How very sad and upsetting. Hunter S. Thompson made me want to become a writer, but more importantly, he's one of the main reasons why I'm so attracted to anything counterculture.
In "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," he wrote:
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 - -the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The secret production company in my head is called "High Water Mark Productions," precisely because of this quote. Because of how much I desperately long to have lived during the era of the original High Water Mark, and because of how very, very, very desperately I long for it to come again.
We miss you, Hunter S. Thompson. You're my comictragic hero of a bygone era. Here's hoping you and Leary are laughing at the rest of us still vibrating at this frequency.
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