Hunter S. Thompson Commits Suicide

"Diamonds and Rust" - now there was a great album. Hadn't thought of it in years. I was up in Telluride a couple of years back, snooping around in the over-priced tourist shops there. One place was all about incredibly expensive shoes and boots. The proprietor proudly showed me a length of turquoise dyed alligator skin that he said was going to be made into a pair of smoke jumper boots for THE Bob Dylan!

I flashed on the deaths of 14 kids from a small town in California who had been smoke jumpers and died fighting a forest fire outside Glenwood Springs some years back. The Forest Service doesn't provide smoke jumper boots for its seasonal employees which is what these kids were. They had to go out and buy their own White's brand smoke jumper boots which back in the day used to run around $140.00 a pair. Don't know what they cost now. The kids bought those boots out of their seasonal's pay and died in them.

For some reason, those alligator skin smoke jumper boots seemed faintly obscene to me.