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his stint at the Examiner and figure I ride the same roads. Which is real flattering, even if they do mean it in a literal sense.

Even I gotta admit that bit in Generation of Swine about the big orange STORAGE sign on Geary and Masonic resonates like a boot to my head when I read it...

But, yeah.

…

But this isn’t so much about that as it is about this . Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and all, with all apologies to Robert Herrick.

I’ve seen what my friends and colleagues have been writing, eulogies to astound and underline about what Thompson’s work meant to them.

But, me? I’m not going to do that. Rob Lavender, and Tom Mudd; maybe Mike Warshaw, and Steve Goldberg. Whitty, God rest his soul. These guys might know what the work meant to me, when I first read it. But so what? What good are flowers at the funeral when the guy you’ve bought them for isn’t there to enjoy them?

So this one isn’t going to be so much about Hunter S. Thompson, and more about me buying some flowers for my friend Harlan for him to enjoy now.

When I was a kid, living in rural Vermont, I used to read a lot of science fiction. I was an angry young man, back then, stuck in rural Vermont after having been born in Cleveland and raised in Dallas. I was a city kid. Well, suburb kid. But I liked action instead of crickets, even as a boy. The thing about rural Vermont, though, is that it’s cold in the wintertime. When we first moved up there, my dad told me it was gonna be cold . “Sure, cold,” I thought. “I’ve seen cold. We’ve had ice storms in Dallas in the dead of winter. Heck, I’ve seen 20 degrees.” Yeah, and that first winter I spent in Vermont it was twenty below for a week. I wouldn’t go outside because I thought the Earth was leaving its orbit. So when it’s too cold to go out, you do a lot of staying in. Me? I did some reading. Our town had an excellent library, and I went through all the big, obvious ones: Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein. I’d read any sci-fi anthology. Planet of the Apes , of course. I liked Farnham’s Freehold quite a bit. I somehow ran across The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the

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