review

The great Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is dead. He shot himself in the head with a .45 sitting at his desk in the kitchen of his fortified compound in the mountains of rural Colorado, with a glass of Chivas Regal and a typewriter by his side. His last wishes were that his ashes be shot out of a giant cannon with a breech shaped like his trademark two-thumbed Gonzo Fist. The pilgrimage to witness the mammoth cannon's first and last ferocious discharge will bring a certain type of closure for the fans, far better than all the official accounts put together. And he left a presidential library full of this stuff.

Hunter didn't buckle under pain or depression. According to abundant interviews with his friends and family, he wanted to put a cap on his career while he was in the top of his game. He wrote a column for ESPN2.com just a few days before his death, where he and Bill Murray explore the possibilities of "shotgun golf," a combination of golf and skeet shooting. Regardless of one's opinion of suicide, in this case you have to recognize the stoic, in the original sense of the word, grit of it. Hell, he didn't even wait for some kind of failure for his seppuku. Then, in a flash of gun powder and the roar of a colossal explosion, he's launched into the sky and eternity.

This type of closure won't be the dusty home-town paper eulogy that a well intentioned grandfather leaves his extended family unit. It was too violent for that. Nor will it be that of the suicidal release from depression that many who take their own beget.

The good doctor was a roaring high pitched screech from several non-western instruments vibrating dynamically across it's stanza of the grand symphony of life --- one whose tone and vigor never fade enough to dissipate properly, instead leaving a scar on the engines of the brain of every soul that hadn't gone out of the concert hall for refreshments or to take a piss when the orchestra reached that thunderous crescendo.

One is never wholly the same after Hunter is done with you. And for the same reason we're never done with Hunter. That long piercing note never diminishes. It doesn't even echo.

It remains --- the final brush stroke of a masterpiece.

Also in this section:
Cool Internet sites
Reuters coverage of Venezuela
Hunter S. Thompson's farewell