain't touching this HST legacy thing with a 10-foot line of premium Colombian blow.
I ain't touching it because it's sad and fraught and would probably fail to do the man and his masterfully debauched writing any sort of true and appropriately inappropriate justice, and given how the fine San Francisco Chronicle, like all respectable newspapers, generally disallows stream-of-consciousness fire hoses of frenetic Thompson-like curse words in its publications, I am, shall we say, a bit hamstrung.
And to be perfectly honest, I'm tragically underversed in the Thompson worldview, not really a disciple and not all that devoted to the hard-boiled writer's life and times and the guns and his hellish relationship with law enforcement, the drugs (always, always the drugs) and Aspen lair and the
feverish, obsessive devotion to politics and the Wild Turkey and the larger-than-life persona, and beyond the utter genius of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and bits of "Generation of Swine" and "The Rum Diary," I have spent insufficient time with the Legacy to perform the beautifully raunchy verbal epitaph HST so f--ing well deserves.
But one thing must be said, and said again, and repeated ad infinitum, screamed and lamented and slapped across the face of modern journalism in the wake of Thompson's brutal and sudden but somehow morbidly appropriate exit from this bittersweet existence and upon his ceremonial entrance into the next, a place where, we just know, the hedonism runs hot and hotter and the guns are plentiful and the drugs are insanely potent and all the hookers wear Lycra and look like Jenna Jameson and can quote Nixon's resignation speech while casually sucking the rust off a tailpipe.
toke up...eardp
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