Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide
 

From today's
NY Times. Truely sad.

Does anyone know why he did it?

Maybe he was in unbelievable pain. Psychic or physical or both. A lot of suicides are really angry, too. It's the best way to say "screw you" to someone. Not the smartest way, but certainly the most effective. :(

Right...

This time next week he'll be forgotten the same as just about everybody else.

doubt it.

Well, he certainly wasn't happy about the way the country was going.

I can't blame him for that, but killing yourself is a little extreme.

That's what I'm saying.

I fully respect a person's right to snuff themselves, but did he have a reason?

The man woke up, snorted coke and smoked a joint. He was famous for violent mood swings. Like a lot of brilliant people he danced all over the edge, particularly considering the impressive substance abuse it was a matter of time. If I was half as capable as Thompson of nailing shit perfectly so often and with such flair and so unable to do something major about it I'd have blown my brains out by now too.

Was he bipolar? His talent has Kinda that ol' bipolar ring to it. Anyone know?

With all the rich, powerful enemies he had I wouldn't be surprised if he was murdered. :eyebrow:

I think it was a delayed grief response to the death of one of his peacocks last summer. Apparently, a fox or something got it. My sister was up in Aspen for the summer and had rented a condo in the vicinity of Mr. Thompson's residence. She jogs every morning and one day she came across the remains of one of Mr. Thompson's birds on the jogging trail that passes near the edge of the former Mr. Thompson's digs. She told her son (my nephew) about it, and the kid went down there and grabbed the dead bird and plucked every feather he could that was still in reasonable shape. No doubt my nephew will soon be offering these priceless momentos for sale on e-bay!

Terribly sad. A great loss

"A drug person can learn to handle such things as seeing their dead grandmother crawling up their leg with a knife in her teeth. But no one should be asked to deal with this trip."

seems more fitting

Anybody come up with an excuse for him yet?

Well that didn't say anything.

Barring any evidence to the contrary it seems the paragon of paranoid gonzo reporting went out with a wimper instead of a bang.

I doubt that he thought to use a silencer ...

Just thought of a really important question ...

Is G.B. Trudeau going to kill off Uncle Duke?

Like I said over on the Reason comment blog, running down the halls of congress with a mini-nuke on his back would have been going out with a bang. Swallowing a chunk of lead is just weak.

found this on doonesbury.com

Thompson's ashes to be shot out of a cannon! :thumbsup:

Sounds like they are trying to Spin this a little to me.

Especially when...

"Family members had no hint that Thompson planned to take his own life, Brinkley said, and he did not leave a note. "There was no farewell salutation,' he said."

Here is an interesting article quoting his wife heavily about his last hours.

That article sounds...weird. It makes her sound weird.

that reminds me of a guy's response when his SO asks if "these jeans make my a*s look fat?" without missing a beat he responds, "no, the fat on your a*s makes you look fat"

all i'm saying is that maybe she really is a little nutty. or selfmedicated. or both.

Uh...well...she was married to Hunter S. Thompson. I 'spect she is. ;)

So what they're saying is that HT's life was like the final season of M.A.S.H?

I don't have much to say about that other than having watched my wife take care of her father in his final two years in Parkinsons, I can possibly understand the motivation for someone with that disease or something like terminal bone cancer to spare themselves the final months or weeks. I heard John Wayne thought about it However, by all accounts the man was in good health.

Saying to oneself "this is as good as my life is ever going to get, so it's all downhill from here" sounds like really bad reason for suicide.

I think Dennis Leary said it best -

BTW, I heard that John Wayne did contemplate suicide while he had cancer but either changed his mind or was prevented from doing so (I don't think a nurse has to be a genius to not let the terminal cancer patient have a gun).

One of the really nice rules of nature is that in most cases, really awful stuff is stuff that kills you. Almost everything else you can get over.

This whole 'killing oneself because this is as good as life gets' implies some kind of psychic ability to absolutely know what will be coming next. That's bullshit. Rodney Dangerfield was a paint salesman until he was 42 and didn't star in his first film until he was almost 60. Should he have picked up a gun and shot himself after his divorce at 41?

I appreciated everything that HT stood for, but if his suicide is his last piece of 'gonzo' performance art, then I'm not buying it.

Possibly your best post ever Rich. Thanks for saying it.

I agree, UT. Great post, rich. Equating a suicide as a gesture of strength and control? Somebody's living in DelusionLand. If he was surrounded by people like his wife maybe it DID seem like a good idea. Who knows what all they romanticized? Who was that author/actor that threw himself off the ferry in NYC a few years ago?

Bullshit...your telling me I can't leave if I don't like the movie? I don't think so...mind your own damn business. :p

IMO, one of the reasons that religions had to make suicide a sin was because they pushed the concept of heaven so hard. They told a large group of people who in many case had really hard, crappy lives that if they did what they were told that they would live in paradise when they died. Well, if you're living in Europe in the dark ages and really believe this, then of course the ones who believed this would ask themselves "what am I waiting for". This means that the organized religion would lose it's most gullible....er....devout followers without any benefit to the organization. It's one thing to have someone martyr themselves or die as a soldier or suicide bomber for the organization, but plain suicide does not offer any benefits back to the group while causing attrition among the most ardent supporters. Hence, martyrdom is applauded and suicide becomes a sin.

Too cynical?

Not too cynical, rich, but you don't have to be a peasant in the Dark Ages to want to kill yourself--today's world suffices just fine. I understand what you are saying and all but I am thinking less globally and more locally. The people close to a suicide are left with immeasurable guilt and grief. If children are involved, even more so. Suicides have a nasty habit of inspiring MORE suicides. Kids imitate parents, etc. Nasty business. You can leave the movie IF no one loves/knows/depends on you. So, Bruce, that leaves you out.

Ok, but I get all of your doodads.

No logical reason for me to feel guilty about someone offing themselves.
Grief, certainly. If they'd gotten run over by a bus I suppose then you have the bus to focus your anger at and I believe anger is one part of greiving. It's hard to direct your anger at the deceased so I guess that leaves yourself, in a suicide. But if you use your head for something besides a hatrack you'll so realize that's not rational.....unless you're an MBA. ;)

When you've been actively working to save the person, yes, there is a lot of guilt for the survivors.

Probably not, in most cases. However, the emotions which arise out of the death of a loved one or even just an acquaintance, by definition, have no basis in logic. The distance from the head to the heart and all that.

As far as suicide in the dark ages, I imagine that the conditions people lived under resolved the question for them more often than not.

Shouldn't be. Maybe if you hadn't tried but certainly not when "you've been actively working to save the person". :headshake

Don't confuse guilt and grief, it's an easy mistake to make. No, they are two different animals. ;)

And with sudden death, unexplained by anything more that "something evil" being commonplace, probably many suicides were undetected.
Body fished out of the river....accident?.....murder?....suicide?

I was just sent an article that says, and may have been in one of the articles here already, that he killed himself while he was on the phone with his wife and the kids were in the other room. Any takers?

When he gets back on I'll add the link to the article.

It's here. :)

I never fully understood Gonzo journalism after reading so many of his books. And yet The Economist (rather interesting that it took his death to better appreciate his life) provided a rather good summary of who Hunter Thompson was.

the above: What A Bunch O' Crap.

Lost my control in an ever-changing world---christ. What a load.

Toldya he looks just like plthijinx

I have to say I'm incredibly disappointed;the second I found out he took his own life,any respect I might have had for him went right out the window.

Good to see the economist gets it, you can see it in his writing over the years. If anything, I respect him more for having the balls to pull the trigger, least he ended things on his own terms.

No he didn't.

He ended up just being weak.

On his own terms would have been pissing off enough people that a lynch mob showed up at his door and having an audience for his parting shot.

I doubt he could have said things more bluntly than he did. He attracted controversy but I don't think he actively courted it, he was just himself.

Barring a convincing video auto-epitaph I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.

*shrugs* I don't claim to be exactly unbiased, Hunter is something little short of a role model where I'm concerned.

And on my side is a close uncle of mine killing himself with a pistol. *shrugs*

Like I said, I'm rig..., I mean yeah, let's agree to disagree. :)

i just heard hst killed himself today, Obviously their was a motive for it other then giving up, Hunter was himself and more of a role model then any person ive ever seen on tv, He was a dope fiend to the extents that his subcontious was ignorant, had he been a lesser man he would of been diagnoised with bipolar disease and given medication to make him better, but no peanuts man thats the 1 thing thats good for you, why not anything worth doing were going to be doing right

This thread was started about 7 months and low and behold you just got the word today and took his nick name? Why not just follow your star and do the world a favor?

HAHAHAHAH!
Plus, I bet your hero would kick yore ass for yer shity speling to!

jesus terrible vibrations in this place, was their no communication in this server or have we sunken to the level of dumb beasts, I have been following his work for about a year and heard he was dead a few months ago and heard he killed himself yesterday, gonzo is truly being true to urself with no regrets all the time of course trying to be someone else would be worthy of your manners, sorry i dont have what it takes to speak about all ur political problems on a level that makes me look smart cause i have always been stupid anyways, im just some kid with the soul of a teenage girl trapped inside some emotional nazi. i mean HST was a great journalist who was trying to do the world a favour so i would give your thanks if anything.

Um, yeah, makes sense to me...

What's an emotional nazi? A soup nazi won't give you soup, a grammar nazi is something you should probably hire, what does an emotional nazi do?

an emonazi? an emo nazi no few people understand the psycology of a monkey most people will immediatley pull over to the side this is wrong arouses contempt in ur heart, make the bastard chase you, he will follow.

I don't get it, what's this guy saying, I read and read but my eyes just glaze over. X_X

[butthead] hehe. he said "monkey" [/butthead]