Buy the ticket, take the ride

On this the final day of February I feel the need to remember a man the world lost just more than six years ago.

On Feb. 20, 2005 the rock star writer that redefined journalism and creative non-fiction was getting old and stiff. With some of his family visiting and his wife on the phone, he loaded a gun, and that was that.

Before I go on let it be said that there is nothing noble about suicide objectively, but Hunter S. Thompson was never objective and if one could ask him about it now he'd never apologize or explain. That was him.

The Kentucky native partied, studied and severed his country. His writing training consisted of practical experience gleaned from sports writing gigs and creative writing classes. He traveled, he wrote and he drank rum.

Hunter S. Thompson is most famous for his gonzo-tinged novel "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and after that for his gonzo journalistic entry "Hells Angels, a strange and terrible saga," but I submit that his best work is the pure novel "The Rum Diary."

He ran for sheriff with the same zeal he covered horse racing and he grappled with presidents as if it were no more difficult than covering the Super Bowl. Two movies about his works have been made, another is in production.

His funeral was attended by U.S. Senator John Kerry and former U.S. Senator George McGovern; 60 Minutes correspondents Ed Bradley and Charlie Rose; actors Jack Nicholson, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, and Josh Hartnett; singers Lyle Lovett, John Oates and others.

If anyone ever lived their own life, refused to play by the rules of the rat race and still won, it was HST.

I'll end this tribute with a couple quotes. Many people asked why HST would off himself and for the answer we turn to close friend Ralph Steadman.

"...He told me 25 years ago that he would feel real trapped if he didn't know that he could commit suicide at any moment." To Thompson, life in the fast lane could only mean certain death, and the only acceptable way to die, in his mind, was by killing himself. In many ways, Thompson wanted to emulate his literary hero, Ernest Hemingway, in both profession and death. Hemingway, the inventor of macho literature, ended his life when he could no longer write well enough to satisfy his standards."

And from the man himself...
"The Edge…There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others – the living – are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later. But the edge is still Out there."

Hunter found the edge six years and eight days ago. He's been over that from which there is no coming back.

American Universities had better start including him in the canon of American Literary Giants, like Ernest Hemmingway and Mark Twain. At the very least, I bet he could out-drink either one.