After Hunter Thompson died I watched a documentary the BBC had produced following him & Steadman on a road trip to Hollywood, where they were having meetings about making Where The Buffalo Roam.

Interspersed with the silliness of a staged road trip are interviews with Thompson back at his compound.

He mentions that he, and probably the rest of the world, would probably be better off were he dead.

Along with this are shots of Hunter & Steadman consulting a funeral director about the construction of a memorial fist/cannon to be placed on his property.

All a bit ghoulish, to be sure.

As I watched the giant freak stumble about discussing his demise it struck me; the rumours are going to start any day now. "He just faked his death, like Elvis, Jim Morrison, Tupac, Andy Kaufman, & Jesus!" Or, "He didn't kill himself, mannn... He was rubbed out. They silenced him mannnnn...."

& today, oh Friday of my dreams, I got the first one.

A friend on MySpace had posted this link.

That's right, kiddies, he was taken out by G Men.

Yowza!

We seem to have hit a disturbing point in the larger relationship between celebrities & day walkers.

A paradigmatic bipolarity.

We do everything in our power to "Kill our Idols," but we can't let them just die.

I spend a lot of nights up late, pacing around smoking, muttering to myself about this, or that. One of my nocturnal meanderings a while back started, as they often do with some ponderance about race. This quickly morphed itself into a question of the function & validity of archetypes, then settled in, at last, to an issue of heroes.

The societal pathology of the frequently undeserved elevation of a person into an icon based on some achievement only remarkable by the standards of a spiritually bankrupt culture's pop-mentality.

It finally hit though. We need heroes, we need icons. Because we need a guiding light to motivate ourselves toward our ideal "I."

Toward being in love with our reflection every time we see it.

This is the function of Buddha, or Yeshua, or Abraxas; a Godhead to illuminate. A Godhead to Illuminate us.

The world, our lives, our minds, every fucking thing, everywhere, is constantly evolving, and confusion is unavoidable. The Illuminative Godhead is a focal point for our kundalini/satori/orgasm/etc...

Even our language is in constant flux. The rules of grammar are a foundation laid long ago, but like any foundation they must be retrofitted to allow for the simultaneous growth of the language, and its constriction into something less dependent on circularity and formality.

New nomenclature is is being inserted by both the learned denizens of the Ivory Tower (who felt "Melting-Pot" too provincial sounding & have supplanted it with "Diaspora"), & on the street level (where the "diaspora" is a "reality," rather than a Theoretical Substructure, or a Cultural Construct), at which language is a dynamic force, regardless of absurd misappropriations & malapropisms.

Life is a complicated matter. We can run propaganda wars over the introduction of Ebonics as an accepted dialect. We can shoot one another over shoes. We can bomb one another over the dinosaur remains which run our cars. We can invent theories over the demise of a celebrity who brought some joy or perspective to us through their violent, unstable lives.

Or we can recognize that the light shining from the words and thoughts of our heroes is nothing more than a well articulated expression of our own light.

We can remember that we've spent far too long mistaking the reflection for something separate from us.