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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I can't compete with that hit by car incident. I can offer this... I was struck with lightning in high school.

Caveat: I was getting into my truck, between a house and a tree. Lightning doesn't strike in a single point. It comes up from the ground and "hits" in a bigger "area." I guess I was in that "area" because the bolt knocked me from a position leaning into my truck into the truck (felt like someone kicked me in the back), cracked branches off the trees, fried the tires on the truck (melted them to the wheels) and blew up the electric system in the house. The strangest thing was that the electricity followed the root system of the tree underneath the driveway and caused all the gravel just above it to shoot up in the air, raining down on my truck, but after the incident, I saw live insects on the tree. You'd figure they'd be fried.

Hunter did the End right, which indeed made up a lot done wrong in his closing years. Still, some of his later pieces ripping Bush (the ESPN Page 2 stuff and the occasional Rolling Stone rant) weren't bad, and his obit on Richard Nixon remains one of the most mean spirited things ever put to print.

BTW, Read Matt Taibbi. He's a great cross between Hunter and early PJ O'Rourke, and if it can be so, more cynical than either (yes, I realize Hunter wsn't a cynic, but what else do you call a defeated idealist?). O'Rourke should be boiled for his later right wing slop. The man who wrote Modern manners should have a goddamned decency not to turn into a pro-life Republican in his old age. You'd swear he was trying to make up for something to get into Heaven.

I was in a train crash where people died. the rest of you should shut up with your little bumps.