Hunter S Thompson

"I have weird dreams," Hunter Stockton Thompson says. "I never expected to be looking over my life, page by page. It's like an animal eating its own intestines." It is 3:45 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, and he is perched like a barn owl on a high stool in his kitchen, eating not innards but a TV dinner, microwaved and then slathered with a hellbroth of mysterious mustards, chutneys and chili sauces. The plate suddenly glows with an unearthly light.

After 25 years of self-imposed electoral exile, Hunter S. Thompson is again dropping matches into the petrol of Aspen politics. Fueled by twin November ballot proposals to upgrade the Aspen airport for larger aircraft--and by what he sees as the general degradation of his prized valley by "absentee landlord scum and greed-heads"--the father of gonzo journalism is back pillorying the Establishment.

Plans for a public ceremony celebrating the life of Hunter S. Thompson have been canceled in favor of a private memorial service. The Aug. 20 ceremony, which will include the scattering of the author's ashes on his Aspen-area ranch, will coincide with the six-month anniversary of Thompson's death, said Doug Brinkley, one of the planners of the memorial.

Hunter S. Thompson's widow will co-edit a new magazine called the Woody Creeker, which is expected to hit newsstands next month. The gonzo journalist shot himself in his kitchen Feb. 20, apparently despondent over health problems. "We have some good writers already," Anita Thompson told the Aspen Times for its Tuesday editions. Satirist and political commentator P.J. O'Rourke plans a profile of her husband based on interviews in 1987 and 1997, she said.

"Gonzo," a limited edition published by Ammo Books, is also an exhibition on view at M+B gallery in Los Angeles until Jan. 20 * Like Ralph Steadman's drawings, which illustrated Hunter S. Thompson's prose in Rolling Stone, Thompson's life contained a lot of splatter. Besides spilled booze, dribbled drugs and even some blood, there were lots of half-baked ideas and throwaway snapshots strewn around his Colorado compound.

Hunter S. Thompson, the counterculture literary figure who rode with the Hells Angels, famously chronicled the Nixon-McGovern presidential race and coined the term "gonzo journalism," committed suicide Sunday night at his secluded home outside Aspen, Colo., his son said. Thompson was 67. "Hunter Thompson took his life with a gunshot to the head at his fortified compound in Woody Creek," Juan Thompson said in a statement.

My wife and I moved into a new home nearly eight years ago, and, from the beginning, she wanted to turn the family room into a flamingo room, built around a prized Audubon print. Until we could afford it, we used the room as a crammed office and instead hung a favorite wedding gift -- a framed "Thompson for Sheriff" poster. The "Thompson" was Hunter S. Thompson, the self-indulgent and idiosyncratically gifted brat of American journalism.

They say the Woody Creek Tavern, with its leopard print carpet and chipped wooden booths, is the center of the universe in this hamlet a few mountaintops from Aspen. For Hunter S. Thompson, it was bigger than that. The hard-living journalist, who committed suicide Sunday, held court in this pleasantly seedy saloon for decades. He preferred the barstool by the door, where he could tuck himself in on cold winter nights, swig Chivas Regal and rail against the world. Now his world was railing back.

The suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, the best-selling writer who pioneered an extravagant form of participatory journalism famously labeled "gonzo," brought to a sober close an era of print journalism rooted in the raucous 1960s. Unlike other practitioners of the so-called New Journalism, Thompson, who died Sunday, was a full-fledged participant in his stories, which explored the dark recesses of the American dream.

Hunter S. Thompson, the "gonzo" journalist with a penchant for drugs, guns and flamethrower prose, might have one more salvo in store: Friends and relatives want to blast his ashes out of a cannon, as he wished. "If that's what he wanted, we'll see if we can pull it off," said Douglas Brinkley, who said he was the family's spokesman. Thompson, 67, committed suicide Sunday at his home in Woody Creek, near Aspen.