It Never Got Weird Enough.

Hunter S. Thompson
July 18, 1937 - Feb. 20, 2005

In this entry, I'll rely on Wikipedia a bit more than usual. I think that's because the subject at hand, Hunter S. Thompson, is at best an enigma. He was at once a public celebrity and a recluse. It was as if he had the ability to vanish at will and reappear only when he felt like it, to perhaps write a column or story.

Hunter S. Thompson was a great writer. His writing was powerful, truthful, and fearless. He was also an anti-social, paranoid, drug-taking, unpredictable loose cannon. But perhaps that came with the territory when you wholly and completely invented a style of journalism and influenced generations of budding writers.

A long time before I really knew anything about Hunter Thompson, I liked him. I liked the idea of him, even before I ever read a word he wrote. Traveling around, getting into adventures, pissing people off, and then writing about it...that's the Real American Dream. And you never even really knew if what you were reading actually happened, or he just made it up in his head. It didn't matter, because it still made the point. I wish I had gotten into his work when I was a teen, back when I was reading J.D. Salinger and Kurt Vonnegut, because it would have made even more of an impression on me.

If you believe Hunter Thompson's Wikipedia entry, he killed himself three years ago today. Or maybe he didn't.

Thompson died at his self-described "fortified compound" known as "Owl Farm" in Woody Creek, Colorado, at 5:42 p.m. on February 20, 2005, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

Thompson's son (Juan), daughter-in-law (Jennifer Winkel Thompson) and grandson (Will Thompson) were visiting for the weekend at the time of his suicide. Will and Jennifer were in the adjacent room when they heard the gunshot. Mistaking the shot for the sound of a book falling, they continued with their activities for a few minutes before checking on him. Thompson was sitting at his typewriter with the word "counselor" written in the center of the page.

Paul William Roberts in his Globe and Mail article of Saturday, February 26, 2005 wrote the following:

Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: "They're gonna make it look like suicide," he said. "I know how these bastards think . . ."

They reported to the press that they do not believe his suicide was out of desperation, but was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful medical conditions. Thompson's wife, Anita, who was at a gym at the time of her husband's death, was on the phone with him when he ended his life.

What family and police describe as a suicide note was delivered to his wife four days before his death and later published by Rolling Stone Magazine. Entitled "Football Season Is Over",it read:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt"

Artist and friend Ralph Steadman wrote:

"...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment. I don't know if that is brave or stupid or what, but it was inevitable. I think that the truth of what rings through all his writing is that he meant what he said. If that is entertainment to you, well, that's OK. If you think that it enlightened you, well, that's even better. If you wonder if he's gone to Heaven or Hell — rest assured he will check out them both, find out which one Richard Milhous Nixon went to — and go there. He could never stand being bored. But there must be Football too — and Peacocks..."

On August 20, 2005, in a private ceremony, Thompson's ashes were fired from a cannon atop a 153-foot tower of his own design (in the shape of a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button) to the tune of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man", known to be the song most respected by the late writer. Red, white, blue, and green fireworks were launched along with his ashes. As the city of Aspen would not allow the cannon to remain for more than a month, the cannon has been dismantled and put into storage until a suitable permanent location can be found. According to widow Anita Thompson, the actor Johnny Depp, a close friend of Thompson (and portrayer of Raoul Duke, Thompson's fictional alter ego, in the movie adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), financed the funeral. Depp told the Associated Press, "All I'm doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out."

Other famous attendees at the funeral included U.S. Senator John Kerry and former U.S. Senator George McGovern; 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley; actors Bill Murray (who portrayed Hunter S. Thompson in the movie Where the Buffalo Roam), Sean Penn, and Josh Hartnett; singers Lyle Lovett and John Oates, the poet Trip Lucid; and numerous other friends. An estimated 280 people attended the funeral.

Sorry. Borrowed heavily from Wikipedia there. It's good to have a free source of semi-reliable information available when words escape you.

The best words to describe him come from Thompson himself, taken his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"Too weird to live, too rare to die."