I don't think Thompson wrote anything great since 1972. He certainly made history with his first three books though.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't have the right to end your life if you want. That is your own choice and under certain circumstances I might feel compelled to do the same thing. But don't mourn this event as a loss. He chose to leave his mortal existence behind. So you can either be happy for him that he has been relieved of whatever pain was ailing him, or mad as hell that he will no longer fill the void you described. I personally choose to be mad as hell that he chose to leave us emptier than we were.
You got that twisted, Playboy. I too do not feel bad for someone who has commited suicide...but for a different reason than you. I don't feel bad because I know they are out of whatever unbearable misery they were in. Usually when someone takes their own life, they were dealing w/ demons they could not live with. RIP Hunter Thompson...you will be remembered. "and with a quick heel toe"
I fellow CMRA racer posted this on the CMRA board and with his permission I am reposting it here: Well, ten years of half hearted attempts to contact him for a road trip to do a story on the Isle of Man later, it has truly been a weird trip. This is going to come as a real shock to some of my close friends, especially one that met and spent some time with him about 16 years ago; Some of the following content is probably not appropriate for every potential reader of posts here, and therefore, please refrain from reading if you know that you shouldn't be. I worked with a small oil company in Denver. The year was 1988. They had a VP who was the Colorado state chair of the republican party. He was from the cream of the lucky sperm club, and had a team of volunteers that worked for the party from the oil company. One of them was a production clerk that I worked with, a woman my age that had a major wild streak running right to her core, and of course, we ran together as close friends and motorcycle riding buddies. I had a BMW K bike back then and we made an excursion to Woody Creek Tavern one weekend just to look up Hunter. We took along the obligatory offering: an insider Republican T shirt from that VP’s (BTW, he became the chairman of the Points of Light Committee under W's dad) campaign insiders group and a bottle of Wild Turkey. Unfortunately, Hunter was off on a trip to San Fran (this was during his Mitchell Brothers period, if you were following that part of his life), so we missed him at his house, leaving the offerings on his front steps, along with a note expressing our continued monitoring of his activities "down at Bush central.....", just to increase his paranoia. Anyway, we ended up partying about half that Sat night at the Tavern with a bunch of pretty bizarre folks, and had a great time. Zip forward about 10 years, she returns in the middle of the night to Woody Creek, post closing time. She looks in the windows and can see several people at the bar, but the door is locked and they won't open it. She makes such a stir, claiming the immediate need to use the restroom, that they finally break down and let her in. As she traverses the bar, seeing Hunter drinking and playing with a folding knife while sitting at the bar, she bumps him hard as she passes, to get his attention, and then heads straight for the ladies room, knocking half of Hunter's drink out of the glass in his hand. Well, it takes about 5 secs with the door locked before Hunter is brandishing the knife outside the door, telling her to open up, or he is going to carve a hole through the door and come in and get her. She gives him about 15 minutes to simmer down, then she comes out and proceeds to saunter up to the bar and sit down next to him, immediately asking if his, uh, member is as small as his knife! Of course, he is ready to allow her to compare, but the bartender dissuades him from any comparative analysis, and the two of them proceed to have a couple of drinks and share stories. She was wearing a white dress shirt, and ends up telling him that she and a friend had planted the Republican shirt and bottle of Turkey on his doorstep years earlier, and he apparently remembers it. As she prepares to leave (after numerous attempts by HST to see if she is interested in a little action in the ladies room), she requests an autograph, and he obliges, by using a permanent red marker found behind the bar and signing right across her chest. While signing the shirt, he is also brandishing the knife at her throat, and when he is finished with the signature, he then uses the felt tip pen to make a dotted line right across her throat to mark the spot.....kinda like a "cut along this line" marker. She left, and the next time I saw her in Houston at a meeting, she took me aside, opened up her briefcase, and showed me the shirt.....the entire neckline was red from the dotted lines rubbing on to the material during her drive home, and the Doctor's signature in blazing red across the front, in perfect detail. When I recently went up to race the 600 in Hallet, I looked her up, and there on the wall, framed behind glass, was the infamous HST white blouse, just as I had remembered it from years earlier. Godspeed Hunter, you left a pretty high watermark.....the journalistic equivalent of a tsunami.
the way he lived his life is almost like he was trying to kill himself his whole life........now after the many years of drinking, drugging, fear and laothing he decided that he needed to take a more drastic approach........sad but not suprising! deffinately one of the better writters of america!
