<\/p>\n
Take me on a trip upon your magic swirlin’ ship, -“Mr. Tambourine Man”, identified by Hunter as the only song he has requested to be played at his funeral<\/p>\n I was somewhere outside of Raleigh when the news began to take hold.<\/p>\n Not only dead, but suicide.\u00a0 Gunshot to the head.\u00a0 I tried to of mind-altering chemicals have.\u00a0 Unable to focus, bobbing in the I couldn’t get angry about it.\u00a0 I didn’t feel misled, misused, or But there was more, as always…<\/p>\n In the early days of my exposure to Hunter, I was madly infatuated.\u00a0 I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/em>, then the Rum Diary<\/em>, “What you have to know is that you never know what you’re going to get I had her put in a word to him anyway.\u00a0 I assumed that visiting a And I also learned how Hunter existed, what he had created for himself: I believe that this was a man who had probably accomplished everything Hunter knew this, and this may have been just one more factor in a
\nMy senses have been stripped,
\nMy hands can’t feel to grip,
\nMy toes too numb to step,
\nWait only for my boot heels
\nTo be wanderin’.
\nI’m ready to go anywhere,
\nI’m ready\u00a0 to fade
\nInto my own parade,
\nCast your dancing spell my way,
\nI promise to go under it<\/em>.<\/p>\n
\ndecipher it.\u00a0 At first I began to think maybe it was just one of
\nthose miserable nights that all people who are fluent in the language<\/p>\n
\nvast sea of Inner Thought, sometimes dipping below the surface,
\nsometimes rising back into coherency and Now.\u00a0 Past and present
\nslow dancing with each other in a lonely room.\u00a0 Drunk and baffled
\nor perhaps high and unmighty, solo-sitting in the kitchen and an idea,
\nperhaps planted long ago, begins to sprout then flower.<\/p>\n
\neven abandoned.\u00a0 I didn’t even feel that upset about the
\nblabbering word jockeys that were chatting up the Good Doctor with
\ndeadlines in their minds instead of true love in their hearts.\u00a0 It
\nwas another great study in cultural icon obituaries, where the words
\nmust be timely and the deceased himself must be reduced to a handful of
\nsentences about his life with no true understanding.\u00a0 And so, the
\nworld that never read much of Hunter or knew of him only as a relic got
\nall they needed to know: drug abuser, volatile writer, disdainer of
\nstandard journalism.\u00a0 Las Vegas, Woody Creek, Rolling Stone<\/em>.
\nThese things are slightly necessary, especially on a sub par holiday
\nwhen everyone is waking up late and searching for Pop-tarts and
\nsomething to occupy their time.<\/p>\n
\nthen all four volumes of the Gonzo papers.\u00a0 At that point in time,
\nhe was my consummate hero.\u00a0 I never doubted what he said, never
\nthought to give it a second thought as to whether anyone could actually
\nlive their life this way for any extended point in time without any
\ndamage.\u00a0 I was in college, working for the school’s programming
\nboard, when I came across (somehow) Hunter’s literary agent’s phone
\nnumber.\u00a0 I called immediately and she gave me some warning.<\/p>\n
\nwith Hunter.\u00a0 He’ll either be brilliant or so wasted that he’ll
\npiss everyone off, even his fans, and walk off early, demanding to be
\ntaken home.\u00a0 He hates crowds.”<\/p>\n
\nhistorical place like Kent State might be enough to tempt him away from
\nColorado.\u00a0 It wasn’t.\u00a0 And I learned my first lesson, that
\nHunter, like Kent State itself, lived in the now, and was eager to
\nshove the bitter past behind, no matter how monumental it seemed nor
\nhow much notoriety it garnered.<\/p>\n
\nnot just a persona that argued with his real personality like many
\nwriters, musicians, and artists face, but also an aura that was
\ndifficult to either nurture or kill.\u00a0 He was, at heart, a deeply
\nself-conscious man.\u00a0 You can glean this from his first novel
\n(which he abandoned before going to Puerto Rico), or in any video
\ninterview.\u00a0 Included on the Criterion Collection’s edition of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/em>
\nis a great documentary made by the BBC in the late 70s\/early 80s, and
\nthe man you see there is so radically different from the one Johnny
\nDepp plays, that the first time you see it you feel gypped, but then,
\nlater, and with more understanding, you realize that it’s easy to
\nreconcile the two.\u00a0 There are clips of the speech he gave after
\nlosing the election for sheriff in Aspen, and you can tell that, even
\nthough in his campaign he was essentially throwing the new Fringe in
\nthe faces of a stodgy society and daring the people to face him that he
\nstill expected to win.\u00a0 And the loss, as you can see on his face,
\ndeeply upset him.\u00a0 You can see a man who is afraid to face a crowd
\nof people outside the Chinese Theater in Los Angeles.\u00a0 You can see
\nthe reality of the morning after a long, crazy night when the cameras
\nenter his messy hotel room, a visual that struck me as extremely apt
\nand heartbreaking, a metaphor, yes, for his life in the public eye:
\nthere is the carnage, the remnants of joy and violence, but in the
\ncenter of it all sits a man in his underwear who is not entirely proud
\nof himself.<\/p>\n
\nhe wanted to a long time ago.\u00a0 And in between that point and now,
\nthere was only the wait and the brief glimpses of what true wisdom
\ncould be gained if anyone really bothered to go and find out, but I
\nthink the fact that he was tied so unexpectedly to Nixon, to the Acid
\nCraze, to Violence, that, after the wipeout and rearrangement of the
\npast few decades, no one really thought to consult him about new evils,
\nor new terrors…no one felt that he could shock anymore.\u00a0 But that
\nis not what people like me look for: mere shock and style.\u00a0 Hell’s Angels<\/em> and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72<\/em>
\nare two of the best history books ever written, and Hunter’s style
\nnever hindered the truth of his research, only that masses’
\naccessibility to his hard-won evidence.\u00a0 But this is what we do
\nwith our idols…we cast them in marble or copper and erect them,
\nanchored to one spot in history, and the only time we climb up inside
\nthe pedestal is when we feel like seeing the same familiar view from
\ninside out.<\/p>\n
\nlong-standing mood of dissatisfaction.\u00a0 In the end, I think he may
\nhave always wanted to go out tragically like F. Scott Fitzgerald, but
\nrather had to settle for the disconcerting method of Hemingway.
\nAnd those of us in the settling cloud, those of us with the
\nreverberation of a gun blast taunting our ears, can only look on in
\nFear at the body then let the first wave of tears start to swell
\nagainst an invisible, unknowable wall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,352],"tags":[68,353,140],"class_list":["post-2480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cass","category-gsarchive","tag-cassander","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-hst"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2480"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2822,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2480\/revisions\/2822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}