He lived by the gun and he died by the gun. Now the late writer Hunter S. Thompson, who shot himself in February, is to be blasted from a cannon from the back garden of his home in the hills of Aspen, Colorado.
Thompson's ashes have been packed into firework casings and will be dispersed today from 34 different shells fired from a gun barrel mounted on top of a 50m-high monument.
The monument, in the form of a clenched fist made symmetrical by the addition of a second thumb, is modelled on Thompson's gonzo logo.
"We have never had a request such as this one in our company's history," Marcy Zambelli of Zambelli Fireworks told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "But we respect the request of the family and have actually custom engineered an aerial shell specifically designed to carry out his final wish."
A close friend of Thompson's, Michael Cleverly, said: "They've taken him out and had him pulverised into a consistency that is optimum for the blast, and it'll go straight up. It'll just be taken by the wind and drift around Woody Creek, a place that he loved."
Thompson, 67, killed himself six months ago with a shot to the head with a pistol. His body was found in a chair by his kitchen table, on which a typewriter had been placed and a page of writing paper had been lined up with the word "counselor" (sic) typed at its centre.
It was a typically enigmatic final word from the inventor of gonzo journalism, the stream-of-consciousness style of writing that was a chief ingredient in the new journalism of the 1960s and 70s.
The age of gonzo officially began with Thompson's account of a drug-fuelled visit to Las Vegas, published in two issues of Rolling Stone, and then released, to great acclaim, as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Much of today's ceremony and the Gonzo monument has been financed by the actor Johnny Depp, a friend of Thompson's who portrayed the writer in the film version of Fear and Loathing.
The actor, it seems, has drawn an idea from his most recent role as Willy Wonka, the chocolate magnate in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for today's ceremony.
In the story, five children who find a ticket inside the wrapper of a Wonka chocolate bar are invited to visit his factory. For the funeral the procedure is remarkably similar.
Brian Harvey of Boise, Idaho, found a secret ticket hidden inside the label on a bottle of the Flying Dog Brewery's Gonzo Imperial Porter.
The ticket grants Harvey and a friend entry to the party, as well as transport and accommodation, according to the company's website.
Gonzo Imperial Porter, with a label designed by another close friend of Thompson's, British artist Ralph Steadman, has a hefty price tag and a worthy cause. Bottles of the beer sell for US$95.
Only 1,500 numbered bottles have been made, and proceeds from the sale go to raise money for the Gonzo Memorial Fund. The fund, says the company's website, was "set up initially to raise funds for a permanent memorial to Hunter so future generations can ponder the life of one of the world's great mavericks".
But all is not sweetness and light in Woody Creek, the hamlet Thompson made his home. Some residents are emulating the writer's curmudgeonly ways.
Jimmy Ibbotson, another close friend of Thompson's and a musician with one of the acts performing at today's ceremony, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, fired a shotgun at a photographer hoping to take a picture of the cannon from his land.
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