From Beyond the Grave

If you don’t live in Colorado and aren’t one of the fourteen people who read the state’s “other” newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, you probably won’t encounter the last gonzo dirty trick of the Duke of Doonesbury. Yep, he planned it all along. He laid the seeds in 1977, almost too long ago to let most of us believe that anyone would remember, let alone seriously consider following through with it. Hunter S. Thompson has got to be grinning like a drug-crazed, motorcycle riding, guns-a-blazing, madman in the great beyond. He’s pulled off one last highlight to the abject foolishness of his fellow man.

As reported in the Rocky (that’s what we call it here to distinguish it from the more uptight and respectable Denver Post), Hunter laid out the plans for disposing of his mortal remains after his demise whether timely or sudden. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3634898,00.html

Get this. He wants his ashes scattered. Well, not exactly just that mundane act which is fairly common for those who live and love the mountains and forests. He wants them fired into the air from a cannon. OK, I hear you saying that’s not too unusual. The cannon is to be shaped like an upside down mushroom! Sort of a mushroom mortar memorial. The toadstool of TNT, capable of hurling ten pounds or so of ashes five hundred feet into the Aspen area atmosphere.

And, he wants the mushroom to be clutched in a raised fist—sort of the last act of defiance. Think Mexico City Olympics 1968 abstract done in green bronze and one hundred fifty feet tall. An arm and fist holding an inverted mushroom that erupts to spread Hunter across the canyons, ski-slopes, trout streams and pine log taverns of his former home. Symbolically just one foot shorter than the Statue of Liberty.

But wait, there’s more. The fist is to have two thumbs. What could be the significance? Is this a post-mortem admission of bi-sexuality? He went both ways? Is it a perverse paean to the politicians who practice their duality on every significant issue? Is it merely an engineering acknowledgement that with only one thumb on a bronze fist it’s a real bitch trying to hold onto an inverted fungus that shoots ashes to the heavens? Will we ever know?

Suffice to say that this is real! This is serious. This is really being considered by the good folks of Woody Creek Colorado. And, the debate is already heating up with several of the glitterati of Aspen griping that a 150 foot statue of a hand with a mushroom and a congenital deformity that ejaculates ashes one last time fulfilling the hallucinogenic-inspired ramblings of the man is not quite consistent with the surroundings of the pristine forest and snow-capped mountains.

Why they couldn’t simply laugh and say, “what a card that Hunter was”? Then dump the ashes in a Tupperware urn and throw it in the trunk of a 1972 Corvette and push it into the Roaring Fork.