Splinters

Two other pertinent comments on HST's suicide: I agree with Kieron Gillen's idea that "him fucking around drunk and accidentally killing himself fits better with the image of The Man". But Warren Ellis, a shouting angry man who's also a doting family man, feels a shudder of horror at the notion of Hunter's wife or grandson discovering his body - and away from the romanticism of what seems to be HST's last homage to Hemingway, an escape from the body that was failing him, Ellis spells out the awful reality:

"Hunter Thompson waited until his young wife left the house, and then shot himself in the head with a pistol. He must have been quite aware that either she, or his son, there in the house with his grandson, would find his corpse. Dead bodies don't lay neatly. They splay, spastic and awful. There is often shit.

And the numbness, in part, comes from now finding that he was the kind of man that'd let his family find him like that. I have a personal loathing for suicide. It's stupid and selfish and ugly and cowardly and reeks of weakness.

Someone said to me yesterday about Thompson, "What a ripoff." And I kind of know what he meant. It's become convenient to write Thompson off as parody in recent years, and there's a case to be made that he peaked around the age of 36, with FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL '72. But he could still make me laugh, even in the most recent collection, HEY RUBE. " 'We have many cigarettes here,' I said suavely" still makes me smile. Writing had clearly become difficult, and a job, but every now and then you'd get a clear burst of the old anger, as in his support for Lisl Auman (google it). He was done with the big fireworks, but the devil was still in him. Probably his great work of the last twenty years was in Being Hunter Thompson. In performance.

But how you leave the stage is at least as important as how you enter it. And he left it alone in a kitchen with a .45, dying in -- and wouldn't it be nice if it were the last time these words were typed together? --

-- dying in fear, and loathing."

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