It was not quite 4:30, and I was not quite up.

I was awake, rolled up in the blankets like a strip of bacon in a breakfast burrito. But I was in no rush to get unwrapped, gnawed on, and shat out by Election Day 2024.

Like Mike’s bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” it has finally arrived: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Don’t worry. I haven’t been reading Ernest Hemingway in the run-up to The Big Show. No, I’ve been wallowing in bits of this and that from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

The Good Doktor wrote madly about The Edge, until he finally stepped over it. Nineteen years later, dead by suicide, cremated, and shot from a cannon by Johnny Depp, he still has more class — albeit in a certain Hell’s Angels style — and gave more service to his country than many a president.

Writing about the Hell’s Angels in his book of the same name, HST described people like the ones Herself recently saw herding flamboyantly Trump-flagged pickups up and down Tramway, horns honking:

“They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”

He may have been a bit premature with the second volume of his “Gonzo Papers,” titled “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” If he had kicked his dope-soaked alter ego Raoul Duke to the curb and survived to see this generation of swine — HST would be 87 today — he might have looked back on the ’80s with a certain fondness, even longing.

Describing the difference between the ’60s and the ’80s, between the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, he wrote:

The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everybody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day. …”

Don’t you wonder what he’d have had to say about the 45th president — impeached twice, beaten in his bid for re-election, tried to reverse the defeat with violence and chicanery, obviously insane, declining hourly — and still within a whisker of winning a second term, going two for three? I know I do.

HST mentioned that guy only in passing, as far as I can recall. But he took note of Joe Biden’s first major presidential-election meltdown over a plagiarism scandal at law school in the ’60s. The candidate who hopes to succeed Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, had won her first election — as San Francisco district attorney — just three years before HST died in 2005.

So, yeah. HST left the party too early for a change, and more’s the pity. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes wasn’t even readable. But when he was on his game the Good Doktor could walk with the King. Or savage him. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be reading right now as we all tiptoe toward The Edge once again.

Here he is again, quoting John Keats instead of his personal fave, the Book of Revelation:

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Selah.

• Late update: Seems Charlie Pierce had HST on the brain today too.