Gonzo Grief

I don't suppose there was any six-degrees of sepratation between Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee. My own connections are spurious at best, but they did both die on my birthday. I doubt if that means anything at all -- though it did to me -- a bit. I once worked with a young reporter who idolized Thompson, and never referred to him without the title 'Dr.' being thrown into his reference. As a stylist -- in those days -- in the late 1970s, Thompson was worthy of both idolization and admiration. One hell of a scribe was he. He threw caution and convention to the proverbial winds, and called the 'bastards' of his etchings as the bastards that they were. He worth a lot of good stuff before he became addled and progressively insane. He ate his gun, as the cops would say, and that, in its own sad way, is apt. What other way could he have gone out? Eventually HST didn't resemble anything particularly current. He had become a sad parody of himself -- as must we all -- I believe. Of substances, he'd known a few. And back in my drinking days I did attempt to emulate -- periodically, and to much grief for all concerned, especially myself. I quit it. He didn't -- he said. My aforementioned friend, by the way, used to scour liquor stores to avail himself of 'Wild Turkey', the good Doctor's tipple of choice. Did he really consume as prodigiously as his self-inscribed legend would have it. I doubt it. He was even honest enough himself, in later life, to suggest there was a certain hyperbole involved in working his myth, and that he likely would have shuffled off the mortal coil years earlier had such profound excess been the case.
But, then there is Sandra Dee. What can one say about this subject of many 14-years-old wet-dreams of mine own -- and countless other male adolescent contemporaries of the former Miss Zuck -- one understands the name change. Sad soul she was. Very lovely. A perpetual heroine in the film 'A Summer Place' who never got any older in my sensibilities. She was once married to the restless, driven and prematurely doomed Bobby Darin -- one who must be perpetually missed by those of style and taste -- but it didn't take. She went on the scotch for many years and ravaged her physical and emotional health. She ended up plugged into a dialysis machine. She deserved ever so much better. Sic transit.