All Write, Already!

I'm not a hippie. I despise hippies. I think the only thing that hippies are useful for are for when cops need to make their billy clubs smell of reefer and patchouli.

But I fucking loved Hunter Thompson. Irrespective of the people who followed in his wake, each a paler imitation of the last, Hunter was the incarnation of some lofty ideals: that the right of a free people to get all drugged up and have a good time should not be abridged, that it's always after 5:00 PM somewhere, that the visceral appeal of using flying lead to punch things full of holes should never be disparaged, and that the people in authority -- no matter who they are -- are insufferable twits. (The other stuff he stood for, like knee-jerk socialism and the ability to disguise baseless assertion as fact through vicious(ly hilarious) rhetoric, I'm willing to forgive; this is after all a eulogy.)

He never really mellowed, if his last column is any indication. He didn't leave behind a note, according to the papers, but I like to imagine that he wrote a scathing 50-page screed that dealt the dirt on everyone from Karl Rove to Noam Chomsky (the "man," you see, is covering it up because it's just too earth-shaking).

If I had any balls at all, Sunday night I would have chain-smoked unfiltered Camels while doing fat rails of Peruvian flake off a gymnast's ass to say goodbye to Hunter. I could have capped the night off with potshots at passing cars while munching peyote buttons. Instead, the best I can hope for is that the leftist burnouts who actually bought into Hunter's Marxist claptrap decide to follow his lead once more.