[richlevy]

Anita Thompson also echoes the comments that have been made by Hunter Thompson's son and daughter-in-law: That her husband's suicide did not come from the bottom of the well, but was a gesture of strength and ultimate control made as his life was at a high-water mark.

So what they're saying is that HT's life was like the final season of M.A.S.H?

I don't have much to say about that other than having watched my wife take care of her father in his final two years in Parkinsons, I can possibly understand the motivation for someone with that disease or something like terminal bone cancer to spare themselves the final months or weeks. I heard John Wayne thought about it However, by all accounts the man was in good health.

Saying to oneself "this is as good as my life is ever going to get, so it's all downhill from here" sounds like really bad reason for suicide.

I think Dennis Leary said it best -

Do not mention FIRE IN THE BELLY. Do not clutch your copy of IRON JOHN. Sit your soft little ass down and listen up. Understanding macho means that you don't possess it. I have proven myself to be the pussy that I am by writing this piece. (I'm wearing a powder blue cotton print shirt and peach panties as I type) [sic] Ernest Hemingway, you say? Wrong. Ernest lived a very macho life and wrote some very macho stories. But Ernest threw it all away by blowing his head off with a shotgun. Very unmacho. Real men do not commit suicide. Real men know just how much life sucks. Real men grit their teeth and take it bill after bill, war after war, tumor after tumor. You don't greet Death, you punch him in the throat repeatedly as he drags you away. I think John Wayne said it best when he said, "Fuck Death and the lung cancer he rode in on."

BTW, I heard that John Wayne did contemplate suicide while he had cancer but either changed his mind or was prevented from doing so (I don't think a nurse has to be a genius to not let the terminal cancer patient have a gun).

One of the really nice rules of nature is that in most cases, really awful stuff is stuff that kills you. Almost everything else you can get over.

This whole 'killing oneself because this is as good as life gets' implies some kind of psychic ability to absolutely know what will be coming next. That's bullshit. Rodney Dangerfield was a paint salesman until he was 42 and didn't star in his first film until he was almost 60. Should he have picked up a gun and shot himself after his divorce at 41?

I appreciated everything that HT stood for, but if his suicide is his last piece of 'gonzo' performance art, then I'm not buying it.