Gonzo is dead...Are we to blame?...Bad vibes in the Heartland...Chaos theory strikes again...

"My god," I ask aloud, "What have they done?"

The Sun Star is in front of me. I'm only halfway through it and already something like three beers deep. I've also just discovered that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson is dead, and combined with the large amounts of high-potency decongestant tablets I've ingested, I can tell you that things are not looking pretty.

I could blame the paper sitting here with its six pages of Oscar coverage, though I did enjoy the latest stories from our Genitals and Basketball Correspondent Alex Foote and the report from Freshman Lacie Grosvold was a refreshing change of pace. Even the cover turned out nice.

Mostly I'm mixed up about Thompson's death, but I can't help feeling the two are related. The only conclusion I can come up with is that the Sun Star is somehow responsible.

It could have been the glaring lack of hard news he would have appreciated, and the comics were so cockeyed you couldn't read the text, rendering the wisdom of Haiku Circus unintelligible. It could have been Grantham's mindless blathering about the Oscars and movies and America and everything else. That could easily compel a person to blow their brains out.

To be honest though, I can't say I'm surprised. I always knew Hunter would go out with a bang. He loved ultra-fast motorcycles, consumed large quantities of alcohol and drugs, and he was a gun lover. What did we expect, a slow dimming of the lights, a Sun Star on his lap in front of the fireplace as he slipped off into the void?

"This is ridiculous," you're thinking. The Good Doctor didn't read the Sun Star, and even if he did, he was good and dead before the Oscar issue hit the newsstands. Stories about his suicide were already coming out, and the expert press wizards said he ended his life to avoid old age, before he turned into a big toxic pile of Jell-O.

People in Alaska identified with Thompson. We love that visceral, captain-of-your-own-ship appeal and a lot of us dug his Gonzo style of writing on everything from politics to the American Dream to the Hell's Angels (they're big up here too if you hadn't figured it out yet).

One of Thompson's last pieces of writing was, in fact, the introduction of a new sport he called "Shotgun Golf." This new pastime involves one player teeing off a golf ball, as in traditional golf, and the other player shooting the ball out of the air with a shotgun before it can land safely on the green.

It's perfect. I'm optimistic that this could really take off here—Shotgun Golf is pure Alaska.

In certain circles, a lot of talk has gone on about his death during the last week, and a couple people asked me, "Hey, did you hear that Hunter S. Thompson is dead?"

"Honduras Thompson?" I respond, "Where the hell is that?" pretending I don't know that we here at the Sun Star are as guilty as the gun that killed him.

But something subtler was at work here…

Meteorologist Edward Lorenz first described the butterfly effect in 1972, which soon became a metaphor for chaos theory. Lorenz said if a butterfly in, say, Guatemala flapped its wings on Wednesday, it was possible that by Friday morning a chain of events could cause it to rain in Juneau. Or something like that.

I quote an IBM business report:

"In layman's terms, chaos theory states that the most unpredictable and seemingly inconsequential events, such as a butterfly flapping its wings, can have a reverberating and unpredictable impact on the most seemingly unconnected systems, such as hemispheric weather patterns."

Thus, it is entirely possible that a weekly college newspaper in Fairbanks, Alaska could have caused Hunter S. Thompson to commit suicide thousands of miles away in Woody Creek, Colorado. At least it is entirely possible based on my five minutes of research into chaos theory and mostly on my contempt for six pages of Oscar coverage. All that and because I simply cannot come up with a better answer.

Hunter S. Thompson is gone, and all the freaks can do now is sigh.

30-

Comment on this story...