A gonzo journalist's exciting death wish

“My concept of death for a long time was to come down that mountain road at 120 and just keep going straight right there, burst out through the barrier and hang out above all that . . . and there I’d be, sitting in the front seat, stark naked, with a case of whiskey next to me and a case of dynamite in the trunk . . . honking the horn, and the lights on, and just sit there in space for an instant, a human bomb, and fall down into that mess of steel mills. It’d be a tremendous goddam explosion. No pain. No one would get hurt. I’m pretty sure, unless they’ve changed the highway, that launching place is still there. As soon as I get home, I ought to take the drive just to check it out.” Hunter Thompson –Quoted in St. Petersburg Times, February 22, 2005 I’ve read a lot of stuff by Thompson but this is the first time I’ve come across this particular quote. I guess he didn’t want to go out in his sleep. At any rate, he shot himself in the head a couple of years back at the not so old age of 67. But then it started–the conspiracy theory. When Prison Planet got a hold of this back in ’05 Alex Jones wrote: “Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn’t always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He’d been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: ‘They’re gonna make it look like suicide,’ he said. ‘I know how these bastards think . . .’ ” Maybe Hunter should’ve followed his first instinct and went off through the barrier. It wouldn’ve been a lot cleaner…Hey I know this is old stuff but it’s new to me.