“They fuck you up, your mum and dad/ They may not mean to, but they do” - Phillip Larkin
I’m naive to think anybody would be interested in reading a short biography about a twenty something aimless college student. Yet, this is for me. Not my reader.
21 years ago in Akron Children’s Hospital your humble author was born into an America ruled by Ronald Reagan and a planet with 5 billion residents. I like to think most of them were morning the death of Andy Warhol. I was born, immediately rushed to an ICU and that’s where I lived the first several weeks of my life. My mother suffered the same fate. Before I achieved self-awareness my body was invaded, raped and permanently scared. It was all in the name of Hippocrates. I’m grateful.
We all are left with only a handful of memories of childhood. We all wish we can remember only the good times; birthdays, ballgames and parades on main street. Unfortunately, we can’t always remember what we want. The residue is all that remains, a smell or a sound or a particular phrase.
Childhood for me was a mix of good and bad, as is typical. Strawberry picking and physical abuse appear in my head side by side, neither holds more clout than the other. They are pasted in a collage fashioned from the smell of cut grass and the sobering reality of a bee sting.
One of my favorite memories as a child is, interestingly enough, of the humidifier my mother used to set in my room when I was sick. I was a sickly child in general. The steroids and “breathing treatments” given to me kept my body ticking as my mind wandered into fantasy. The humidifier represented, to me at the time, an undying protector found in my mother. My coughing would worsen throughout the night and she would feed me cough syrup every 3 hours. I pretended to hate it. Eventually, mom would stop coming with cough syrup. I had to sneak downstairs and get it myself.
At a young age I discovered my unrelenting curiosity and my knack for mischief. I didn’t keep either a secret; I flushed toilets when people were in showers, I put soap into dinner. I did it all. I quickly became resourceful. Dad would sleep on the couch, mom would be working and I would be climbing on kitchen drawers to reach the candy jar. I went largely unnoticed. Positive reinforcement was rare, corporal punishment was expected in my house.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Monday, May 19, 2008
Part I- Confession
The following few essays are written in an attempt to reveal who I really am through writing. It will share my personal history, reflections, stories and attitudes as honestly as possible.
Part 1-
My room is dimly lit in warm yellow light. An American flag hangs behind me, a peace sign replaces 50 white stars, a nod to my love of freedom and harmony.
This is where I write. My desk is exploding with post-it note shrapnel screaming to-do lists and meaningless words like mastodon and yowl. The to-do lists are always titled tomorrow. A creaking floor above me whispers lover's secrets almost always less than 10 minutes at a time. A blowish wind outside tugs in a new season every three months and I've only just started to notice. My speakers thump with classic rock staples and undiscovered nobodies begging karma to give them another chance. This is my existence in a nut-shell. A gross generalization of my life. This is the result of a diet of Adderol and Miller Lite and Captain Morgan, ingested with moderation.
I've lived for nearly 21 years. Well, I haven't lived most of those. I must admit. This is my honest confession. Observation. I have observed my life for the past 21 years in silence. I've taken in the smells, feelings, emotions, sounds and images and analyzed ever tiny detail and spit out my personal take on things as fact. What I boast in outer confidence I lake in inner conviction. I am the product of miles of road covered with glass gravel and the inability to fit into my own shoes. But, I'm always better because of my scars, or I would like to think.
The following few essays are written in an attempt to reveal who I really am through writing. It will share my personal history, reflections, stories and attitudes as honestly as possible.
Part 1-
My room is dimly lit in warm yellow light. An American flag hangs behind me, a peace sign replaces 50 white stars, a nod to my love of freedom and harmony.
This is where I write. My desk is exploding with post-it note shrapnel screaming to-do lists and meaningless words like mastodon and yowl. The to-do lists are always titled tomorrow. A creaking floor above me whispers lover's secrets almost always less than 10 minutes at a time. A blowish wind outside tugs in a new season every three months and I've only just started to notice. My speakers thump with classic rock staples and undiscovered nobodies begging karma to give them another chance. This is my existence in a nut-shell. A gross generalization of my life. This is the result of a diet of Adderol and Miller Lite and Captain Morgan, ingested with moderation.
I've lived for nearly 21 years. Well, I haven't lived most of those. I must admit. This is my honest confession. Observation. I have observed my life for the past 21 years in silence. I've taken in the smells, feelings, emotions, sounds and images and analyzed ever tiny detail and spit out my personal take on things as fact. What I boast in outer confidence I lake in inner conviction. I am the product of miles of road covered with glass gravel and the inability to fit into my own shoes. But, I'm always better because of my scars, or I would like to think.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
A Wicked Life
A Twisted Style
An Epic written by:
West Gibson
To write about Hunter S. Thompson is to invite a world of wild circus madness into my notebook. I feel I need to make myself two, maybe three rum and cokes and take an occasional drag from a tightly rolled marijuana cigarette. I need to do the Good Doctor justice, inebriation is of the utmost importance.
My mission is to bring to you a sense of what made the writings of Hunter S. Thompson so damn different, so unique. It’s a dangerous task yes, it’s absolutely unholy. I am risking falling into a chasm of drug culture and slacker related ramblings about how Thompson liberates my soul, and how he truly lived the life every angst filled teenager dreams of. It is a dangerous game to be playing. But, I’m “buying the ticket and taking the ride”, as it were. Raul Duke is driving me to the knife’s point of the horizon in a red convertible at 104 miles an hour. All I can do to keep my sanity is hold on to what I know will never fade, my constant desire for alcohol induced orgies and the legend of America’s most notorious tall tale, Hunter S. Thompson.
For days, I’ve been contemplating how to begin this epic I call, “A Wicked Life, A Twisted Style” My desk is covered with post-it notes, one reads, “You’re over thinking it!” another, “Jesus man, start the damn paper”. Unfortunately, the best idea I have is starting from where Hunter’s own epic began; Louisville, Kentucky on July 18th in the year 1937. Hunter S. Thompson was the first son of Jack Robert, a veteran of the First World War, and Virginia Davidson Ray, a secretary and librarian. Not surprisingly, Hunter was a bit different from the rest of the children in his neighborhood. In Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, his wife of seventeen years, Sandy Thompson writes, “He was angry. He was charming. He was a lot of trouble.” (3) Many who knew Hunter personally during his childhood echo her account of him. His taste for theatricality and danger circulated around Louisville. He created a reputation for himself as a maverick. People flocked to him because of his natural charm and the promise of an exciting, yet usually dangerous and criminal experience.
In July of 1952, Hunter’s father passed away, leaving his mother to raise Hunter and his two younger brothers, Davison and James. Virginia Ray turned to drinking and so did Hunter. Hunter’s harmless pranks and theatrics graduated to full-blown criminal activity. Amazingly, Hunter charmed the system time and time again, only getting probation. In high school, Hunter socialized with the sons and daughters of Louisville’s elite. His networking skills allowed him to take the law with a grain of salt. He knew he was invincible. He knew he could talk his way out of anything. The Athenaum, a prestigious literary club in Louisville accepted Hunter as a member. Members of the Athenaum either loved Hunter or hated him. They believed his antics reflected poorly upon the club. After typing Fitzgerald and Hemmingway novels word by word , as he said, “ to get the feel of how it is to write those words”, Hunter wrote a third-place winning essay titled Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation, it began, “Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future!”.
Hunter’s own future would be in jeopardy. A wild night of drinking and mischief ended in the arrest of Hunter and three of his closest friends. The other boys dodged criminal charges thanks to their influential parents. However, Hunter was on probation and his middle class background couldn’t save him from ninety days in jail. Hunter didn’t graduate from high school instead, he bargained with the judge to shorten his sentence, in return, Hunter would join the United States Air Force. His military career then ended in an early dismissal. Apparently, the Air Force didn’t appreciate a mock press-release Hunter published on base.
The following decedent years of Hunter’s life resulted in: many jobs lost because of his distaste for authority and his unpredictable behavior, two wives, a son named Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, a countless number of personal assistants, a run for Sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, a thirty-year relationship with Rolling Stone Magazine, a rocky relationship with his editors, hundreds of published articles, thousands of 3am phone calls, and a career that produced essays, letters, novels and non-fiction that all boast his unique style and character.
Wow, I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. My eyes are bleeding ink, my fingers are swollen, and my bottle of rum is half-empty. I can see in the reflection of my computer screen a clock that reads 1am. I’m tired, but this silliness must continue. Jumping ship would be a selfish act of ignorance. The momentum must build into a fiery comet of ugly metaphors and tasteless language. I must continue.
When I first picked up The Rum Diary, I expected to be dazzled by the Hunter Thompson I knew from his Fear and Loathing days. I wanted to be thrown into a disturbing and frightening drug filled adventure peppered with expletives, fantastic displays of weirdness, and the occasional whiff of the unbelievable. What I found was the developing seed of Gonzo Journalism. The Rum Diary is Hunter’s first attempt at taking his personal experience and knitting it into an interesting narrative that engages the reader with sharp tongue and wacky sense of humor. Although it lacks some of the spunk of his later works, The Rum Diary is a great place to begin looking at what makes Hunter S. Thompson tick.
Paul Kemp is Hunter’s main character in the book. Paul moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico to work for a small newspaper as a journalist. During his stay, Paul surrounds himself with a cast of characters hell bent on self-destruction. The book lacks any sort of stable plot, it’s a fact. But, what The Rum Diary lacks in plot it makes up for in the development of very personal, very realistic characters. It also gives me a sense of continuous sunshine, I feel as if I’m sitting on the beach right beside Paul Kemp drinking rum when I turn the pages of Hunter’s novel.
Hunter’s style stems from injecting himself into his stories. Paul Kemp is a perfect example. Hunter moved to San Juan when he was 22 years old to work for a small newspaper. The Rum Diary is a fictionalization of his experience. Writing fiction allows Hunter to play with realism and fantasy in ways seemingly impossible with any other genre. In one passage, after Paul Kemp steps onto Puerto Rican soil, he reflects:
“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 on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.”(11)
Paul Kemp is a representation of Hunter S. Thompson living in Puerto Rico. I’m willing to bet the other characters in The Rum Diary are dramatizations of Hunter’s friends and coworkers. Hunter pulls pieces of those around him and constructs characters that feel as if they exist some where other than inside the writing. Making the writing edgy and theatrical is what’s important to Hunter. Adding quirks and flaws to his characters is key. But, The Rum Diary reads like the wind blows in Puerto Rico, lazily with overtones of relaxation and bliss. Hunter has not yet become the dark and twisted theatrical writer so many of us know.
The theatricality of The Rum Diary is mild in comparison to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If you want to experience a disgusting drug binge that puts anything written since to absolute shame, read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the book is popular in many smoked filled living rooms only because of the drug related material. Anybody who has ever taken part in anything remotely related to drug use has read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I promise, the only thing those druggies can say about it is, “Dude, that book is freaking sweet. I wish I could do that many drugs and survive.”
The really amazing thing about Fear and Loathing is, as a reader, I don’t know whether or not to believe it. Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? What the hell do I make of it? Where does reality stop and fiction begin? Thompson has no problem letting us in on his wild journey to find the American dream, but he never gives us any hints to whether or not his journey really happened.. He starts his travels by listing his drugs of choice like a Greek epic:
“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”(4)
From this point on, the story becomes a drug-filled date with indescribable amounts of sin and treachery that pours from the finger tips of the Good Doctor. The largest difference between the Paul Kemp of The Rum Diary and the Raul Duke, Hunter’s character in Fear and Loathing, is the pure excess in which Duke participates. Hunter transformed from a humble journalist in Puerto Rico to a drug riddled sensation riding the success of The Hells Angels. “The Vegas Book”, as Hunter calls it, opened the door for true Gonzo Journalism. Once again Hunter has managed to capture a time in place in his history. In Fear and Loathing he has splattered his history with paints of violence, drugs and booze to a level that even Timothy Leary couldn’t comprehend. In a letter to his editor, Jann Wenner, Hunter wrote, “we are dealing with a classic of irresponsible gibberish.”
What the language did in The Rum Diary was to relax me with long sentences, and an almost “swaying in the breeze” type structure. In Fear and Loathing, thanks to Hunter’s use of outrageous situations and sentences that change length from tiny to lengthy full page lists, I become almost neurotic. Fear and Loathing gives me this feeling of impending doom. It’s a great read, but it is capable of giving me nightmares of hellish vibrancy.
Finally, I have come to the final stage of Hunter’s transformation. Early Hunter was a modest writer with a wild streak between the lines. Gonzo Hunter was a fame driven monster of a man capable of taking enormous amounts of anything into his body without the slightest side affect. The Hunter of the late 80’s was a cynical man, always questioning the establishment. His writing became his personal commentary on current events.
Generation of Swine is a collection of essays from the mid to late 80’s. Most of the writing is political in nature but Hunter also touches on the corpulent glamour and the infestation of corruption in American society. It is some of Hunter’s most honest and cerebral writing.
Generation of Swine showcases a Hunter S. Thompson who has been torn apart by years of substance abuse but whose mind is as sharp as ever. He still sprinkles his writing with words like, “hideous” and phrases like, “rife with madness” but they are more calculated. Now, the real Hunter is writing, not his persona Raul Duke. Throughout the essays Hunter takes heavy jabs at George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan. However, in his last essay in the collection titled A New Dumb, he comments on the Democratic party failing miserably in the election. He writes, “Sixteen years is plenty of time for even dumb people to learn just about anything they need to”(310). Hunter keeps his writing terribly honest.
What struck me most about Generation of Swine was the author’s note. He mentions trying most of his life to get away from journalism but somehow, he always returns to his typewriter. He calls journalism, “a habit worse than heroine”. Only Hunter S. Thompson could say something like that with the sincerity of a pastor. At last, the single phrase of Hunter Thompson’s in any of his writing that I believe comes closest to explaining his unique gift is from Generation of Swine. He says in the author’s note, “I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.” Hunter S. Thompson opened one of his final books with the single phrase that encompasses everything that he had worked for his entire life. That phrase still gives me chills to this day.
My rum is gone. It has been gone for two hours and my hangover is taking hold. For the past several sentences -- my words are being typed with a single finger. I seem to have lost my other nine digits someplace between exhaustion and insomnia. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold myself up in this cheap ass computer chair. I’m wearing sunglasses now, the screen has gotten to me. I can no longer go on with this sorry excuse of an essay. It must end.
The Good Doctor’s style changed over time from clever and sharp tongued to wild and dangerous to finally, cynical and calculated. In every one of Hunter’s books, Hunter is the star. No wonder Hunter lived the way he did. Without constant material coming in through his dramatic antics, Hunter S. Thompson would have been starved for material. But, he never fails to drop a little wisdom between the lines. While reading Thompson I find myself wondering, why didn’t this man ever try his hand at philosophy? In closing, I would like to leave you with a quote from Johnny Depp in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, “Hunter was a genius who revolutionized writing in the same way that Marlon Brando did with acting, as significant, essential, and valuable as Dylan, Kerouac, and the Stones.” Mission Accomplished.
My mission is to bring to you a sense of what made the writings of Hunter S. Thompson so damn different, so unique. It’s a dangerous task yes, it’s absolutely unholy. I am risking falling into a chasm of drug culture and slacker related ramblings about how Thompson liberates my soul, and how he truly lived the life every angst filled teenager dreams of. It is a dangerous game to be playing. But, I’m “buying the ticket and taking the ride”, as it were. Raul Duke is driving me to the knife’s point of the horizon in a red convertible at 104 miles an hour. All I can do to keep my sanity is hold on to what I know will never fade, my constant desire for alcohol induced orgies and the legend of America’s most notorious tall tale, Hunter S. Thompson.
For days, I’ve been contemplating how to begin this epic I call, “A Wicked Life, A Twisted Style” My desk is covered with post-it notes, one reads, “You’re over thinking it!” another, “Jesus man, start the damn paper”. Unfortunately, the best idea I have is starting from where Hunter’s own epic began; Louisville, Kentucky on July 18th in the year 1937. Hunter S. Thompson was the first son of Jack Robert, a veteran of the First World War, and Virginia Davidson Ray, a secretary and librarian. Not surprisingly, Hunter was a bit different from the rest of the children in his neighborhood. In Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, his wife of seventeen years, Sandy Thompson writes, “He was angry. He was charming. He was a lot of trouble.” (3) Many who knew Hunter personally during his childhood echo her account of him. His taste for theatricality and danger circulated around Louisville. He created a reputation for himself as a maverick. People flocked to him because of his natural charm and the promise of an exciting, yet usually dangerous and criminal experience.
In July of 1952, Hunter’s father passed away, leaving his mother to raise Hunter and his two younger brothers, Davison and James. Virginia Ray turned to drinking and so did Hunter. Hunter’s harmless pranks and theatrics graduated to full-blown criminal activity. Amazingly, Hunter charmed the system time and time again, only getting probation. In high school, Hunter socialized with the sons and daughters of Louisville’s elite. His networking skills allowed him to take the law with a grain of salt. He knew he was invincible. He knew he could talk his way out of anything. The Athenaum, a prestigious literary club in Louisville accepted Hunter as a member. Members of the Athenaum either loved Hunter or hated him. They believed his antics reflected poorly upon the club. After typing Fitzgerald and Hemmingway novels word by word , as he said, “ to get the feel of how it is to write those words”, Hunter wrote a third-place winning essay titled Open Letter to the Youth of Our Nation, it began, “Young people of America, awake from your slumber of indolence and harken to the call of the future!”.
Hunter’s own future would be in jeopardy. A wild night of drinking and mischief ended in the arrest of Hunter and three of his closest friends. The other boys dodged criminal charges thanks to their influential parents. However, Hunter was on probation and his middle class background couldn’t save him from ninety days in jail. Hunter didn’t graduate from high school instead, he bargained with the judge to shorten his sentence, in return, Hunter would join the United States Air Force. His military career then ended in an early dismissal. Apparently, the Air Force didn’t appreciate a mock press-release Hunter published on base.
The following decedent years of Hunter’s life resulted in: many jobs lost because of his distaste for authority and his unpredictable behavior, two wives, a son named Juan Fitzgerald Thompson, a countless number of personal assistants, a run for Sheriff in Aspen, Colorado, a thirty-year relationship with Rolling Stone Magazine, a rocky relationship with his editors, hundreds of published articles, thousands of 3am phone calls, and a career that produced essays, letters, novels and non-fiction that all boast his unique style and character.
Wow, I can’t believe I’ve made it this far. My eyes are bleeding ink, my fingers are swollen, and my bottle of rum is half-empty. I can see in the reflection of my computer screen a clock that reads 1am. I’m tired, but this silliness must continue. Jumping ship would be a selfish act of ignorance. The momentum must build into a fiery comet of ugly metaphors and tasteless language. I must continue.
When I first picked up The Rum Diary, I expected to be dazzled by the Hunter Thompson I knew from his Fear and Loathing days. I wanted to be thrown into a disturbing and frightening drug filled adventure peppered with expletives, fantastic displays of weirdness, and the occasional whiff of the unbelievable. What I found was the developing seed of Gonzo Journalism. The Rum Diary is Hunter’s first attempt at taking his personal experience and knitting it into an interesting narrative that engages the reader with sharp tongue and wacky sense of humor. Although it lacks some of the spunk of his later works, The Rum Diary is a great place to begin looking at what makes Hunter S. Thompson tick.
Paul Kemp is Hunter’s main character in the book. Paul moves to San Juan, Puerto Rico to work for a small newspaper as a journalist. During his stay, Paul surrounds himself with a cast of characters hell bent on self-destruction. The book lacks any sort of stable plot, it’s a fact. But, what The Rum Diary lacks in plot it makes up for in the development of very personal, very realistic characters. It also gives me a sense of continuous sunshine, I feel as if I’m sitting on the beach right beside Paul Kemp drinking rum when I turn the pages of Hunter’s novel.
Hunter’s style stems from injecting himself into his stories. Paul Kemp is a perfect example. Hunter moved to San Juan when he was 22 years old to work for a small newspaper. The Rum Diary is a fictionalization of his experience. Writing fiction allows Hunter to play with realism and fantasy in ways seemingly impossible with any other genre. In one passage, after Paul Kemp steps onto Puerto Rican soil, he reflects:
“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 on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line toward an unknown horizon.”(11)
Paul Kemp is a representation of Hunter S. Thompson living in Puerto Rico. I’m willing to bet the other characters in The Rum Diary are dramatizations of Hunter’s friends and coworkers. Hunter pulls pieces of those around him and constructs characters that feel as if they exist some where other than inside the writing. Making the writing edgy and theatrical is what’s important to Hunter. Adding quirks and flaws to his characters is key. But, The Rum Diary reads like the wind blows in Puerto Rico, lazily with overtones of relaxation and bliss. Hunter has not yet become the dark and twisted theatrical writer so many of us know.
The theatricality of The Rum Diary is mild in comparison to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. If you want to experience a disgusting drug binge that puts anything written since to absolute shame, read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the book is popular in many smoked filled living rooms only because of the drug related material. Anybody who has ever taken part in anything remotely related to drug use has read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and I promise, the only thing those druggies can say about it is, “Dude, that book is freaking sweet. I wish I could do that many drugs and survive.”
The really amazing thing about Fear and Loathing is, as a reader, I don’t know whether or not to believe it. Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? What the hell do I make of it? Where does reality stop and fiction begin? Thompson has no problem letting us in on his wild journey to find the American dream, but he never gives us any hints to whether or not his journey really happened.. He starts his travels by listing his drugs of choice like a Greek epic:
“We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls.”(4)
From this point on, the story becomes a drug-filled date with indescribable amounts of sin and treachery that pours from the finger tips of the Good Doctor. The largest difference between the Paul Kemp of The Rum Diary and the Raul Duke, Hunter’s character in Fear and Loathing, is the pure excess in which Duke participates. Hunter transformed from a humble journalist in Puerto Rico to a drug riddled sensation riding the success of The Hells Angels. “The Vegas Book”, as Hunter calls it, opened the door for true Gonzo Journalism. Once again Hunter has managed to capture a time in place in his history. In Fear and Loathing he has splattered his history with paints of violence, drugs and booze to a level that even Timothy Leary couldn’t comprehend. In a letter to his editor, Jann Wenner, Hunter wrote, “we are dealing with a classic of irresponsible gibberish.”
What the language did in The Rum Diary was to relax me with long sentences, and an almost “swaying in the breeze” type structure. In Fear and Loathing, thanks to Hunter’s use of outrageous situations and sentences that change length from tiny to lengthy full page lists, I become almost neurotic. Fear and Loathing gives me this feeling of impending doom. It’s a great read, but it is capable of giving me nightmares of hellish vibrancy.
Finally, I have come to the final stage of Hunter’s transformation. Early Hunter was a modest writer with a wild streak between the lines. Gonzo Hunter was a fame driven monster of a man capable of taking enormous amounts of anything into his body without the slightest side affect. The Hunter of the late 80’s was a cynical man, always questioning the establishment. His writing became his personal commentary on current events.
Generation of Swine is a collection of essays from the mid to late 80’s. Most of the writing is political in nature but Hunter also touches on the corpulent glamour and the infestation of corruption in American society. It is some of Hunter’s most honest and cerebral writing.
Generation of Swine showcases a Hunter S. Thompson who has been torn apart by years of substance abuse but whose mind is as sharp as ever. He still sprinkles his writing with words like, “hideous” and phrases like, “rife with madness” but they are more calculated. Now, the real Hunter is writing, not his persona Raul Duke. Throughout the essays Hunter takes heavy jabs at George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan. However, in his last essay in the collection titled A New Dumb, he comments on the Democratic party failing miserably in the election. He writes, “Sixteen years is plenty of time for even dumb people to learn just about anything they need to”(310). Hunter keeps his writing terribly honest.
What struck me most about Generation of Swine was the author’s note. He mentions trying most of his life to get away from journalism but somehow, he always returns to his typewriter. He calls journalism, “a habit worse than heroine”. Only Hunter S. Thompson could say something like that with the sincerity of a pastor. At last, the single phrase of Hunter Thompson’s in any of his writing that I believe comes closest to explaining his unique gift is from Generation of Swine. He says in the author’s note, “I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music.” Hunter S. Thompson opened one of his final books with the single phrase that encompasses everything that he had worked for his entire life. That phrase still gives me chills to this day.
My rum is gone. It has been gone for two hours and my hangover is taking hold. For the past several sentences -- my words are being typed with a single finger. I seem to have lost my other nine digits someplace between exhaustion and insomnia. I’m not sure how much longer I can hold myself up in this cheap ass computer chair. I’m wearing sunglasses now, the screen has gotten to me. I can no longer go on with this sorry excuse of an essay. It must end.
The Good Doctor’s style changed over time from clever and sharp tongued to wild and dangerous to finally, cynical and calculated. In every one of Hunter’s books, Hunter is the star. No wonder Hunter lived the way he did. Without constant material coming in through his dramatic antics, Hunter S. Thompson would have been starved for material. But, he never fails to drop a little wisdom between the lines. While reading Thompson I find myself wondering, why didn’t this man ever try his hand at philosophy? In closing, I would like to leave you with a quote from Johnny Depp in Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, “Hunter was a genius who revolutionized writing in the same way that Marlon Brando did with acting, as significant, essential, and valuable as Dylan, Kerouac, and the Stones.” Mission Accomplished.
Works Cited
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas. New York: Random House, 1971.
Thompson, Hunter S. Generation of Swine. New York: Random House, 1988.
Thompson, Hunter S. The Rum Diary. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1998.
Wenner, Jann S., and Corey Seymour, eds. Gonzo: the Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2007.
Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Last Vegas. New York: Random House, 1971.
Thompson, Hunter S. Generation of Swine. New York: Random House, 1988.
Thompson, Hunter S. The Rum Diary. New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1998.
Wenner, Jann S., and Corey Seymour, eds. Gonzo: the Life of Hunter S. Thompson. New York: Little Brown and Company, 2007.
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