Another one done in by demons ...

A little bit of diversion, here, from the routine Hep C stuff: I was a bit amazed Monday to learn that Hunter S. Thompson killed himself.

To be sure, he’d been killing himself for decades, but the self-inflicted gunshot ... well, that was surprising to me.

Not sure why; it’s definitely not the first time a writer was chased by demons into the darkness, whether by suicide, substance abuse, or both: Ernest Hemingway, William Sydney Porter (O Henry), Jack Kerouac, to name a few that come easily to mind. You’d also have to consider Ken Kesey, who was "done in by a bum liver." The jury’s still out on Edgar Allan Poe’s death.

In the ’70s, I was greatly influenced by the writings of Kerouac, Thompson and Tom Wolfe, particularly Kerouac and Wolfe. When I read "On the Road" and "Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," I saw myself in their stories:

-- Running to Mexico with Sal Paradise, Dean Morarity and Carlo Marx, stopping at Old Bull Lee’s to do bennies.

-- On the bus with Neal (Morarity) Cassady and the rest of the Merry Pranksters as they tripped to Timothy Leary’s place in New York.

-- Roaring up the California coast with the Hell’s Angels.

-- Later, as I seriously considered journalism as a career, reading Thompson's "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail" captured my imagination.

To me, it wasn’t "gonzo journalism"; shoot, I didn’t even know the term back then. To me, it was life, pure and simple — well, not pure ...

Still, I likely asked myself, "What better life could there be?"

Well, now I know: As the song goes, "I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now ..."

To put it another way, I danced with the devil on the dark side for more than 15 years, but dancing in the light of God's love for the past 20 years has been so much better.

Grace and peace ...