Happy Birthday Hunter S.

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught."

-Hunter S. Thompson

I just thought that I'd post this awesome quote from the incomparable Hunter S. in honor of his birthday today. He joined the ranks of Ray Bradbury and Douglas Adams, writers that were gone far too soon. Damn you guys, you should have stuck around, I wasn't done *reading*.

my favorite:
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."

RIP Hunter S. Thompson...the master/creator of gonzo journalism!

"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." +1

"Cover a war in a place where you can't drink beer or talk to a woman?
Hell no!"

When I first saw Fear & Loathing I was convinced that it was fiction, it was impossible to believe that someone as over the top as Hunter S. could have ever been respected, or even successful, in the real world. Once I realized that Thompson had, if anything, downplayed some of the events, I was hooked. As a journalist he never spoke down to his readers, you either could keep up with what he was throwing out or you got left behind without apology. He said fuck you to the rapidly declining reading level of the average American and delivered his version of the absolute, dirty truth in such a way that it became beautiful. I'd put him on a level with Nietzsche if only for his ability to make me re-read a passage and say, "my God, that's exactly what I feel, why didn't I ever think to say it that way?" I would read his work and spend the next three days angry and envious that one human should possess so much talent.

Here's another of my favorites, “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”

I think we should throw together a guerilla HST Birthday Party!!! What do you say? Tonight, happy hour, at a bar that HST would have approved of?

I love the inscription in the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "man makes a beast of himself to ease the pain of being a man." I believe the quote is from Johnson's The Life of Dr. Boswell.

Worked on his political campaign for sheriff of Pitkin county (passed out flyers and nailed signs on trees). Named my son after him.