readingthedark

Wow, I'm posting from

nihilistic_kid's computer while he's asleep and it was logged in under his name. When I think of the chaos that I could've created with this keyboard and didn't, I'm aghast with myself.

So, yes, yes, ReaderCon is so underway. I'm extremely excited for the cool things. Seeing the Samuel R. Delany documentary last night made the day super-awesome. The picnic at

pgtremblay's (with at least four other people from my f-list) was also cool.

But those factoids are irrelevant.

In 1937, on this day, one of the few certifiable geniuses of American letters entered the planet.

He was erascible, crude, strung-out, underhanded and may have never been on time for a deadline.

But, when an idea finally struck him, he hit back like nobody's bizness.

Here's it: when I was 19, goddess poet and memoirist (and someone I'll always be smitten with) Mary Karr asked me to write a letter to my favorite living author in order to help me understand why I've always been so compelled to write weird things. Somewhere I have the letter to Dr. Thompson that I wrote but was too afraid of him to send. As a reader, I loved plenty of others when I was younger, but HST may have been the first writer I wanted to be when I grew up. (Yes, the road to wisdom was paved with excess. I'm okay now, I promise.)

And, yes, he took the words off the page and paraded them around in his life, maybe even believing his own hype, not to mention running for sherrif and late-night drug and gun parties are rarely healthy for anyone and I'm not sure his second wife really even knew him...

but, at his era's version of a frat kegger, when he was still a kid and from the wrong side of the tracks (as he always was), he hid in a closet and bad-mouthed every preppy jock at the party, mumbling into his new tape recorder. Then, and this is why Hunter is eternal, he came back out of that closet and played the tape to the jocks because he wanted the rich kids to like him for his ability to mock them.

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson wasn't just an outsider who threw heavy, jagged rocks at glass houses. He threw those rocks because he wanted to break in and put his feet up on their coffee table and watch their plasma screen. He was an outsider who saw every way that the system is rigged and still wanted to try to take charge of that system, even if it meant talking football with President F-ing Nixon or running for sherrif of Aspen, Colorado.

Some say the latter work is uneven. I don't care because anyone, anyone, who writes as much as he did for as long as he did will have uneven parts. Bless him and his memory for the many, many moments when he got everything right.