At least he never "lapsed into good taste"

Toils in the service of Pegasus kept me up late and away from the TV, so I awake to find not only that one of my journalistic heroes has killed himself (pictured at right as I'll always remember him), but that the scribes of the blogosphere have already issued eulogies far more eloquent than I could hope to create. So, just like we'll do post-launch on a national story, we aggregate:

• Jarvis: Thompson was really the first reaction to one-size-fits-all journalism. He was the argument that the grand shared experience of media in a three-network, one-newspaper-town world was actually bad because it was boring and institutional and inhuman. Thompson tried to inject humanity back into journalism. He injected it like drugs into his veins and, yes, sometimes it was a bad trip.
   
• Ed Cone: Thanks, HST. For Hell's Angels, snippets of which still bubble into my consciousness with some regularity 21 years after I read it on an overnight train to Rome.

  For this:

  "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold..." And everything that followed on that alarming trip.

  For the scatalogical note you scrawled to me in 2000 in response to a query for an article I was reporting on Garry Trudeau.
   

• JD Lasica: ...Thompson was in some ways a forerunner of the We Media movement.

  Yeah, he was known for gonzo journalism, but when you strip it down, it was about the idea that anyone with a typewriter, a modicum of reporting talent and the gumption to ask the hard questions could be a reporter. Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Jimmy Breslin and others dressed it up in fancier clothes and called it "the new journalism," but the idea was that journalistic objectivity was pretty much bullshit, that the writer was very much a part of the story he was covering -- a notion that is now a core precept of the blogosphere.

  Thompson was one of a kind. Rest in peace? No friggin' way.
     
• Lileks:  Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee died on the same Yahoo most-emailed page. There’s some telling symmetry in that. Dee, who died of organ failure, was a sunny perky teen idol with a dark past – sexual abuse, domineering show-biz mom, public divorce, alcoholism, health ills. But she “turned her life around,” in the lingo of Behind the Scenes; she had a good last act, and she didn’t trade on her pains to craft a public persona. People think "Sandra Dee," they think the happy teen Tammy still.
  
  HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” – that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman – meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read "Hell's Angels." That was a man who could hit the keys right.
     
• Bruce Castleberry: It's terrible news...mostly because now I will have to offer a fitting tribute and get raucously hammered tonight. At least he'll get a chance to terrorize Nixon in hell tonight....
     
• Lenslinger (whose tribute is the closest to what I would have said if it hadn't already been said): I discovered Thompson at age thirteen, when one of my more subversive older buddies slipped me a tattered copy of 'Hell's Angels'. Inside those well-worn pages, I found the most unlikely of role models - an unbalanced outlaw scribe who fascinated me as much as his salacious subject matter. That a journalist could interject himself into the action in such an incredibly entertaining way was nothing less than a revelation to me. It made me want to WRITE more than ever. Why not? This deranged wordsmith from the decade I was born in had cleared the way, blazed intoxicating skid marks through the hallowed halls of American Journalism. Soon I immersed myself in the H.S.T. canon, from 'Fear and Loathing' to 'Songs of the Doomed' to 'Generation of Swine'. Whiel other kids my age were busy idolizing sports figures, I was falling under the influence of a drunken Master, a dangerous uncle who could lay down incendiary narratives and broken prose like no one else before or after him. I was hooked, and still am. Not far from my computer, his many works fill my bookshelves, timeless testaments to the power of the caustically written word.