It's sad to know that our world is now without Hunter Thompson. He was an idol, a hero, but now that he's gone, what am I supposed to feel? This is a special case. When a normal human being sticks a gun to their head and pulls the trigger, you drop to your knees and scream, "Why? Why, God, why?" but Hunter Thompson wasn't a normal human being. So this is a special case. Don't feel empty because a hero is dead. He was 67. He lived a hard and dangerous life. How did you expect it to end? Was Hunter S. Thompson going to live to be a hundred and three, sitting in an old rocking chair at the compound with a shot gun in his lap, take a drooly old man nap and just drift peacefully to sleep, never to wake? Could it have ended in a sudden and surprising motorcycle accident, or maybe a natural disaster? Would it have been better if he'd stuck around long enough to get lung cancer from years of chain smoking, and then linger in a sad and pathetic state between life and death for several years, eventually dying a shell of his former self, no more fight left in him? Or how about a drug overdose. A fucking drug overdose? Hunter Thompson? After as many drugs as he's taken? What a ridiculous cliche that would have been.

Thompson wasn't one of those people. He wasn't one of us, and he didn't live on our terms. That wasn't a character he was playing, it was absolutely real. I spent years wondering why I couldn't just be as strange and eccentric and interesting as Hunter Thompson, and then one night it just dawned on me. "Oh. He's crazy. Well, that explains that." He was crazy. And brilliant. And perfect in his way. There was a place in the world, a hole cut just the right shape and size, and he was the only one that would ever be able to fit. It just so happens that the peculiar shape and size of this hole specifies a self inflicted gun shot wound to the head. How did you think it was going to end?

Don't worry. Everything turned out exactly as it was supposed to. Sometimes if you can pull back and stare at it from far away, you can see - painful and sad as it may be - that everything makes sense.

"Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era -- the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning . . .

And that, I think, was the handle -- that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."