Today marks the third anniversary of Hunter S. Thompson’s death. I have included two of my favorite passages from Hunter’s writing. The shorter of the two Tracy had inscribed it in a photo album of our travels as a gift to me. Here’s to you hunter; Res Ipsa Loquitur.
"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run...but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. ...
"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."
-- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, 1972
"With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn't felt since my first months in Europe. A mixture of ignorance, and a loose, what-the-hell kind of confidence that comes when a man picks up and begins to move in a hard, straight line toward an unknown horizon."
--Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary (1998)
Here are a couple clips of an interview in the 60s (I believe) the first is a short piece and then the second is the continuation (can’t find the whole thing any more and it could be b/c at one point Hunter sniffs coke behind a
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBVvBL8c8Q0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r31hV_BPFf0&NR=1
And this one is a trailer of the film that I purchased based (Breakfast with Hunter) on Hunter’s interesting life style and it has a kind of ‘a day in the life…’ feel to it. There are tons of clips on youtube:
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