I doubt that many people are unclear about the handle* on my blog, or at least I was until I started publishing this random detritus more regularly. I am not a reporter, nor, as the saying goes, do I play one on TV. I have too much respect for the profession to make much of myself as a journalist. A journalist journals. I don't have the discipline. I don't think that I couldn't have it -- it's simply not a practice that I've subscribed to much. So much of the journaling process seems to be introspective, mindless wankery, and I'd rather have something to say or a picture with which to say it.

So let me indulge in a trifle more mindless wankery:

Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist in the proud American tradition of the craft, is gone.

There are a number of zygotic thoughts running around my head, but I'm doing my best to avoid much handwringing until a bit more information is made available. That said, and in the wake of the controversy swirling around the margins of the putative world of American journalism, take note. Here was a man who asked hard questions, demanded hard answers, and lived a hard life. He embodied his profession, and goes to his grave a consummate professional.

Why he didn't turn the shotgun on Judith Miller or "Jeff Gannon" will remain, for me, one of life's cruel and eternal mysteries.

Yet we may never have the real answers behind his final moments. And so ends the life of one of America's most original contributors to essays and letters; an enigma to the last.

Selah.

* For those who don't know, the title is ganked from a song from The Minutemen:

what could be romantic to mike watt? he's only a skeleton. his body's a series of points with no height, length, or width. in his joints he feels life. his strongest connection between the yelling & the sleep. pain is the toughest riddle. he's chalk. he's a dartboard. his sex is disease. he's a stopsign.