Gonzo Gunshot… Goodbye, Hunter S. Thompson

I’ve restrained myself from commenting on the “Jeff Gannon” story, or even the hilarity (and the fully expected hilarity) of the President’s naming Central American Right Wing Death Squad Coordinator and Iraq Governor General John Negroponte to the newly created “National Intelligence Director” (thank YOU 9-11 Families– will you EVER stop giving to this country? PLEASE will you stop, already, GOD DAMN YOU?) and other popular stories of blogdom these days. (Once in a while, we get into sequences I consider too depressing to even comment on. And we’re in such a spate.)
But in the midst of finding myself (and everyone else in my household) a tad under the weather, and the New York area itself under 5 inches of snow this morning… I saw indicia of this story via e-mails from my American Street colleagues, but tried not to think about it. Alas, I must now deal with the suicide of famed self-styled “Gonzo journalist”, author of the “Fear and Loathing” books and Rolling Stone writer Hunter S. Thompson, at 67.
Thompson did not chose a lifestyle that I would have (for example, no one would believe me re: my own non-existent illicit drug history… see what I mean?) he chose to inject himself into some of the leading stories of our culture (and injected… other things), and trashed the very concept of bogus journalistic objectivity, to come up with what he called “gonzo journalism”. This, of course, is what some would consider a paradigm of blogs: not 678 people commenting on the latest musings of Kos or Atrios, but people telling us about their own experiences, once in a while, experiences that other people might be interested in.
Well, Thompson did this in the big-time. (Plus, he got Johnny Depp to play him in the movie, which, I must say, is an aspiration that few of us will ever achieve).
Thompson was supposedly despondent from physical pain (he broke his leg doing a hairpin turn near a mini-bar in Hawaii) and had an artificial hip, and had those… demons… He went back to his celebrity enclave near Aspen and… offed himself.
Well, this is sad news. Anytime we lose a free spirit with as much life energy as Hunter S. Thompson, the world is just that much less alive… RIP HST.