I didn't know it until Sunday night, but I really don't have that many living heroes.

There are plenty of writers and musicians and politicians that I absolutely adore, but when it comes down to it, they seem very human. Some part of me says, "Well, if I really worked at it, I could probably be like them some day."

This was not the case with Hunter S. Thompson, the drug-crazed political junkie whose writing from the 1960s and '70s-namely "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," and "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72"-still resides in a school of journalism all its own.

Thompson killed himself at his home in Colorado Sunday night, at the age of 67. When I read the news, I was completely shocked. The last time I can remember feeling truly stunned by a news story was on Sept. 11. I had almost the same reaction: I was frozen for a moment, then overwhelmed with the need to tell someone what had happened.

I tried to figure out why Thompson's suicide struck me the way it did, and I decided that it was because somewhere in the back of my mind I had always imagined meeting him someday, or at least writing to him-making some contact with a man who had achieved mythic status in my mind; "a Man on the Move…just sick enough to be totally confident," as he said in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."

He wrote about America-its politics, its culture-in a way that no one has ever quite been able to duplicate. As a journalist, he saw no separation between himself and his subject; he considered Dr. Thompson (or Raoul Duke, his doppelganger at the sports desk) to be just as integral to his story as any presidential candidate or party kingpin. He was often more interesting, too.

Perhaps what made his prose so exciting, though, was that he always sought the poetic truth of the news, even if his reporting never matched up to professional standards. He said what all his colleagues couldn't say-and they loved him for it. (Well, many of them did.)

In his coverage of the last days of the Nixon administration, he wrote: "Almost every journalist in Washington assigned to the Nixon Deathwatch had been averaging about two hours sleep a night…Many were weak and confused, succumbing to drink or drugs…Radio and TV reporters in the White House pressroom were reduced to tearing articles out of the nearest newspaper and reading them verbatim straight over the air-while the newspaper and magazine people would tape the live broadcasts and then transcribe them word for word under their own bylines… As August began and Nixon still showed no signs of giving up, there was more and more talk of 'the suicide option.'"

Absurd, yes, but telling nonetheless-even if the press corps had yet to get quite as desperate as an astronaut hurtling around the earth with no hope of re-entry, his sweaty palm wrapped around the handle of the escape hatch on his little, doomed space capsule.

Thompson was even more fond of taking shots at political figures than his fellow newsmen, and unafraid to embellish to make his point.

Writing about the status of Nixon's campaign funds during the '72 Republican convention, Thompson said: "The President was not immediately available for comment on how he planned to spend his forty-five Big Ones, but [chief fund-raiser Maurice] Stans said he planned to safeguard the funds personally. At that point, [campaign manager Clark] McGregor cracked Stans upside the head with a Gideon Bible… McGregor then began shoving the rest of us (the press) out of the room, but when Stans tried to leave, McGregor grabbed him by the neck and jerked him back inside. Then he slammed the door and threw the bolt… Jesus, why do I write things like that? I must be getting sick, or maybe just tired of writing about these greasy Rotarian bastards."

Beyond his writing, though, Thompson himself had the luck (or perhaps it was our luck) to blossom during one of the most brief, electrified periods in recent American history, what he called, "the kind of peak that never comes again."

And that's probably what turned him from an excellent writer into an icon: He was a shit-disturber in time of dissent and cultural overhaul, and he was unafraid to wholly engage his mind and his body in his moment, even if it meant he would be subsiding for the rest of his life.

Indeed, Thompson's later writing shows his wit and insight trumped by his angst and cynicism: "Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid little rich kids like George Bush… They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character."

He was still sharp, but I wondered if he really had his finger on the pulse of the country the way he once did. He seemed lost, unable to understand how America had changed. He seemed to be "strollin' through the lonely graveyard of [his] mind," as another aging '60s icon, Bob Dylan, put it in his 1997 album. Thompson was secure in his knowledge of the ghosts of America's past, yet struggling to determine what, exactly, they have borne in the present age.

I'll always remember him as his younger self, though, as the man in his cigarette-sucking moment-or, in the words of the Dylan song he loved the most, dancing "beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free / Silhouetted by the sea / … / With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves," longing to "forget about today until tomorrow."

Andrew Ivers is a junior studying English and political science.