No Point Mentioning Those Bats... Hunter S Thompson commits suicide. Fuck. It was only a few weeks ago that I finished Rube. He was the only fucker who ever made sport sound remotely interesting, and American sport at that. I'm a Hunter junkie. I'd read Fear & Loathing as a teenager but I only really got swept up in the whole gonzo thing after Frank forced me to read the biography Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life by E Jean Carroll. Since then I've read everything I could find by and about Hunter - there's some photos on here somewhere of me reading him in the middle of a Mexican jungle - the first google news alert I signed up for covered Hunter and at least once a day I'd get an article written by or about him. Now my gmail alert is continuously beeping as more stories about his suicide roll in. I have the above photo (the cover to Kingdom of Fear) blown up to an almost live size cut-out that greets me every morning on my way up the stairs... Only last week I was driving back into San Francisco with an artist from LA and chatting about Hunter and the fact that on his recent booksigning tour he just sat on the floor and forced the fans to have shots of whiskey with him until the police turned up and stopped the fun. While I was there I picked up a copy of Willard and his Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan, another of my favourite authors who also ended his own life with a gun. Willard is the only novel by Brautigan I hadn't read and I picked up a perfect first edition hardback from Dog Eared Books on Valencia. I'm maybe five chapters in and milking the damn thing very slowly because I know that after this is finished there isn't any more. I expect in the next year we'll be treated to a new biography and at least one collection of unpublished writings belonging to Hunter but then that'll be it... Fuck. And oh yeah, we're back. Mike is writing to Songs of the Doomed (audio version)