"The King is dead. Long live the King."

The departure Hunter Thompson envisaged for himself in 1968 has come to pass, and with the assistance of Pennsylvania's own Zambelli fireworks company, who mingled his cremains with a brief firework display that made it back to Colorado where it decorated his temporary memorial, a tower taller than the Statute of Libery and visible for miles.

Although the site, and the attendees, sound quite wonderful and furnish any number of good quotes, this was my favorite part:

At the entry to what could only be called the set, his portrait was hung at the center of his personal literary solar system, surrounded by the planets of Samuel T. Coleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck and Mark Twain.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me.

The Good Doctor will be missed. And imitated. But never adequately. His impression on contemporary writing, however, is and will remain deep and indelible. Indeed, is his corpus stands for any one thing, it is the inextricability of the writer's personality from the writer's work. And Thompson's personality, being entirely inimitable, imbued his work with that same quality.

So with that, I bid the Good Doctor mahalo. From the first to the last, you did it your way. And nothing's better than that.