HST

Forty years ago today Malcolm X was killed. Reading his autobiography, or biography by Alex Haley taught me a lot about freedom and what it was to not have it in a country that flaunts it. Two days ago Hunter Thompson took his own life. His books taught me to love my freedom and push it, see how far you can be free and find out who is going to try and stop you. When I think of Thompson I don't think of the decadence but of how he had his own American Dream, one that thought it was okay to blow shit up in your backyard, walk through hotel lobbies in your underwear and drive crazy listening to music real loud. He did these crazy things so that I could write letters to the editor that talked bad about cops riding motorcycles on the sidewalk by my school. He paraded around so that every October I can get together with 200 of my best friends out in the middle of nowhere and have our own little festival if only for a night.
He saw freedom as a joy, and when people tried to take it away from him or others he got pissed and used his words to rally others. I learned more about presidential politics reading Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, 1972 than from any other source. Read it if you haven't. I never laughed so hard than when reading of picking up hitch hikers, breaking into libraries, and of course hanging out at the Kentucky Derby. The way he described how to pick out the Kentucky elite by looking at their boots for puke because they would never get any on their clothes, but boots were fair game. Or when he was pretending that he was the skier John-Claude Kinney and kids asking him what he was smoking and he told them marijuana, that's what made him ski so fast. So fast, so funny, so much cooler that anyone, not giving a shit about rules, protocol, manners, just live fast and fun.
There was another article about a person being killed in a bar in Los Angeles years ago and the guy picked the case apart, he could research.
Malcolm X was fighting for the freedom that Hunter didn't take for granted and tried to show us how to use it.
I don't know why he did it. Does it matter? I'm sad he is gone, well both of them, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that would have loved one night, one hour with him, just to see how real it was. Now we just have to do it ourselves, which is okay, but it's never as cool when you do what someone else has already done.
Hunter S. Thompson searched for the death of the American dream and I hope he didn't think that it died so he had to as well.

From "Freak Power in the Rockies":
Our program basically, was to drive the real estate goons completely out of the valley: to prevent the State Highway Department from bringing a four-lane highway into the town and in fact to ban all auto traffic from every downtown street. Turn them all into grassy malls where everybody, even freaks, could do whatever's right. The cops would become trash collectors and maintenance men for a fleet of municipal bicycles, for anybody to use. No more huge, space-killing apartment buildings to block the view, from any downtown street, of anybody who might want to look up and see the mountains. No more land-rapes, no more busts for "flute playing" or "blocking the sidewalk"...fuck the tourists, dead-end the highway, zone the greedheads out of existence, and in general create a town where people could live like human beings, instead of slaves to some bogus sense of Progress that is driving us all mad.

Greed heads, freaks, land-rapes. All of these great words,
Malcolm copied the dictionary cover to cover from a jail cell, but he didn't use words like that.