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**stockfire** · 02-20-2005, 11:57 PM

Yep. Shot himself Sunday evening. Sad.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=518102

barfo · 02-21-2005, 12:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hunter S. Thompson

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hunter S. Thompson

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...

And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting - on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

R.I.P.

barfo

**Oldmangrouch** · 02-21-2005, 12:18 AM

Bloody damn shame. I'm sorry his demons finally got to be more then he could bear.

hoojacks · 02-21-2005, 12:29 AM

;_________________________________________________ __________;

;____;

/cry

Target · 02-21-2005, 12:58 AM

Oh Duke...you did yourself?

Ever read Hell's Angels?

Thompson was responsible for much of the outlaw biker image. One culture that owes him a considerable amount.

His favorite bike:

Quote:

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid.... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler, and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Café Racer.

A friend from Aspen once told me that Thompson would shoot at the squirrels on his neighbors property who just happened to be the late John Denver. Thompson would sit on a couch and shoot out through an open door across the room. The only ones that could hear the shots were down range and that was John Denver. Aspen police did nothing about it so Denver took things into his own hands and stepped out on the porch and emptied a revolver at Thompson's house. There was some discussion about attempted murder but Denver was only charged with discharging a firearm in the Aspen city limits.

My friend left Aspen some time ago. He confirmed nearly every crazy rumor about Duke including his affinity for handguns and hallucinogenics. He had told me that Thompson would end up shooting himself or someone else. Looks like he was right.

You know that he was Warren Zevon's personal physician?

Quote:

The first exchange we ever had was about 10 years ago, when my daughter and I arrived in Aspen. I said, "Dr. Thompson, I've got the most terrible headache you can ever imagine. I don't know what to do at this altitude." He said, "Acid."

meru · 02-21-2005, 07:06 PM

Thompson's obituary of Richard Nixon:

Quote:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was ***** in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern--but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man--evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him--except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

.............
Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism--which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Now we may never know how he really felt.

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