Hunter

It was two years ago today that Hunter S. Thompson finally went over that edge, leaving this world a little less interesting.

Although on the one hand, Thompson conjured up visions of a world "where nobody laughs and everybody lies and the days drag by like dead animals and the nights are full of whores and junkies clawing at your windows and tax men jamming writs under your door and the screams of the doomed coming up through the air shaft along with white cockroaches and red stringworms full of AIDS and bursts of foul gas with no sunrise and the morning streets full of preachers begging for money and fondling themselves with gangs of fat young boys trailing after them," on the other hand, he was just "a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow---to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested."

He gave a lecture once at Boston University a long time ago when I was a student there. I don't remember a thing he said, but what impressed me was that before he spoke, he emptied over a dozen pills and capsules of various pharmaceuticals from his many jacket pockets and dumped them all into a plastic cup. He then produced a bottle of Jack Daniels, and throughout the lecture would wash down a couple of the pills at a time by chugging on the Jack straight from the bottle, his hands gripping the bottleneck.

I had always wished that he could have collaborated on a work with the late, great William S. Burroughs - now that would have been worth a read.

R.I.P. Hunter, you always were a bad influence.

Let the good times roll.