Later, Dr. Gonzo.

Hunter S. Thompson was always a strange and infinite mystery to me as a young person. I followed the cartoon exploits of the character that was modeled after him in the Doonesbury comic strip. I read his books, as many of you did, Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas, The Gonzo Papers, Hell's Angels, and a flurry of other hazy, crazy, shady adventures. In many ways, he pioneered the idea of the journalist as a celebrity and as a cult figure. He represented, presented, and diatribed on the counter culture as nobody really could. He cashed in on the counter-culture and redesigned the tweaked-out, shot-up, shot-off, whiskey-and-ether-inflated American dream of taking to the open road as a renegade without fear of death or retribution.

And he wrote about it.

But to be fair, I'm too young even now to really understand the trials and tribulations of Hunter S. Thompson. I only know what he meant to me. I only know what he represented to my unseen eyes, my naive adolescent dreams of wild adventures that shocked the system and cursed the machine. His death represents an enormous void to me, like the death of Andy Warhol did. He made pushing the limits of journalism an art, and in his wake he has left countless thousands who have failed vainly follwing in his path towards self-destruction without ever reaching the lofty prosaically gifted heights of his insane meanderings and jet-fueled attacks. He was one of a kind, you aren't going to be able to ever mint another coin that looks, or reads, exactly like this one.

It's going to take a while for me to process the meaning behind his suicide, and it will take a while for me to fully comprehend exactly the impact he left on me, my culture, and my life. The truth about it all will never come out, I can assure you of that. He wouldn't have had it any other way than to piss all of us off and leave us guessing as to his reasons for saying a final big fuck you to the world. But all I can tell you is this: if that's the way he wanted to go, so be it. Damn him for not being who I thought he was in the end, but love him for being everything that he was to me in his lifetime.