ONE SECOND AT A TIME

I love Hunter S. Thompson. I discovered him at around 20 years of age and I loved his acid, drunken and pissed-off style. He wrote passionately about politics in Rolling Stone for many, many years. He had movies, with Johnny Depp playing him, made about him. How cool is that? How cool that he fucked the establishment and threw caution and personal safety to the wind? He was my hero and when I finished The Rum Diary, his first book, writen by a then twenty-two year old Thompson, I was awed and envious and aching for a tumbler of rum.

(I very nearly capitalised the word Rum, as if it were a person or a country...Does anyone out there know how telling that is?)

I love Huntter S, Thompson still but I have this pit in my stomach when I think that my hero, tough as nails boy-genious renegade, blew his brains out with a shot gun. He said he couldn't take the pain anymore. Most of the newspaper articles speculated that it was his long suffering with back pain from a surgery he had gotten years before. I know it was booze. And drugs. And years of being a drowning man.

I don't pity him. His ultimate naiveté was that he mistook his anger for cynicism...much hipper, much cooler than fear. Fear and Loathing, people. Think maybe he knew? His opus was Fear and Loathing. Then he went to hang out with Bikers.

Makes me think of some guys I went to CEGEP with, who used to talk about trying heroin. They made a plan on it, these rich kids who spent daddy's dough on Ectasy and raves. I was actually jealous of them too, I wanted to be cool like them and think that doing dangerous drugs was brave.



I ain't giving up my dream that easily. I will not end up living on a ranch alone in the middle of nowhere with a shotgun to my head...So to quote Cypress Hill... "I ain't goin out like that."

Bring on the fucking audition!