complicated by thompson

So, as you've surely seen everywhere Hunter Stockton Thompson has died by his own hand. I ask myself if it could have ended any other way? Doubtful.

Here's the thing: This would have made me much sadder when I was in my late teens and early 20s. I was a huge Thompson fan, perhaps too enamoured of the lifestyle his early work memorializes (just ask McLaren), not to mention of the mindset that caught fire with exposure to gonzo in j-school, and, of course, he was a Kentuckian. Bred, anyway.

I got to The Rum Diaries about the same time I read Paul Perry's
Fear and Loathing: The Strange and Terrible Saga of Hunter S. Thompson. I remember the experience of reading it vividly. It was the summer after the fire at my parents' house and I spent half of it living in England and the other in the claustrophobic attic bedroom at my grandmother's house, soothed only by the roar of the window unit air conditioner. I read the biography late at night in that close room. I'd had no idea about the pattern of violence toward women. I suppose it shouldn't have come as a shock, but it did. I had lionized someone who was capable of that?

This was the first time I ever wrestled with how to balance what I felt about someone's work with what I felt about them as a person. It's something that still comes up from time to time. I have to say that the bloom on Thompson's rose died for me then and never really came back, a fact that's probably as due to the fact I'd read all his best work by then, and only the mediocre was left.

My lasting impression of Thompson is that he was the kind of person it's better to know of, than to know well.

(Johnny Depp can come fight me if he wants.)