last sunday, thompson put a loaded .45 calibre handgun in his mouth and blew his brains out. he was 67 years old. i can't say the suicide surprised me terribly; i always kinda figured he'd die in an extremely violent way, whether from suicide, murder, OD or some car accident. what surprises me is that he lived this long in the first place; he himself mentioned that he didn't know how he made it through through the 70s. thompson existed in a self-contained universe of mind-boggling frenzies of violence, debauchery and conspicuous consumption of every mind-altering chemical imaginable. he lived every day of his weird life like it was his last, because with the way he lived, it very well could have been.

honestly, i think suicide was the best possible way he could have died; he decided that it was his time to go, and so he went. if he'd been murdered or killed accidentally, THAT would have been a tragedy; he lived a bizarre, delirious life of a hundred adventures, and was obviously satisfied enough with the time he'd spent wandering the earth to finally step into the one lone trip he had yet to experience; death.

i could never see him dying in a hospital bed with tubes stuffed in every orifice; he's the sort of guy who would put a gun to his head and snarl 'you can't fire me, you pigfuckers, i QUIT!' and that's exactly what he did.

to say he was complex is a devastating understatement. he was dangerously brilliant, and utterly deranged; a fascinatingly unfathomable human iceberg of which we only saw the tip. hunter s. thompson was a pioneer, an artist, a bizarre revolutionary blazing violent trails where sane decent people feared to tread.

thompson was a goddamned genius, and an icon to all freaks of society; so original and extreme in his nature that he was almost a cartoon character. he was a musician of words, bending and shaping them to his bizarre will in his lunatic accounts of his drug-fuelled escapades. his frenzied stories of paranoia, alarming depravity and indulgence in his own stream-of-consciousness psychotic rambling is what makes his writing so distinctively violent, strange and extraordinary, and unmistakably his.

he had no tolerance for the stupid or the simpering. he loathed politicians and government, and once threatened to run for president. he detested those in power and obeyed no one's rules. if he wanted to row out to a military boat at midnight while high on mushrooms so he could spray paint 'FUCK THE POPE' in bright red letters across the hull, then he would. he was a free-thinking maverick in a society that time and again tried and failed to contain his thunderously defiant spirit, and lived completely unchained from the ideals and laws he detested as society's beloved ID, the gleeful demon who did and said everything we wished we could but didn't.

i would tell you some of the stories that defined him for what he is, but there are far too many to choose from, and they are far better in  the words of the good doctor himself. honor his memory. read his books; they are the legacy he has left as his indelible mark on the human race, and he'll live on forever through them. his death is indeed a tragic loss of a great, disturbed mind, and the entire species is indeed somewhat less without him among our numbers. we are incredibly lucky that this strange creature of impulsion took the time to record the frenzied torrents of bewildering chaos erupting from the fascinatingly twisted hive of his own uniquely weird psyche.

hunter s. thompson was the ultimate bastard lovechild of the first amendment. he said, did, smoked, drank, shot and blew up whatever the fuck he felt like.
there has never been before and will never be again another human being anything like him.

in the words of the man himself, some may never live - but the crazy never die.
all of you about to drink your faces off, i'd like to ask you to raise your alcoholic beverages of choice in one final farewell salute to one of the greatest minds and freest spirits who has ever roamed this earth... to the doctor.