Feb 20
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
Hunter S. Thompson put a cap in his own ass yesterday.
Depending on how much of his work you have absorbed, and how you interpret it, this is either a fitting end or not. I haven’t read much, so I’m not going to try and interpret right now. Instead, I’d like to share my Thompson story with you.
The year was 2001, the impact of 9/11 was just starting to sink in, and it was really goddamn cold and snowy. It was one of those days when the weather was so impressively shitty that lights just didn’t seem to be able to cut through the perpetual darkness. I was a student in Mr. West’s Engl 102 class, a class that had been weeded down to the very dedicated and the very fucked by the dual facts that West was a real hard-ass to those who obviously didn’t try, which was most of the school, and that it was at 8 goddamn AM. (more)
Having slid to school on my poor bald tires and then slushed my way into the classroom on my equally bald boots, I was being quiet. We were actually all being abnormally quiet, all feeling very melancholy, trying to figure out what the dick went wrong with our world, but in the short term we all just wanted to know why the fuck the dark was seeping in through the windows even though the all the lights were on.
My English teacher, normally known for his ability to be fucking awake and coherent at 8AM, wandered into the classroom clutching his coffee cup like a long-lost child, and sloughed into his chair, mirroring the feeling of every single one of us. Looking around to confirm that yes, we were all just as fucked as he was, he began to recite, completely from memory:
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive. . . .” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.”
Having been hammered down over the years by Twin Falls right-wing society, that first semester at CSI was a colossal shock for me - to find out that there was a place in Twin that actually celebrated diversity and development of one’s intellect, but no single moment crystallized what I was feeling better than that few seconds after “The poor bastard will see them soon enough.”
Catch ya soon, Hunter, I’ll bring the beer. God knows we’re gonna need it.