A moment of silence, please, for Hunter S. Thompson.

The gonzo journalist passed quietly yesterday, after reportedly blowing a hole through his head with one of his beloved guns.

I owe Thompson a debt of gratitude. He is one of the writers who made me want to be a writer. He also made me want to drink a lot and do drugs, and he's one of the main reasons I flunked out of college the first time around, and didn't end up graduating until I was 26.

(The other main reason I flunked out was my roommate, Barzo, who over the course of our one semester together slowly sold off all of the furniture in our dorm room—including my clock radio and rented refrigerator—for drugs, until all that was left was the bare bunk beds. He even sold the sheets).

If it were not for Thompson, I would not have gained the valuable life experience of running a hot-dog stand, working as a truck loader, delivering pizzas, waiting tables, cooking on the line, working an assembly line in a factory, or dozens of other real jobs I accepted after washing out of Northern Illinois University.

Say what you want about Thompson, but nobody captured the fall of the American Dream better than he did in the late sixties and early seventies. I don't know that anyone better captured the pessimistic mood of the times, either.

His 'fiction,' or 'gonzo journalism,' or whatever you want to call it was very good. But I think his best writing came in his collection of letters. If you ever want to get a flavor for what young people in this country felt during the Vietnam War and Watergate era, pick up a copy of Fear and Loathing in America, his collection of letters.

Thompson was a prolific letter writer. And the letters—to editors, friends, family, politicians, celebrities—capture the era better than anything else, I think. And the frenetic nature of the man himself.

Here's an opening from a letter he wrote to Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, from the 1972 campaign trail:

'Dear Jann—

Jesus, what's the other one? Every journalist in America knows the 'Five W's.' But I can only remember four. 'Who, What, Why, Where' . . . and, yes . . . of course . . . 'When!'

But what the hell? An item like that tends to pinch the interest gland . . . so you figure it's time to move out: Pack up the $419 Abercrombie & Fitch elephant skin suitcase; send the phones and the scanner and the tape viewers by Separate Float, load everything else into the weightless Magnesium Kitbag . . . then call for a high-speed cab to the airport; load on and zip off to wherever The Word says it's happening.

The public expects no less. They want a man who can zap around the nation like a goddamn methedrine bat: Racing from airport to airport, from one crisis to another—sucking up the news and then spewing it out by the 'Five W's' in a package that makes perfect sense.'

Indeed. Thompson always made perfect sense to me . . . even when I stopped doing drugs and went back to college. Though it wasn't necessarily in that order.

It's enough to make me believe in spirits and ghosts. I'd love to read Thompson's Fear and Loathing in the Afterworld, to get a sense of what it's like over there.