If Hunter S. Thompson hadn’t blown his brains out, he’d be 85, perhaps too old to book a flight to Atlanta, too old to drive the back roads through Flannery O’Connor country past Blind Willie McTell’s grave, past that weird ass art installation that practically defies description, past the “Hell Is Real” billboards, over the Savannah River Bridge, through the desolation of the town of Allendale on his way to the Colleton County Court House in Walterboro to cover the double homicide murder trial of Alex Murdaugh.^[1]

If you’re unfamiliar with the horror show, here’s a link to a New Yorker article that provides an excellent overview. New Yorker. Or, if you’d prefer a briefer version compressed into poetry, click HERE.

I would love to read Hunter’s drug-fueled take on the drug-fueled mess, what he’d make of the prosecution’s scattershot case, a shotgun blast of so much disassociated information that Immanuel Kant couldn’t follow it. Then there’s defense attorney Dick Harpootlian, shuffling papers, fumbling for his reading glasses, the food trucks outside the courthouse, the moss-draped oaks minding their own business as they always have.

But, alas, as the final song of the Stones’ album Let It Bleed says, “You can’t always get what you want.”

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^[1] I realize the phrase “homicide murder trial” is redundant, but it sounds so much better than either adjective by itself.