...Heaven will be a place where the swine will be sorted out at the gate and sent off like rats, with huge welts and lumps and puncture wounds all over their bodies - down the long black chute where ugliness rolls over you every 10 or 16 minutes like waves of boiling asphalt and poison scum, followed by sergeants and lawyers and crooked cops waving rule books; and where nobody laughs and everybody lies and the days drag by like dead animals and the nights are full of whores and junkies clawing at your windows and tax men jamming writs under your door and the screams of the doomed coming up through the air shaft along with white cockroaches and red stringworms full of AIDS and bursts of foul gas with no sunrise and the morning streets full of preachers begging for money and fondling themselves with gangs of fat young boys trailing after them....Forgive the sophomorically apposite citation. I just like the writing.
But we were talking about Heaven...or trying to...but somehow we got back into Hell.
Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish - a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found out a way to live out there where the real winds blow - to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested....
Res ipsa loquitur. Let the good times roll.Hunter S. Thompson
from the introduction to Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80s
Some tributes from the world of blog: Steve Gilliard, Giblets, Dennis Perrin & The Rude Pundit. And one from Ralph Steadman in The Guardian. Godspeed, Dr Thompson.
EDIT: Rox Populi has more, and a compendium of links to works on-line.