Hunter Thompson's daily routine

I hope those onion rings weren't fried in transfat! From Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson, by E. Jean Carroll.

(Via World's Best Ever)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

MORE: books • drugs • Hunter S. Thompson

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

http://boingboing.net/ Jason Weisberger

This closely resembles the Happy Mutants health care plan.
- http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
  
  How do I sign up for that, again? And what’s the co-pay on Chivas Regal?
  - http://boingboing.net/ Jason Weisberger
    
    Plan likely does not allow you to import pharmaceuticals from Canada.
    - http://boingboing.net/ Jason Weisberger
      
      Sorry, I was thinking of Crown Royal.
    - http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker
      
      That’s okay, I’d prefer to have Basil Hayden, anyway.
      - http://boingboing.net/ Jason Weisberger
        
        If you get sick, I will send you a bottle.
Roose_Bolton

Legend.
http://twitter.com/the_damned_fool the damned fool

From the book: book, Gonzo: The Life of Hunter S. Thompson, “Bob Braudis, sheriff of Woody Creek, Colo., “From now on when the phone rings at 4 a.m., it’s just bad news.”
Jay Buffington

From http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/169uxx/a_day_with_hunter_s_thompson/c7u6imt

“alright im sorry to be that guy, but this is simply not true. this comes from E. Jean Carroll who imo wrote the worst of HST biographies of all time. while hunter totally refused to speak with her she just spoke to associates, friends and acquaintances. and while she was not getting the stuff she was looking for she nvented a hunter who never existed. someone bigger then life who could deliver the stories she was looking for. but nothing of that stuff is true.”
- http://twitter.com/ChrisParry Chris Parry ™
  
  Agreed. I spent a night at HST’s pad, and the above is nothing close to what he did.
  
  Let me be clear, he did a LOT of things that would make as interesting a list, but none of this rings true. At all. In fact, Thompson and his wife talked about that list directly and how bullshit it was.
  - http://redesigned.com redesigned
    
    when were you there? he may have toned it down at the end, i moved away in the early 90′s. as his neighbor, i can say this was certainly true some days…
- Cowicide
  
  Thanks for the other perspective, Jay, but I still enjoyed it nonetheless.
- http://redesigned.com redesigned
  
  i hate to be that guy…but you really shouldn’t assume that just because the biographer didn’t speak to him directly doesn’t mean she got an inaccurate picture of his life in this regards. the man truly was epic.
  
  i was his uphill next door neighbor for almost 5 years, and am a big fan of his writing.
  
  while this schedule might not have been true every day, it sounds about right for one of his frequent benders. he’d be on a bender as often as not.
  
  i still remember the day he decided to try and shoot down don johnson’s helicopter because it flew over his land while he was trying to write. the cops came tearing down our road and it ended up with him yelling at them in his yard, from what i could make out it sounded like he felt he was “within his rights” to shoot down anything that flew over his land.
  
  between him and the damn peacock farm of the other neighbor, interrupted sleep was a common occurrence.
  
  one of my friends who was a waitress at the woody creek tavern said that he was just one of the many colorful characters that regularly frequented their establishment. the woody creek tavern was one of the more interesting places to drink. :-)
http://www.twitter.com/eselqueso eselqueso

Ah, Chivas and Dunhills… Breakfast of Gonzo Champions.
L_Mariachi

Fettucine Alfredo in a hot tub could get messy real quick.
- Edward Becerra
  
  Maybe a hot tub OF Fetticine Alfredo? Damn, now I’m hungry… ^_^
http://twitter.com/jmaynard8888 Joe Maynard

I don’t think this is cool or rebellious at all, it just makes me sad. We need to stop romanticizing the ‘self-destructive artist’ stereotype.
- rtb61
  
  Hardly self destructive. He simply committed suicide when his aged body could no longer handle his preferred life style, all of it a choice.
  At most I think he would have been offended that his body had not given up the ghost prior to this with a peaceful stroke or heart attack thus obviating the need for suicide.
Jerry Hilts

Bullshit.
Whoever made this up has apparently never taken a hit of acid in her life.
- niktemadur
  
  9 p.m. - cocaine
  10 p.m. - drops acid
  11 p.m. - Chartreuse, cocaine, grass
  11:30 - cocaine
  
  Reads like a classic case of “print the legend”.
- http://redesigned.com redesigned
  
  why? i’ve know several people who dropped daily for years. like any substance, regular users are affected quite differently then occasional users. acid has a very different baseline after several days of consecutive use. have you ever been a daily user of acid?
  
  i never firsthand had any knowledge of him dropping acid, although i’m sure he did from time to time. the drinking, smoking, coke, and weed, all sound about right though…as does the huge evening food binges at the tavern.
spacedmonkey

I’m in the bullshit camp. I don’t think anyone could survive that regimen for long.
jandrese

Yeah, my bullshit meter is pegged too. You can’t be doing coke back to back to back like that and still function, especially not every day. The weird thing is that HST is a crazy enough guy already, I don’t see a need to invent some sort of drug superhero on top of him.
- http://twitter.com/ChrisParry Chris Parry ™
  
  Hunter did a lot of coke, but it wasn’t back to back like this. It was one element of a drug regimen that he knew very well, and used specifically to maintain balance. A little coke now, a little ether later during a swim, a lot of whiskey, several joints, maybe a pre-writing snort to get back to the edge and go.
- http://redesigned.com redesigned
  
  there is a big difference between a “bump” and a “rail” or “line”
  
  you most certainly can do “bumps” this frequently back to back to keep going and the energy up…rails…no f’n way would it be possible.
  
  a long time user will more likely be doing small bumps to maintain “normal” then massive rails like a party user would.
  
  imho.
welcomeabored

Shouldn’t there have been a nap in there after the snowcone, or maybe a coma?
- oasisob1
  
  I was just surprised to find the snowcone had chivas on it, not snow.
http://maggiekb.com/ Maggie Koerth-Baker

I agree this is probably bullshit. I still find it wonderful and hilarious. Especially the implication that this is exactly his DAILY routine. Like, every morning, at exactly 6:00 am, Thompson ate Dove bars and fettucini in the hot tub. Never spaghetti. Never 6:45. It’s like “Rain Man” …. er, on acid.

I am reminded of the time my high school asked seniors to fill out a survey on our drug use and sexual behaviors. I’m sure they were surprised to find out that 95% of the forensics team was doing heroin 5 times a day and had had at least one abortion.
- blueelm
  
  I could actually see him or some one around him sending this to the reporter just to be hilarious. Because it really is hilarious.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

I believe that’s the exact same schedule as in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
- http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11
  
  Nah, not enough farting to be Benjamin Franklin.
  - welcomeabored
    
    If Hunter smoked all day, having a constant cloud of cigarette smoke around you can cover up alot of alchohol-perfumed butt stink. Maybe he farted like Franklin, but no one thought to comment. (My parents were both smokers and one was an alcoholic). Likewise with my aunt, although she rarely ate.
    
    For me, drinking and eating are mutually exclusive; I can only do one or the other. I can’t decide which to be more amazed by: that he consumed drugs and alcohol like that every day, or that he lived to the age of 67. Talk about ’burning the candle at both ends’.
    
    http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/burning-the-candle-at-both-ends.html
rastronomicals

I’m sure that Thompson took drugs every day. And if Carroll’s bio is bullshit, it’s not that far removed from what Thompson wanted you to believe. But probably the saddest thing about Thompson’s having been eaten alive by his self-created legend is that he never wrote anything that gave us an idea what a *real* day in the life might have been like
- blueelm
  
  More likely he followed the path of most binging creatives, either writing until a certain time, only drinking or smoking pot while writing, or some other system. Then for a few days he probably went on a complete binge, occasionally blacked out. The thing is… it’s boring as shit. Everyone does that. Not everyone clears some time every day to write. That’s the difference. As for the real man? Who wants to know him? Because getting to know the real man would make the reader special some how? That’s just not how art works. There is no real man. The wizard behind the curtain was also just a story some one wrote.
  - http://twitter.com/ChrisParry Chris Parry ™
    
    There was a real man, and a supremely genuine, and talented, one at that. He lived the way he wanted to live, from go to whoa, and happily took the good with the bad in order to squeeze every drop out of his existence.
    
    He didn’t want to sell insurance and retire to Palm Springs. He wanted to leave a mark. And he did.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Many of us here in Palm Springs could get through that list before lunch.
      - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
        
        Few people seem to be familiar with the build-up of tolerance most of those drugs would create with steady use.
        
        The only one that I question is the cocaine, just because he’d be unlikely to have much of a septum left. Replace the coke with Ritalin or Dexedrine and suddenly the list looks like a fairly standard binge for a grad student trying to crank out a thesis.
        
        I’m not saying it’s healthy or sustainable (or cheap), but I’m betting there were years when this wasn’t far off from HST’s diet.
  - rastronomicals
    
    Dude, blueelm i agreed with your first two sentences, and then we part company. 1) it’s not boring 2) Not everyone does that 3) Plenty of people wanted to know him. Ask Mssrs. Murray, Depp, Richards, etc. 4) Getting to know the real man is one of the ways that art happens. In fact it’s the *usual* way, Thompson’s fantasies being a very rare exception. 5) It IS how art works. 6) There was a real man, and the shame was how all the talent got buried under the rest of the admittedly fun bullshit.
    Other than that, good comment.
Jake0748

How does he have the appetite for that huge lunch after all that coke?
Shaun

Yeah, and how the hell did he have any appetite at all after slamming all of that blow all day long?
- http://redesigned.com redesigned
  
  bumps not rails…when you are a long time user it doesn’t affect you the same way. you need bumps to maintain a normal energy level because you’ve screwed your adrenals.
http://twitter.com/amordecosmos amordecosmos

This was the article that, when published in the 90′s, got me to start smoking Dunhills. And that year our campus fraternity recruited as the Hunter S. Thompson Appreciation Society. (We were kind of embarrassed to be called a fraternity, since most of us joined for the super cheap rent and ski team perks.)
http://profile.yahoo.com/J5FJEJQGV6WRWJZR3QLWPQ3S34 Vern

Christ, what an asshole.
Datavist

A minute spent on Google confirms my suspicions that this is horseshit, though use of the word apocryphal should be a red flag.
creesto

I read the article as “Chivas with the morning poppers…” still works.
Dave Horton

E. Jean Carroll only wrote four books in her life, and this was her only major biography. It was largely ignored, and mostly panned by anyone who read it. Hunter and his family dismissed the book. She certainly didn’t know him and likely never even met him. HST fans know that a lot of the legend is overblown hype. I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.
Antinous / Moderator

Was he insane? Did he not know that grapefruit has dangerous interactions with many drugs?
http://twitter.com/hewr0te hewr0te

all that coke and whiskey, but no blow jobs… poor slob of a writer
sockdoll

As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit. You won’t need much, just a tiny taste. Then seek more reliable sources of information about the actual lifestyle of HST.

He hated the word “lifestyle,” by the way.
aeryn

Whatever anyone says, I’d like to give HST some props for having his first cup of coffee daily at “4:95″, a mystical time somehow between 3:50 and 4:15.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  I guess that you’re not old enough to have lived through the 19A0s.
mysterymoil

Who orders a whole plate of tomatoes, I mean, seriously?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Italian people.