FIELD NOTE #14 - THE PRICE OF MYTH
Woody Creek, CO. April 4, 2026.
We just flew in from Phoenix, where I'd spent the day interviewing a whistleblower from inside ICE. Someone with firsthand knowledge of everything that went sideways during Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis. A drag, really… the night before, I'd been in Colorado playing to a sold-out crowd at the Paramount Theater in Denver. I honestly would have preferred a couple days to cool off without having to hear or think of the word ‘journalism.’ Maybe get a motel room in Durango and record more Spanish-language raps. Or drive up to the Dakotas and check in on my old cellmate Chris, who's apparently doing well and running a sober living up in Rapid City. This may come as a shock to some of you, but I'm getting tired of creating documentaries. Well, to be clear, producing impactful journalism is my primary passion and sole purpose in life. Yet the arduous process of research, chaos of last-minute travel, physical leg-work of conducting the interviews themselves and endless hours spent on Adobe Premiere during post-production are things I could live without. The only parts I enjoy are the initial idea and final release. One of my greatest inspirations, the late-and-great late Hunter S. Thompson, expressed a similar relationship to his own work:
“Writing is the flip side of sex—it's good only when it's over,” he wrote. “I've always viewed it as a sort of a left-handed thing, sort of a ticket to ride. Journalism has always been my way of going to a place to see if I wanted to see what was going on. Once I've gotten the story in my mind, the rest is just pain. And to cure the pain, we put it together between covers.”
He couldn't have put it better! Every step between the sudden arrival of an exciting idea and the eventual publication of a piece is pain, full of unforeseen creative obstacles and logistical roadblocks. Yet it's a labor of love, so we keep pushing.
On the flight over the Rockies I kept trying to figure out what the next move for Channel 5 was going to be. I've been deep in a run of celebrity interviews lately. Spanning from Afroman to Clavicular, the Hawk Tuah girl all the way to Shia “chill with these questions, Andrew” LaBeouf… there’s been a theme here: portraits of the ways different folks handle the scrutiny of the internet's gaze. Yet I feel that maybe it’s time to get back to my roots, interviewing disaffected Americans and fringe experts with a sprinkling of pedestrians rapping.
I also had to compose a decent Field Note, which I’ve been writing on a weekly basis to train my brain’s word-muscle after years of nearly doomscrolling myself into illiteracy.
To be clear though, these written dispatches aren't just a means to advance my reading level. I just closed a book deal with Simon & Schuster yesterday. S&S is one of the biggest publishing houses in the country and they’ve tasked me with creating a memoir about my journey from teenage hitchhiker to apparent 'Gen Z Gonzo extraordinaire.' This opportunity will give me the chance to tell my story in a whole new way and provide a dignified medium to clear the air on some extremely fucking important things — one thing in particular, that should've been put to bed ages ago.
So these field notes are helping me develop my own written flow, learn how to best express myself, and ultimately turn in an intelligible first draft to S&S by the end of summer. I wish I’d been writing these things consistently throughout my entire career, but hindsight is 20/20.
I initially thought I’d write a piece about Clavicular, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I'd rather drip ghost pepper hot sauce into my eyeballs like Visine. The dude was pretty what-you-see-is-what-you-get and I didn't think my internal observations would bring anything new to the table. This left me deep in the grips of a dreaded writer's block.
Back to the late, great Hunter S. Thompson. I was hoping the opportunity to kick it at his Colorado compound would spark something.
***
I brought my landlord from Lake Periphery along for the journey. As it turns out, you can actually be friends with your landlord if they charge you under $500/month and don’t complain about noise. When I first moved to Lake Periphery, I never expected to assemble a full film crew out of the ragtag desert-dwellers who live on my street. Yet I’d pulled it off in a matter of months and now my landlord flies with me everywhere we go. His name is Damon, an ex-pornographer who would look more at home in the movie Easy Rider. Not that he cosplays a vintage biker like a large contingent of listless millennials in Southern California. No, his look is more subdued and casual, functional and comfortable. Black jeans and a dark t-shirt with a full sweater of tattoos.
We walked through the door of the Woody Creek Tavern, Hunter S. Thompson’s former watering hole. It was packed wall-to-wall with the 21st century's very own generation of swine. You know the type, best described by two words: Patagonia Fleeces. I should have anticipated this from the luxury SUVs and e-bikes populating the parking lot. Aspen tourists making the pilgrimage to see the favorite dive bar of the dude who wrote the book to the movie that was a poster on their stoner friend's dorm room wall. On one wall there was a portrait of HST done in the style of Shepard Fairey's Obama 'Hope' poster, except instead of HOPE it said GONZO underneath. The place was a gift shop first, and a bar second. And as a first-class connoisseur of dive bars around the world, the juxtaposition was jarring. All manner of Gonzo idolatry and merchandise — and I couldn't really blame them, it probably made Woody Creek Tavern a buttload of money, but that didn't mean it didn't make me a little sad. It kinda reminded me of one of those '90s family restaurants with a bunch of crap on the wall. Like in that movie Office Space, except all the pieces of flair were all Hunter-related. Last call was 9 PM, which seemed pretty out of character for a bar once frequented by a man whose penchant for cocaine was no secret.
The one cool thing was a napkin behind glass near the front of the bar. Hunter's handwriting. It says: Never call 911. Yes, that means you. HST.
My friend RJ — another Lake Periphery associate — said something once that popped into my mind just then: everything you love will be commodified and sold to the people you hate the most.
I was standing in the putrid proof of that observation.
The aging bartender recognized me — and not just in a casual oh shit, you're the All Gas No Brakes dude way. He leaned over the bar and said, "How was the show in Denver?"
"Sold it out," I told him. "Got a Blucifer tattooed on my leg live on stage to commemorate it."
He winced. "Looks pretty rough?"
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty rough. The dude was under a lot of pressure with the live crowd and shit. I'm gonna get it touched up next time I'm in Albuquerque.” I like to support a shop called Red Light Tattoo in Albuquerque.
The bartender said he started working there in 2010, five years after Hunter's death. Sixteen years is a long time to work anywhere, especially in the service industry. He looked at me and said, "You want to see the real shit?"
I thought he'd never ask. "Yes, of course, dude."
He motioned me to a back room, to a roped-off section of the original bar, perfectly preserved. Nobody's allowed back there anymore. It looked like a working man's wallet had been blown to smithereens by an M80 sometime in the latter half of the 20th century and plastered the walls with dollar bills. They were yellowed and signed with names. An absolutely beautiful sight.
But I'd seen a place like this before. It reminded me of my own watering hole back in Lake Periphery. To a T. Before I could mention it to my new bartender, he gestured back toward the main bar, at a cluster of old-timers grumbling over their drinks, lamenting the billionaire Aspenites who’ve sucked the soul out of town.
Then he pointed to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. The headline said: A Haven for Locals, describing Woody Creek Tavern as the polar opposite of what it was today.
"At least a few of those old crocodiles are still around. That's the Breakfast Crew — they were all drinking buddies with Hunter."
"So the guys in Patagonia vests aren't locals?" I smirked.
He laughed, then looked around and said, "Hunter would absolutely flip his shit if he saw this place now. Maybe even burn this place to the ground."
"When Hunter was alive," I asked him, "was any of this stuff here? The portraits, the napkins under glass, Shepherd Fairey poster, all of it?"
"No. Hunter never would have allowed it. This was the only place where he felt seen by his people. He’d be embarrassed to see the walls decked in all this commemorative shit. Wouldn’t you?”
In my mind's eye, I used to picture Hunter riding a Harley bike down here with a crossbow and busting through the door to meet Johnny Depp for the first time. Standing there in this shrine to capitalism masquerading as a homage to an American titan of words, I couldn't picture it at all. The cops would've been called before he got to the door.
As I chowed down on a semi-decent veggie burger, I thought about Hunter when he first came to Woody Creek. He'd just published Hell's Angels. He was a hotshot bestselling author — he could have gone to Hollywood or New York. But he wasn't a greedhead, he was a well-grounded Southern gentleman that needed something real. So he set his sights on the Rockies and built a compound at the end of a dirt road and got himself some peacocks and an arsenal of high-powered firearms.
The Woody Creek Tavern used to be where real Americans went to drink. It was where Hunter went to let his hair down — although he didn't have much hair. Just a place where he could chill with the freaks, weirdos, and outcasts that saw him for him, and not the drug-addicted, amoral trickster know as 'Uncle Duke' in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury comic strip, which ran in the weekly papers for decades. According to early interviews, Trudeau's cartoon was the depiction Hunter that hated most.
"Some people grow up and want to be firemen, and some want to be president; nobody wants to grow up and be a cartoon character," Hunter said, largely crediting the loss of his anonymity as a journalist and privacy as a citizen to Trudeau. "If I ever meet him, I might set the little bastard on fire."
In the same interview, Hunter explains that he himself never wanted to be become famous, preferring a fly-on-the-wall approach to his job. Yet the myth he'd built through his character in Fear & Loathing forced him into the shoes of a cultural icon. A frontman of the very freak-show he'd sought to document.
I thought of what the area looked like in 1969, and the place looked in my mind's eye a lot like somewhere I know. A place with cheap rent, weird neighbors, no one cares if you're famous, nobody asks what you do for a living. A place where you're allowed to just be a person for a while. I know that place. I live there currently.
The difference between Woody Creek then and Woody Creek now is that a famous writer put a gun in his mouth, and the people who never understood him while he was alive showed up afterward to buy his ghost. It was horrifying.
I want to be careful about comparing myself to Hunter S. Thompson — enough people do that already and I don't think I'm anywhere near able to fill his shoes at this stage in my life. But I'll say this: he published Hell's Angels, his first book, at 28. I’ve just signed my first deal at 28. He moved to Woody Creek at the exact age I am right now. At the same age I moved to Lake Periphery. And I am not here as a tourist, nor do I own or have ever owned a Patagonia fleece.
I was also invited here by Thompson's widow, Anita.
***
We arrived at Owl Farm around 2 AM. At 9 AM, I woke up to Sympathy for the Devil blasting at full volume from somewhere on the property. It had been running all night.
The farm is a lot smaller than I had expected, much in the same way as when you meet a movie star and they are a lot shorter than you imagined. I thought about the first time I'd seen Danny Trejo in the flesh — an LA rite of passage — I was shocked at how short he was. I'd always pictured him as a towering giant. He was 5'6. Not that he wasn't still intimidating. Owl Farm is like that. It's a modest two-bedroom house, a side cabin, a shed in the back. 42.5 acres of Colorado mountain property, which sounds enormous until you factor in that most of it is just open land rolling out behind the house toward the valley.
Out front, Hunter's famed red Barracuda sits under a tarp. Near the entry post there's a bronze sculpture of a peacock, and then there are the actual peacocks. Dozens of them, roaming the property with an air of superiority that makes you certain they are of the belief that they, not the humans, are the ones in charge. And they weren't wrong. Hunter had gotten the first ones with a head full of mescaline, the story goes. That tracks.
Near the main house there's a sign that says: Nobody gets in to see the wizard. Not nobody. Not nohow. And another one: It never got weird enough for me.
I asked Anita why the music was running all night.
"If we don't play music," she said, "the owls attack the peacocks."
That was my first inkling that the whole place was organized around the birds. Hunter Thompson — one of the great men of letters in recent American memory — had constructed an elaborate nocturnal sound system to protect his peacocks from owls. Which is somewhat ironic given that the place is called Owl Farm, not Peacock Farm. It reminded me of the feral cat colony that Disneyland maintains to control the rodent population after hours. Disneyland is an elaborate shrine to a mouse if you catch my drift. Maybe that doesn’t make sense. Hopefully it does.
Anita had met me at the tavern the night before and I'd vibed with her immediately. She was in her fifties but didn't look it, she obviously took care of herself. Warm, in the way people get when they've been through enough that putting up a front isn't worth the effort anymore. The kind of thing that only comes with age. There's a sadness to her face when discussing Hunter, and I don't think she'd be insulted if she knew people noticed. She’d essentially been a professional widow for 20 years, living in the house where he lived and died.
My original plan was to film a 5CAST with her. Almost immediately, I lost total interest in doing so out of respect for what felt like a religious experience. Filming would've been extractive in a way I wasn't comfortable with. I'd been invited into her home, the stuff of journalistic dreams, into her grief and unfinished business, and it felt like the wrong time to put her on record. We just talked, like normal humans, without lavalier mics and a camera. She opened up to me like she had been waiting to say these things to someone specific, and had decided, for whatever reason, that I was that person.
The first thing she said, almost before we sat down, was: "Now that he's gone, it is your turn."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.
She took me down to the War Room. That's what Hunter called it. It's in the basement of the main house, where he spent up to sixteen hours a day writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and everything else that mattered. Perfectly preserved. His typewriter still on the desk. The wall above it covered in Polaroids, press passes and letters. His credential from the 1971 Democratic primary, when he was embedded with McGovern against Nixon. Photos of him with Muhammad Ali. Shelves packed with books he'd dog-eared and annotated. I hadn't known he called it the War Room. We have a War Room back at the Channel 5 office in Los Angeles. I'd named it that without knowing. Same idea, different era: trying to make sense of the whole American experiment as it rages around you.
There was a ruler on the desk with his handwriting on it. It said: character is action.
Before I left she unclasped an original Gonzo necklace from around her neck, the logo cast in metal, and handed it to me. "I want you to have this," she said. "It's from Hunter."
I didn't know what to say to that either, so I didn’t say anything.
***
The investigation into Hunter's death had been reopened last fall and ended up on the front page of the New York Times. People's first instinct was predictable. Younger woman – Anita – married an old famous man two years before he died, you know the deal. The narrative wrote itself and the narrative was wrong.
She told me she didn't push for it. Hunter had a lot of women in his life, ex-girlfriends, women who had been around for years, and some of them were actually in the room when it happened. After twenty years of silence they started talking. That's what triggered the investigation, not Anita.
She wasn't even there. They'd been fighting. Hunter had been talking suicidally on the phone, talking about ‘what's the point, civilization is collapsing, there's nothing worth sticking around for.’ The kind of talk that had become a pattern and that she could never fully get used to no matter how many times she heard it. He called her at the gym and asked her to come home so they could work on his ESPN column together, which was his way of pulling back from the ledge. She thought they were okay. They were still on the phone when she heard the click. She thought it was the typewriter. That was their thing, that was how she always knew a fight was over, as soon as she heard him start typing she knew whatever spiral he was on had run its course. The click of a gun being cocked and the click of a typewriter loading sound a lot alike apparently. She was sitting there at the gym waiting for him to come back on the line. He didn't. His son Juan found the body.
She believes it was a suicide. She just wasn't sure she'd been told the whole story of how it went down. There's a difference. What she'd heard was that the women who were in the room that night were saying he was still yelling, still writing, still going right up to the last minute. The allegation was that it was an assisted suicide and that Juan had sanctioned it. She took what she knew to the sheriff and named names. The CBI investigated for four months and closed the case in January, finding nothing that contradicted the original ruling.
She hadn't gone public with any of it, which had kind of backfired on her. By refusing to go on record with the Times she'd made herself look like she had something to hide. Like the grieving widow trying to keep the lid on things. I've had my own negative experiences with that paper and I couldn't blame her for not wanting to talk to them. It's the same reason the other Hunter had talked to me. I don't have an agenda.
One thing about suicide that people don't talk about enough is the anger. You love someone completely, you grieve them completely, and underneath all of it there's this fury that you can never fully justify and never fully let go of, because frankly it's a selfish thing to do. Maybe the most selfish. That is why I didn’t kill myself in the January or February of 2023. Because I am my mom’s only child and I knew what it would do to her. Otherwise, I was completely ready to go, and still sort of feel like I'm living on borrowed time. Anita and Hunter were planning to have kids together. That was a big part of why she agreed to marry him. She adjusted her whole life around that possibility, got the courthouse wedding, all of it. And even now his genetic material is sitting frozen in a lab somewhere in Colorado. But she never used it. She couldn't imagine raising his child without him.
At Owl Farm, Anita isn’t running a museum and she'll be the first to tell you that. She never asked to be the keeper of his legacy. But she is, and she takes it seriously, and part of why she'd first gotten in touch with me after hearing me talking about Hunter on Lex Fridman, was to set the record set.
This is what she wanted me to know and what she wanted people to know:
Most of Hunter's great work, everything that actually mattered including Fear and Loathing, was written completely sober. Not sober-ish. Sober. Caffeinated, yes. Cigarettes, yes. But never on drugs. Maybe some alcohol. Now Hell's Angels, his first book, that one he wrote on drugs. But by the time he sat down to write it he'd already put in ten thousand hours. The craft was there, it was in his muscle memory from years of grinding, the drugs weren't doing the writing. Everything after that, the serious work, was done clean and serene.
She hates the Gonzo-drug association more than almost anything and has a specific person to blame for it. Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone. When Wenner moved the magazine from San Francisco to New York and turned it from a counterculture outlet into a cheap socialite rag, Hunter walked.. contributing only in sporadic bursts while offering his services to a number of competitors. Her read was that after he left, there was a concentrated effort in publishing to typecast him, including the calculated promotion of Doonesbury. In order for Rolling Stone to succeed, Wenner had to advance the narrative that Hunter walked due to his own drug abuse, not because the magazine sold out. What ensued was multiple decades of shoddy biographical coverage that depicted Hunter as an unreliable druggy, a brilliant disaster you couldn't trust. The very myth that had 'made' him into a cultural icon became a weapon used against him.
The cocaine was abuse real though, Anita said. The nineties were brutal. At its worst, Woody Creek Road was bumper to bumper with people coming to party, closing out the tavern and moving the whole thing back to Owl Farm. Free cocaine, all night, every night. Cocaine, alcohol and cigarettes were his Holy Trinity, his ritual, his way of getting comfortable and his way of coming down, it was baked into everything. But it caught up with him.
The coke made him functionally unable to write. His nose was so destroyed by the mid-nineties that snorting it no longer worked and he had to resort to freebasing. The myth he'd built, the gonzo outlaw, the man who ran on excess, had turned him into a magnet for exactly the kind of people and energy that were killing him. Every parasite who wanted to party with Hunter Thompson would either find him at the Woody Creek Tavern or show up at his door with cocaine, and he’d let them in. He was on the spectrum she said, just desperate to connect with people, and the legend he'd built around himself had become his armor, the thing that made him feel less exposed. He'd already blown up his first marriage back in 1980. Things had long since soured with his son, Juan. He became, by his own admission, an egomaniac.
Anita needed me to understand that he knew this. That by the time she came around he had seen the errors of his ways and was genuinely trying to turn the ship around. He was waking up at 9 AM, going on walks, largely clean if you didn't count drinks at the tavern. He was trying to write again. He wanted to put it all behind him. And then he put a gun in his mouth. Why?
I understood it more than I wanted to. For a long time I was running the same operating system. Cocaine and alcohol, the age old artist's self deception that it was "part of the process." I was the free spirit, the rambling man. The Hemingway mythos of a writer who drank from Key West to Paris and back again. It's like how drug dealers get super into Scarface but totally miss the point that Tony Montana dies in the end. Hemingway and Thompson put shotguns in their mouths, I'd never put three and five together on that and gotten eight. I thought it was the lifestyle, the rare mutant that was "too weird to live and too rare to die." Really though, I was just too fucked up to work.
Sometimes, the homies would tell me I was overdoing it and my mom was catching onto the fact that I was going off-the-rails. Still, I wasn't trying to hear it back then. I'd have periods of sobriety, but it coke-and-booze would keep creeping back into my life. I used to love it because it made me feel invincible, wittier and prettier. But as I’ve gotten older, I hate the a person bender makes me. After a while, I get quiet in a way that isn't peaceful while simultaneously having so much to say, that I end up barking it out at inappropriate and random intervals through clenched teeth, frequently promising things to people I’ll never see again. And then two-to-three days of the serotonin blues in which I'm incapable of producing anything of journalistic value.
I'm happy to say that I've put that part of my life behind me. I'm not totally sober, nor do I think I need to be. Yet there's always part of me that wants to withdraw ten grand, score an eight ball, learn to drive a motorcycle, surf Instagram DM's for a willing companion, change my name, get a face tattoo of a demon, move to Las Vegas and howl at the moon til' my liver fails.
But standing there in Hunter's War Room and wearing his necklace, I felt something I can only describe as an ominous warning from the other side.
I had to heed it. I have too much to lose.
***
It was 11 AM. I was walking through the backyard where Johnny Depp shot Hunter's ashes out of a cannon, past the spot that's now a registered NRA gun range, the legal workaround that let him fire weapons back there all those years. Some part of me had been sitting with anger all afternoon and out here in the dark it was easier to feel it clearly. Not at the situation. At him.
At Hunter, specifically. For what he left Anita holding. For the position he put her in. For deciding, at 67, that the tape was done.
Ralph Steadman is still alive. He's got a show in Fort Collins in two weeks. Hunter’s friends are still out here, still kicking. Hunter should be too. The world needed him then and it needs him now more than ever. Yet he decided that the myth mattered more than the work that was left to do. Anita had to hear a gunshot and think it was a typewriter. She is still in that house with his frozen genetic material in a lab and his ashes scattered around the property and his Barracuda under a tarp and dozens of peacocks that she has to play the Rolling Stones for all night so the owls don't get them.
And he isn’t there.
Anita asks if I’d like to write the foreword to my upcoming memoir on his War Room typewriter and also, if I want a grapefruit. I say yes to both.
She seems a bit happier today, and so am I.
AC
Comments (103)
That was an excellent read, I am so grateful for your existence Andrew and inspired by you
I love this so much and had no idea you and Hunter had such a special connection. Keep writing dawg.
Late to the party. The voice you have developed in your writing is very powerful, and held me in a tight grasp the whole piece through. Thanks for sharing. You & your work is important beyond what words could convey. This essay feels like very meaningful insight into your innerworld. Everything you create at this point moving forward is frankly anchored in history and even if its something you dont enjoy discussing, if it feels like it puts a spotlight on you, thats understandable. But the work youve done so far and the mission youve set out on has certainly cemented you with the greats. i cant imagine that’s comfortable, the burden is heavy, but youre paving a path forward for others to follow with the difficult journey youve embarked on. Anyways. Other degenerates like me and folks struggling with sobriety will be better off thanks to your vulnerability as well as the rest as the world has been for your work at large. Peace & love xox
Reading this changed my entire perspective of Andrew. I am pretty disheartened. I thought Andrew and Channel 5 cared about journalism, not their image. All this article made me think is that Andrew is obsessed with his own public image. Hamilton Morris needs to come back to documentary film making. We need at least one genuine person in this space. I thought Andrew was that guy after Hamilton stepped back, but, after reading this, he is clearly not the guy. Being honest though, I'm still going to subscribe and watch bc I like the majority of content. I'm not trying to be too much of a hater-Andrew should focus on film instead of words. Also, somebody find a pic of him wearing a patagucci. I know there's one out there...
I don't read that much anymore because legal work sucked the enjoyment out of it. But for the first time in a while, I read this lengthy journal entry and enjoyed it. Also just watched Dear Kelly yesterday after learning about the lawsuit and throwing down on the GoFundMe. I really don't know how you have the energy for everything that you do, but it inspirational, and I admire your search for truth. Take care.
is this the latest update it's been 3 months hopefully more has happened
I put this off for a while but I couldn't wait to get to it. Honestly I love your writing. The zine was killer, and every field note... I look forward to these. This one moved me a lot. I really love and appreciate and support the work you do Andrew. Especially the honesty part, and the being upfront and addressing things too. Its courageous, and in a world where there is a lot of need for accountability - and taking responsibility and at the very least restorative justice - there are far too few examples out there that people can look up to who have the courage to stand for that and act on it. Thank you
Really enjoyed reading this. Great writing brother.
Arguably your best field note, both in prose and the weight of the story. Thank you for this, it’s a privilege to watch your creativity continue to grow. Always grateful for the ways your work has genuinely expanded my views on American life & politics.
you and Hamilton should work together more. The shit the two of you could come up with, and the way you two could present it, would be top fucking tier, man.
You're the man now, dog.
Love your field notes and look forward to the book. Congrats! Re: the journalism overload. I’d suggest hiring a contextually-aware, historically-informed production manager who understands and can translate your vision with your team. It could help clarify Ch5/AGNB operations and mission…while taking a load off your shoulders as you focus on writing. This said, I hope you’ll be able to ‘finally put to bed that one thing in particular…’ Please know there’s a world of support out here for you—so many folks who deeply appreciate the work and care about you. That should be evident by now. Just remember to fasten your seatbelt and enjoy the ride.
how do you interpret your success?
AC, For real, Hunter S. Thompson would absolutely cheer you on. He probably is cheering you on, wherever the fuck he is. Nobody is doing interviews with ICE agents like yours. Nobody. I don't say this lightly, but if you need some more encouraging words, read Thompson's letter to his friend that he wrote when he was 21. I think he would have thought what you're doing is really admirable. You're carrying the torch and that shit sucks sometimes, but you're doing an excellent job setting a better bar for the generations he feared were "a nation of frightened illiterates." It's hard work, and most of all, I recommend you balance this crazy job and responsibility, with extremely strong doses of luddite-ism and being offline (If you treated being offline like Hunter treated drugs, I think you would actually be in a good spot.) Cheers from LA.
Congrats at the book deal 🔥
Powerful stuff man.
So much respect for you, respecting Anita. A beautifully written article. a real class act, keep it up. Well, classy when you need to be. The people need you alive, covering WHAT YOU WANT.
hell yeah dawg
This might be the best “article” of anything I’ve read in a long time! I’m not to far off a similar path, and it’s amazing how all different walks of life go though and struggle with Very Similar things.
AC: presses X to stay silent
<3
Insane
Great piece. Courageous, confessional, all the things that make writing a powerful medium. Dig deeper into those things. Explore that anger. Is there also sadness? What other emotions? How are they manifesting? Why are they there? It seems like there's anger at the patagonia yuppies? Is that tinged with any of your radical empathy? Are they, like the outcasts, lost souls but just don't realize it? What do those groups have in common? Are they miserable running the rat race but can't recognize the alternative? What is the alternative? Keep writing dude.
can't wait to see your writing evolve and come into its own. this was a great way to start my day
I can't wait for the book. You're clearly developing a real HST inspired writing style thats still your own. Keep at it and my only piece of advice: while its great to be inspired by others (HST would write out Fitzgerald and Hemingway novels in full to get the feel for how their fingers moved on the typewriter), don't be afraid of your own voice. thats the unique part of you that is gnawing to get out and onto the page (or likely the screen). Best of luck, Andrew.
Great read. Thanks for sharing
I love your writing more than your videos and that's saying something. I do see the similarities between Hunter and yourself, I'm sure that's why | like you both. When my best friend tried to kill herself when I was 19, I experienced that anger you mentioned. It was more than anger though, it felt like a break in trust, we trust people not to kill themselves, especially those of us that grapple with those dark thoughts. I remember thinking how could you leave me here with one less good thing?! | look forward to the book! Good luck!
Love you Andrew
Love you Andrew. You’re worth more than a sad writers legacy. Heed the warning. You have too much work left to do. Congratulations on the book.
This is basically a HST fanatic’s ‘wet dream’ 😭. Good for you AC, keep up the great work.
Wow Andre, excellent writing. Thank you for the transparency.
Agreed, great job Andre
Thank you, Andrew.
You nailed this, dude. I don't know if you feel it's up to whatever standard you aspire to, but I wish this was posted some other places so more people could read your work. Unless you want to keep it closed off to add to the book later on, that would make sense. I also agree with your sentiment of getting back to stories about disenfranchised Americans, instead of just influencer/culture hot topic one shots that can sometimes feel shallow. Definitely feels like the right direction.
amazing brother. Thanks for not filming. You did this so right.
I'm so excited for you and can't wait to read the book! This was beautifully honest and moving, keep staying true to yourself, we love you 💗
This is so freaking good Andrew. You’re an inspiration
I'm glad you started sharing your writing, you are a good writer.
Can't wait to read the book, man - this stuff is special. There are a lot of us who are grateful that you chose to keep going back in 2023.
Thank you man.
Thank you for you and your teams’ labor of love. Knowing you listened to that woman….
Excellent
What is that weird metal statue in HST's room? A dog?
This is real special. Thanks for your vulnerability, homie. Shit is appreciated and shows what true manhood should look like.
Yep. Keep it cookin brother.
Incredible read. I'm not familiar with your past writing work, but you definitely still got it man. Keep going.
Can’t wait to read your book AC
All I gotta say is, you better release that on audiobook and in your own voice. Congrats, dude...well earned.
Agreed but audiobooks are not reading, diff thing
One of the greatest. You're such an inspiration
This reminds me of when Pryor passed the torch on his death bed to Chappelle. It feels that significant. Maybe not sentiment from the man HST himself, but from someone who might’ve been the most important person in his life. This memoir is gorgeous. I’m 😭 and touched by your words.
Keep writing 👏🏻
Your work is great, and I am grateful to have been able to see you grow as a person and journalist. Even if it’s only through the internet. Can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store for us with your book!
Loved this. I’m so grateful you did the Hunter interview or I wouldn’t have found you. I love your interviews and writings so much, please keep doing you and take care of yourself!
For whatever it's worth, I subscribed to Channel 5 the moment I saw Andrew running down the street while simultaneously interviewing a guy whose car had just been stolen. Here I saw a true journalist who was literally chasing the story, as opposed to a panel of talking heads all pushing whatever narrative their corporate overlords were invested in. The field notes are fine and the celebrity interviews are okay, but my favorite content will always be hitting the streets and showing the "what's actually going on right now." I hope you continue to follow your passion and don't get burned out. And maybe hire a professional video editor while you're at it.
Prose was good enough and the self-importance was a little jarring but never so over-the-top that I quit reading, not bad
I mean, he received a necklace from the wife of the man with the sentiment that he’s carrying the torch. That’s not self-importance. That’s just importance.
You've got a gift, Andrew. Keep pushing bro. This touched my soul and gave me new perspective. Can't wait for the book!
Thank you for this. What a gift to read something so introspective
Got damn, there's the beauty I needed today. Grazie fratello
This was an incredible read man. I’m glad you figured things out—we need you. My dad was a journalist and died young and every now and then I wish I’d followed in his footsteps, times like this. I’m an addictions counselor now, but I have written. And this made me want to write again. Thank you for all that you do!
This is why I'm here.
when yer done https://msf-usa.org/start-your-ride/basic-ridercourse/
W reads
Love the work you do Andrew, thank you for being there for Anita. One day at a time. Channel 5 we up!!
This was a fantastic read. I’ll be first in line for that book. Can’t wait
Nice piece, AC. Writing drunk and editing sober has nothing to do with external substances. We rarely mine Marble pre-chiseled. Keep working on your craft and ride those waves of inspiration as they come. If no waves come, throw a fucking rock in the pond.
Crying eating shawarma reading this. Thank you andrew, keep going. It means more than you’ll ever know to have your voice out there.
This is some of the best writing you have done yet in these field notes. I know you are not trying to fill the mans enormous shoes, but there is no one on the landscape of journalism that is better to carry the torch of HST. Congrats on the book deal, cant wait to read in the future. Hope to see you at the ABQ stop of tour if i can get my shift at the fire station covered! Sending love from Taos NM
I support giving yourself space to address the "one thing in particular, that should've been put to bed ages ago." Be prepared for backlash but do trust that your true supporters will stick by you.
Rather die than lie
You’re the man Andrew.
Holy fuck dude, this is some real anime moment shit right here. Bro just inherited the will of HST.
Fuck Yeah. Homie just leveled up.
This is the best thing you’ve written. Like a million of us Hunter is the reason I started writing. You’re the third. Stay on the path my guy.
This is immaculate. Been waiting on this since the Shane Smith interview. I’ve been a HST fan probably as long as I’ve been an AGNB fan. I’m always terrified of becoming an out-of-touch, Patagonia-donning swine. Absolutely legendary field note. This feels like the part of Ready Player One where Wade gets the 1981 quarter. Don’t ask me to explain
Very quality writing appreciate the insights into your mind with these posts and your willingness to share this kind of experience. Congratulations on the book deal you’ll kill it!
I really enjoy your writing, i'd read a whole book of it.
A memoir! Well done 😍
Congratulations on the book, Andrew! As a mildly literate and over educated patron, I aspire to add your book to my shelf.
Skinny pedal down young man 😎 you got some shoes to fill
The parallels between y’all are significant in itself. Felt like an affirmation from him on the other side merely saying, “Keep going.”
“The difference between Woody Creek then and Woody Creek now is that a famous writer put a gun in his mouth, and the people who never understood him while he was alive showed up afterward to buy his ghost. It was horrifying.” I can’t wait for this book.
This is amazing. I’m half way through Kingdom of Fear so this all feels fresh. Keep going Andrew!
I don’t think anyone could replace HST, but i do think your dedication to the craft is something he would respect. I cant wait to read your book and see how you can go on to carry the torch as it were, i dont think gonzo was ever about sex drugs and rock and roll, its about being human, the ugly side of being human. The side that self medicates in times of pain and deludes itself into thinking poison really is good for it. Its about giving your everything for something you believe it and seeing it die in-front of you, and having to get up the next day and keep living. I think youre well on track for greatness Andrew, never stop grinding, we need you now more than ever.
Just got back from Vegas last night. Parking at Mandalay Bay was $40 per car. God damn WrestleMania.
This is really awesome
Course correction at its finest. I am a musician who always inspired to be the next Mac Miller and have recently learned this lesson myself in my own ways. Someone street interviewed me randomly the other day. Before he started he asked if I was familiar with the style and I said "Yea, I love Andrew Callaghan." His first question after that was simply "Why?" I responded "because he took what he was given and made a choice to do something good with it." Thank you Andrew. Remember it is okay to get tired, go dormate, and to get rest. The cockroach always prevails.
I think it's good to remember that writing is an art, which sounds like an obvious statement, but it has important implications. There is a common notion, especially with any sort of autobiographical work, that writing is more of a "hard" skill rather than an art/talent. This view posits that there is "good" writing and "bad" writing, more of a science than an art. This is pretty reductive and limits the scope of creativity that should be present in any sort of writing. This is why, as someone who writes, trying to find my own style is so important and something I constantly strive for. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but what matters is that it is mine and no one else's. In a world of AI trying to suck the soul out of art, the best creative action we can take is to be ourselves. It sounds corny, but I have held this sentiment to be more true the more I write. It applies the same to visual arts. Michelangelo, Van Gogh, and Picasso all have wildly different styles, but does that lessen the fact that their art is art? No. My point is, for writing, especially a book, making it yours and not what other people think it should be is important. Your writing should be reflective of you, not a grammar book. This is all to say, I am extremely excited to read your book, and I always enjoy reading these notes. You are a very skilled writer, and I wish you luck as you begin work on the book.
Small typo, "What ensured was multiple decades of shoddy biographical coverage" should likely be "What ensued was multiple decades of shoddy biographical coverage". Also "But as I’ve gotten older, I hate the a bender makes me." is probably missing "person" and should be "But as I’ve gotten older, I hate the person a bender makes me."
"set the record set" as well. Unless that is intentional.
I really hope you find yourself an Anita. I feel most people wish to be doing work that is hard but immensely rewarding, but we need people who love us to ground us when the world becomes too overwhelming. Love the words and work you do man. Also sorry about the tattoo, could tell at the show you were making the best of it, but the story was for sure worth it.
Thanks for this Andrew, I appreciate you for never seeming to let your head get bigger than your heart when you put your own experience to words. It's alright to be a reincarnation, no higher blessing than dharma. Stay up brotha, keep doing Dog's work 🙏
Great piece, moved me to tears if I'm honest. I read everything from HST in my 20s, and his inspiration burned into me then, but faded over time. Now in my 40s, you've come along and rekindled it. Quite the torch you've been passed my dude, and well deserved
I feel fortunate to have found your work. Im also thankful that you recognize your worth and am very excited to follow your career as a fan and advocate for a long time to come. Thanks for sharing!
Damn, yo. What a ride, what a read. You'll make a great author. Side note, ngl I don't think I ever heard of HST before you... "Fear and Loathing in LV" feels long term familiar but i couldn't tell you a thing about it
By far your best notes yet - i hope you find yourself improving too. looking forward to the book. thanks for what you do.
Andrew, I have been consuming and enjoying your content since the original All Gas Videos, to see your content change into these beautiful works of journalism is incredible. These field notes show the enthusiasm in your work and the care for its subjects. You are a unique force in the media landscape, that I feel privileged follow. Thank you so much for these field notes, please keep us updated on the memoir, I would love to read it.
This is awesome, thanks for sharing! Actually just got into HST reading F&L first and literally ordered 3 more of his books on eBay yesterday. Happy to know I’m watching his legacy play out in real time through you, and while maybe he should still be here, I’m sure he’s happy somewhere seeing it too. Keeping going! Thanks
“Now that he’s gone, it’s your turn.” She sees the voice you give people who have none, and the perspectives you can share with the world that no one else can. Inspiring… terrifying… I’m glad you chose to be here. Thank you for sharing this.
One of many fascinating things about HST is that he always knew that he would take his own life - he wrote about it extensively in letters and stories that he wrote in his early twenties. It's easy to say his final action was selfish, (and I agree to extent, he would've had a lot of fun documenting the Trump era, I'm sure) but he had numerous documented medical problems causing chronic pain, not to mention the toll a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse takes on a person, mentally and physically. I can't recommend his first two volumes of letters enough to anyone with the patience to read them, and I believe the final volume should be released later this year.
100% thought you named your war room after his on purpose, that's so cute. This is probably the coolest thing you've posted thank you so much.
Made me cry AND made me laugh out loud