The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

That crazy motherfucker, Hunter S. Thompson, killed himself over the last weekend. He wrote some wacked out shit and even though I've tried to watch Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas I couldn't do it. I felt like I had ADHD after watching for about 20 minutes and I had to turn it off.

Anyway, this just brings up another point of interest. Why do all these well known writers commit suicide? Hunter Thompson is just the most recent. Guys like Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Jack London all committed suicide. I'm not sure why this exists, but there's a list on the Wikipedia site of famous people who've committed suicide. If you do a find for "author" or "novelist" you get a ton of names.

I guess the prevailing wisdom is that some writers become writers to deal with issues they have and writing is a catharsis for them. At some point the writing doesn't really solve their problems and they go over the edge. The same I guess with some musicians who either directly (Kurt Cobain) or indirectly (Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, the singers from Blind Melon and Sublime) end up killing themselves.

I think guys just end up thinking too deeply about stuff. In some ways this is sort of a restatement of what Max was saying about gimmicks. If you dissect life piece by piece, then you're left with fragments.

It's like if you're interested to know how your television works and you take it apart to see each individual piece. Most likely you will not figure out how it works, and then at the same time your TV is all fucked up. Now it's just pieces on the floor. You just gotta appreciate stuff for what it is and if we don't question everything, then we end up enjoying ourselves that much more.

It's interesting how there seems to be an inverse relationship in many ways between happiness and intelligence. I don't know if intelligence is the right word here. Maybe insightfulness. Anyway, an extreme example being say Gary the Retard from Howard Stern who's always happy about everything and say a John Nash or any of the myriad brilliant mathematicians who later went crazy.

Anyway, I've rambled a bit. I guess I'll stop now.