�He may have died relatively young but he made up for it in quality if not quantity of years,� Paul Krassner, the veteran radical journalist and one of Thompson�s former editors, told The Associated Press by phone from his Southern California home.

�It was hard to say sometimes whether he was being provocative for its own sake or if he was just being drunk and stoned and irresponsible,� quipped Krassner, founder of the leftist publication The Realist and co-founder of the Youth International (YIPPIE) party.

The world has lost a pioneer. So I drink a shot of whiskey — not my favorite, but appropos, I think — and hope to one day have the same impact his work had on me and so many others. With luck, Hunter has found his peace.

For as long as I can remember I have wanted to
Silence every beating heart; every sound of breathing
Now there is something inside of me that aches as I hear you
Breathing here when you sleep between these morning sheets

I am the tears in your mouth
I am the weight on your shoulder
I am the scream that wants out
And my heart just couldn’t grow colder
Now this rusty heart is my gift
This fallen love is my gift

Morning arrives on an Earth I’ve never seen before
Revealing a life that I never really understood
Strange, the way beauty can hurt the unopened eye
Much more than all of the filth and pain
That we’re soaked in ever could

I am the tears in your mouth
I am the weight on your shoulder
I am the scream that wants out
And my heart just couldn’t grow colder

Hear this voice, see this man standing before you
I’m just a child trapped inside the body of a man

(from Morning on Earth, Pain of Salvation)

“Boy is cancer free; online auction paid for medical bills”:

David was diagnosed in May 2003 with a grapefruit-sized malignant brain tumor called a rhabdomyosarcoma, which was causing blindness and headaches.

He nicknamed it �Frank� after Frankenstein, who scared him until he dressed up as the monster for Halloween.

(ah, cancer humor. from the mouths of babes…)

Fuck:

hackers
unsupportive hosting support
web design as a business
Valentine’s Day
couples
plagiarists
TV programmers

…and then just an extra loud fuck in general.

I’m going to drink. A lot.

If you’re going to do something stupid, expect consequence.

If you’re going to commit a criminal act, make sure you can’t be caught.

If you’re going to drop a phishing scam on a site that I oversee, don’t, for gods sakes, leave your email in the code. Yeah, that means that simple html forms are gonna have to be a little creative, but when you leave your two gmail accounts in the php code for anyone to see — especially when said code is commented “Leave your email here for lamerz cc to be sent” —

Well, it just ain’t too smart.

Dumb fucker.

I think I’ll just send you a bill for three hours it took me to clean up the mess you left on my website.

And I’m not necessarily confining this thought to any one area. Sure, there’s feverish loss of memory — flu is f u with a random letter in the middle, to confuse the spiders and the search bots. And there’s total and utter loss of memory, for whatever reason. Some people build walls around memories to protect themselves, and some of us just have no memory of childhood, for instance. So, the last few days, by and large, are largely hallucinatory creations in my boil-in-bag brain, and great heaping chunks of time before 1985 are just missing from my world.

But what of the really meaningful times in my life, those moments that played a large part in defining who I am now? Do I remember them as they happened, accurately and with as little perceptive slant as I would like to think? And if I do, do I accurately relate said moments to others?

Was talking with a friend about some journals that she found, long ago, belonging to an ex’s ex, and in between pages of high school poetry and whatnot, there were diary entries about days — each entry about the same day would get more and more pronouncedly fictitious. And she says the scary thing about the entries was that what got expounded upon (that’s terrible grammar, I think, but I blame it on the last remnants of the flu) was meaningless and trivial stuff.

I’ve known a few compulsive liars in my life, and mostly, the lies are placed out there to impress. And some lies are told to protect, of course — others, egos, lies of omission…. And I’m crossing the lines here. Someone call Egon, quick… But what is the point of the lie told to an empty room? It serves only to reinforce the lie that one has told oneself.

What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.

Shakespeare. What a riot.

Anyone got anymore DayQuil?

(Special thanks to Wade, Jessica, and James for apple-juice-and-soup runs)

There’s a horrible buzzing noise, flourescent light symphony. She hears it now for the first time, and wonders how she never noticed it in three years. The silence of the past two certainly left room for it.

Reminders litter the room, the last pieces of the corpse of them. No ligature marks, no defensive wounds, and the scientists would say that there’s no obvious cause of death, but there lies the body, no question. And no one is to blame, really; but she wants to point and scream and pierce the soul of the world with accusations and cries of guilt.

Judge, jury, and now executioner.

She lifts the last box of her things, things that existed outside of them, before the vows, before even the night at the dirty hole-in-the-wall dive that they both frequented (his in the settlement now and new lushes in her future). She walks out into the hall, silencing the white light cacophony before she closes the door, and all that she leaves behind is the light scent of vanilla and incense and a lifetime of dreams.

Sometimes, one needs to be reminded what one already knows. The trick is having a friend that knows of what one needs to be reminded.

Isn’t that neat English? Leslie’s rubbing off on me.

“Modulation” (Ani DiFranco)

In order to
Say thank you to you
I must do it intentionally
But tonight with every breath
I can feel my death
Sure as I can feel my knees

You were my modulation
So that’s what you will always be
We took each other higher
We set each other free

Course, neither of us were wearing helmets
And our blood was just everywhere
And when the morphine kicked in later
The censors threw their hands up in despair
And that’s when the truth came marching in
And promptly pulled the plug
But you were better than any drug
You were better than any drug

In order to
Say thank you to you
I must do it intentionally
But tonight with every breath
I can feel my death
Sure as I can feel my knees

You were my modulation
And that’s what you will always be
We took each other higher
Then we set each other free
We set each other free