We have noted the passing of Hunter S. Thompson on this blog. It was hard not to love him in the way one can love Hemingway and his characters. This article in the Rocky Mountain News describes a rather bizarre ritual of passing.
The literary champ was sitting in his command post kitchen chair, a piece of blank paper in his favorite typewriter, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot through the mouth hours earlier.
But a small circle of family and friends gathered around with stories, as he wished, with glasses full of his favored elixir — Chivas Regal on ice.
"It was very loving. It was not a panic, or ugly, or freaky," Thompson's wife, Anita Thompson, said Thursday night in her first spoken comments since the icon's death Sunday. "It was just like Hunter wanted. He was in control here.
PoliPundit describes this as creepy, which it is, kinda. But it also seems to have an ancient elegance to it that Thompson would have appreciated.
The last paragraphs, though, are the best I have seen on what was fascinating and appalling about his life.
Hunter Thompson was huge on swimming for his exercise. But he was also known for his love of fine whiskey, and to put it far too mildly, for experimenting with most every intoxicant known to man.
"He loved his body, look what he did to it," Anita Thompson jokes. She then adds a line that maybe even she fails, on its face, to grasp the significance of: "He gave his body everything it wanted."
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