Agouti Music Community

ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the acerbic counterculture writer who popularized a new form of journalism in books like “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” fatally shot himself Sunday night at his Aspen-area home, his son said. He was 67.

“Hunter prized his privacy and we ask that his friends and admirers respect that privacy as well as that of his family,” Juan Thompson said in a statement released to the Aspen Daily News.

Sad times. His funeral request was for his ashes to be shot out of a cannon in front of his estate.

I was shocked when I heard about this.  Not so much that he'd do it, but that he did it with his son and 6 year old grandson in the house.

In a strange twist of fate, Thompson was crushed when he learned that his idol Ernest Hemingway had killed himself in Idaho in 1961.

"I think he killed himself because he couldn't write anymore," Thompson is quoted as saying in a chapter of Paul Perry's book titled "Totally Unclassifiable."

"He couldn't write, he was too sick to hunt. He just didn't have it anymore, so he decided to end it."
http://aspentimes.com/article/20050221/NEWS/102210013/0/FRONTPAGE

Totally sad.