A Sad Day

It was about 7:15 am this morning, I had woken up just a few minutes before from a night that didn’t provide much rest in the classic sense of the word. It happens to me from time to time when I just don’t sleep well; this in spite of my current Sigur Ros fascination, which I have been playing regularly when I go to sleep.

I had just stepped into the kitchen to throw some waffles in the toaster when my home phone rang. “Who the hell is calling me at this hour?” I thought to myself as I made my way over to the phone. Whenever calls like that come early in the morning you have to brace yourself for the worst. It was Adrian and he stated off by simply asking if I heard what happened.

“No” I said in a garbled kind of morning voice that non-morning people get when they have to rise before double digits.
“Hunter Thompson killed himself.”
“What?!” I exclaimed. The interrogation was going to begin with “when did you hear about this?” Some how I was hoping it was just some sort of internet rumor that spread like wildfire, but he said that he heard it on the Today Show. I tend to watch Good Morning America, and they hadn’t said anything about it, or I simply missed it from earlier.

I walked over to my computer, and refreshed the New York Times page, and saw the headline in the sidebar. We spoke a few more minutes, and then I turned back to the computer to read the headline again: Hunter S. Thompson, 67, Author, Commits Suicide, from NY Times:

Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction writing he called "gonzo journalism," died yesterday in Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, said Mr. Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 67.

I will lift one of his phrases from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”