Hunter Thompson is dead at the age of 67. There are no real details yet, just that he died of, “an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and that his son Juan found him.

CNN is the only media outlet actually calling it a suicide so far. I kind of doubt that at this point. Not that Thompson wasn’t capable of killing himself...he seems to have been toying with the idea for years. It just doesn’t seem like the method he would choose to kill himself.

He wrote about driving off the edge of a cliff in a Jaguar convertible once. It was one of his recurring dreams. Not a nightmare. He seemed intrigued, but not frightened, by the image of plunging to his death. His usage of illicit substances is legendary. His apparent love of being in the spotlight well known. Mostly what the Mad Doctor of Woody Creek liked was fun though. For him to shoot himself alone in a room doesn’t seem to fit the mold very well.

He was a legendary gun nut. He loved them, wrote about them, bragged about them. A self-inflicted wound, the only real information we have as I write this, could mean that he shot himself on purpose. It could also mean that he ate a peyote button and decided that his .357 magnum was due for a cleaning. It doesn’t really matter.

The fact is that nobody had ever expected the man to live to 67 years of age. He didn’t even expect it himself and said so more than once. He was a wild boy. Not in the Peter Pan sense, he grew up and had a full knowledge of the implications. He refused to yield though. No half measures, no curling up in the fetal position allowed. It was 67 years of being fully involved in life.

Hunter packed a lot in to those 67 years, from childhood vandalism to a stint in the US Air Force to becoming perhaps the most important writer of his generation. Some will try to call him a journalist and others will claim his work was fiction. Others, those with no vision, will try to denigrate him as just another drug-addled misfit. They’ll be wrong though. Thompson was a writer. He invented something else, and most people still don’t get it. He never saw much point in trying to draw a line between reality and fiction, what he wanted to do was tell the Truth. He did exactly that with a flair that has yet to be matched.

He was a philosopher, really. It was an odd philosophy...violence as a comedic sport, drugs as a path to nothing more than getting high and seeing what happened, politics as a means to controlling his own environment, and sports as the only thing that mattered in the long run.That doesn’t change the fact that he was a philosopher though.

There is no doubt that Hunter enjoyed sports, especially football, immensely. He loved to watch sports, he loved to play sports, he loved to gamble on sports, and he loved to write about sports. When you read his writing though, whether it’s an ugly screed telling the Truth about Richard Nixon or one of his ESPN Page Two columns, it was apparent that Thompson saw sports as a metaphor for life.

Nothing is black and white in Thompson’s musings about sports, there is no won/lost column, it’s all about the point spread and the emotion and politics. It’s about ugly people doing great things and great people doing ugly things and how fine the line between the two is. Mostly though, it’s about the way things are and the way they could be.

Just like the rest of Thompson’s writing. That is Thompson’s real legacy. He might have been writing about being on mescaline or riding a motorcycle too fast or he might be going after a politician for being corrupt and Wrong. Hell, he might have been supporting a politician by telling embarrassing stories about him. That’s the thing....Thompson was incredibly and openly partisan, but he held his friends in as much contempt as his enemies. Hunter never lied to us. Not once. He didn’t always rely on facts, that wasn’t his gig. He always told the Truth.

Whether you agreed with that truth or not was immaterial to him. Thompson didn’t care. It might have been Savage Lucy or Nancy Reagan or Nixon or Clinton or George W. Bush, Thompson just wanted to tell the truth. That truth was not often, or even usually, good news.

Thompson never shied away from the ugly. He celebrated it as part of the human condition and railed against it for reasons of his own. He did his bit to make the world better. He managed that, and hit the big time in spite of himself. While doing that he never once denied, or even apologised for, his own ugly bits. He celebrated those too.

That takes a fair bit of courage for even an average person. For somebody with Hunter Thompson’s instincts and habits, it takes nerves of steel and sure knowledge that you’re Right. In 67 years of drugs and booze and violence as a sport Thompson got busted twice. Once he ended up in the military for a crime he always said he didn’t commit. The second time was a politically motivated raid on his house when George Bush Sr. was in charge. Thompson beat most of those charges because, when it came right down to it, he was Right.

He influenced a generation and more of writers. He introduced a new word to the lexicon to describe a new kind of journalism that he, along with a couple other guys, invented out of desperation, boredom, and a decided antipathy to those who thought they were in charge.

In the end Hunter S. Thompson did what he always said he would. He gnawed on their skulls. He did it by being right. He did it mostly peacefully and he did it with heart he made this world a better place and he got to be president of the Too Much Fun Club for a while longer than most

Those that would try to denigrate him are, in the parlance of Hunter Thompson, miscreants and fishwives.


Thanks for the truth, Doc. The world got a whole lot worse just now.

Ipse Res Loquiter.