Tuesday afternoon, in the middle of the conference, I finally get to look at a Times - the only source I have when I'm in hyper-focused conference mode - and I get floored by Thompson's suicide.Hunter S. Thompson, by all accounts, was a paranoid degenerate and deeply weird person who nonetheless had an immense effect on my writing and literary worldview. Even deeper, I felt a kinship with his outlook - that were he to have been born an orthodox Jewish redhead in 1972 he'd be me instead of being a godless coked-out gun-crazy superfreak. The converse is true, because I felt he was a brother under the skin, I was long afraid that there but for the grace of God go I. I feel the same way about Belushi.
Thompson was an outlaw, a unique voice, and one of the most important writers in the 20th Century. His concept of "gonzo" journalism is based on the phenomenological philosophy of the breakdown between subjectivity and objectivity - his most important contribution to literature, epistemology and that rarefied nexus between ethnography and journalism that the greatest non-fiction writers inhabit.
I was very worried that his suicide came from the inevitable depression inflicted on we who see too much - a depression that may have been fueled by his mythically enormous drug consumption. Thank God, sorta, it turns out that he gunned himself down for all-too-understandable reasons for someone of his Libertarian freaky-deaky worldview: he was getting too sick.
We didn't think he was going to die quietly. A profound egotism drove his appetites for narcotics, pornography, guns, explosives, the fourth amendment, Freedom and is the very basis of Gonzo Philosophy. It's that same egotism that drove him to go out in a blaze of glory.
The gifts of family and God that I was given have kept me away from that egotism and those appetites, but I still mourn the loss of a person who spoke to my mind with an eerie resonance.
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