Just two things:
One, his most recent column at ESPN.com: “Shotgun Golf with Bill Murray.” I didn’t even know he was writing for ESPN.com. It”s actually an entertaining and at times lucid piece.
Two, just checking on Technorati to see how the blog people are taking the news. I’m surprised by how much comment there is, from the outright sappy (“Hunter, we hardly knew ye” — apparently meant seriously) to the self-consciously neo-gonzo (“Too wierd [sic] to live, too rare to die“) to the actually original and humorous (like the blogger who asks, “What kind of God lets Hunter S. Thompson shoot himself, but is cool with allowing Dan Brown [author of “The da Vinci Code”] to go on living?”).
Like I said, surprising. I assumed Thompson’s act was so old, inebriated, and stuck in the glory days of Nixon-McGovern that folks had moved on. Maybe “Doonesbury” and the movies (both the Johnny Depp one and the Bill Murray one) endeared him to the post-me (me, not Me) generation.
Until I walked in the door from work tonight, I had no idea Hunter was even known among the younger generation. My oldest daughter’s first words to me were, “did you hear Hunter S. Thompson died?” Also, I just found out tonight that her best guy friend, who just got out of the Marines after four long years, has a tatoo of the main character from “Fear and Loathing,” paid for as a Christmas present by my daughter a couple years ago. And her friend only drinks Flying Dog beer because of some Hunter connection which I’m not exactly sure of at this point. Anyway, I just thought I’d mention it here.
I guess we were asleep while Hunter’s reputation grew and spread. I got a note from a friend who talked about how on his first day at the University of Tennessee, a day on which he was dubious of the whole UT enterprise, the doubts dropped away when one of his instructors opened her class by sitting on the desk and reading for the first half hour from “Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas.”
Of course, his screw-it attitude, his apparent readiness to embrace trouble to express himself, has to be part of the appeal for younger folks. To be honest, I probably got scared out of that from one squad-car ride to the police station on a disorderly conduct charge.