Too weird to live and too rare to die: the watches of Hunter Thompson
I must admit that I don’t read nearly enough. It’s not that I don’t like reading per se, it’s just that I’m too much of a movie buff to find time in my life to do so. Not to mention how much time I spend just browsing Wikipedia, or mindlessly trolling different luxury-related forums. All in all, I’m on fairly thin ice when it comes to literature. Regardless, I’m going to exercise my less-than-satisfying authority by claiming that Hunter S Thompson is by far my favorite author, being the writer of one of my favorite passages ever:
San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run … History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash … You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil … Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
— Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1972)
Now, cross you heart and tell me that that isn’t one most moving things you’ve ever read. It does without a doubt help to understand what a complete lunatic and enigma Thompson could be (the shooting of secretaries, massive drug consumption and eventual suicide aside). On the one hand, we have his very serious work on Richard Nixon (whom he despised and thought was “a monument to all the rancid genes and broken chromosomes that corrupt the possibilities of the American Dream” (if only I could scorn people like that). On the other hand, when he did end up sharing a car with Nixon they ended up having a riveting hour-long conversation about football.
One another hand, Thompson was the very essence of a freedom-loving hippie spokesperson for all sorts of hallucinogenics (Fear & Loathing is probably a lot closer to reality than some would like to realize), on the other hand he was obsessed with firearms and ended up, during his mayoral election campaign in Aspen, shaving his head just so that he could call his opponent a long-hair. A man of many contradictions, to say the least.
In many ways, he despised the consumption-oriented society that America grew into, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s. Still, it’s worth to note that he later on in his life, much like fellow revolutionary thinker Fidel Castro, wore no less than two Swiss watches at the same time. Pictured above is a Rolex GMT Master. Below is an admittedly poor screenshot from a TV biography.
Now, the quality is too poor to judge what Rolex model the upper watch actually is. It could be his GMT Master. It could also be a no-date Sub, but it’s definitely a Rolex. What’s also interesting is that the other watch is a TAG Heuer Super Professional with a gold bezel, pictured below.
Fidel reportedly wore his two Rolexes to tell time in both Havanna and Moscow. If the Rolex worn by Thompson is a GMT, that purpose seems rather pointless. Besides, what two time zones did he need to keep track of anyway?
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