Tikkabik

Now that I've had a few days to think about it, I just wanted to pass on my thoughts about Hunter S. Thompson, following his unfortunate suicide.

I was sixteen years old and it was my junior year at Manter Hall, a small private high school that was the prep school of last resort for many of its students. I'd ended up there after I'd dropped out of Stoughton High School.

Stoughton High was an industrial wasteland of a school, a nazi bratwurst factory of the most mediocre order populated by impotent, second-rate bureaucrats. The way that I dropped out speaks volumes of their incompetence: I stopped going shortly after the academic year started. It was a full trimester before the school's guidance department bothered to call my mother -- a single parent -- at work to find out why I wasn't coming to school. She left before I did, and I'd simply wait for them to call to ask why I wasn't in school that day. Then I'd have the rest of the day to watch TV, play games on my computer, or get stoned or drunk with my other slacker friends who were skipping school that day.

Manter Hall was a different story, though. The school was tiny -- my graduating class, if I remember correctly, was only a couple dozen kids. And the curriculum was focused on core competencies. But English was, without question, a special point of pride for the administration -- enough so that they published their own vocabulary book series called Wordly Wise.

I had a great English teacher in Mr. Gannon. He was one of the few teachers I had who truly inspired me, and it was at Manter Hall that I began to realize that I really wanted to do something involving writing. In retrospect, i'm not surprised. The few teachers that I ever really connected with, were either English teachers or I connected with because of reading.

One day in study hall I noticed my friend Paul was trying really hard not to laugh out loud, and I noticed he was thumbing through a blue-covered paperback. When I asked him about it he said, "Dude, you have to check this out. This guy is so out of his mind."

I picked it up and began to read.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

That book -- Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas -- changed my life. While I already had an inkling that I wanted to write, I knew after I read that book that I absolutely had to write. It wasn't because I wanted to write like Hunter S. Thompson did -- not that anyone can, or will again. It was because I recognized the craft, and I identified with the creative impulse to make it.

I expect anyone that follows their bliss has a similar perception-altering experience: That moment where you realize, either in the act of creating or experiencing what someone else has created, that this thing is yours. That it calls to you. That it touches you on a profound level. It's transcendental.

Hunter S. Thompson was surely no role model, nor was he a model of professional journalism. He was a flawed figure -- a victim of his own demons as much as anything else. Angry, eccentric, often incoherent and rambling. He was, however, an absolutely brilliant writer -- and to lose him diminishes us all, just a little bit.