The three writers I most admire are now all dead; two through suicide and one through a life so dramatically shortened by not giving a single solitary fuck about the effects of cigarettes and whiskey that terming it suicide wouldn't be too far off the mark. Though I'm sure others writers will soon hit the scene, these three - Wallace, Thompson & Hitchens - will be difficult to replace. They arrived for me at a time when I was just beginning to sort through the questions that still lingered in the air after 18 years of schooling (or maybe it was the schooling that lingered); the big forbidding mysteries that keep the modern mind afraid: god, politics and self. Hitchens, Thompson and Wallace. Each, in their way, utterly fearless and nothing short of heroic when cast against a culture that can be so easily driven by fear and a market that inflates uneasiness; encourages conformity and finds new ways to ease trust in to the hands the monied.

This morning I spent an hour watching a Hitchens interview from August of last year. I watched hungrily. It was a recent enough interview for his cancer to be in full bloom. His hair was already gone, his mouth puckered strangely between utterances, and there was an emotional sensitivity to his demeanor that was - when set against the Hitch of yore - totally out of character. But even then, bent and dying, the moment he opened his mouth he was so wholly Hitch that death, days away, seemed a distant, empty threat.