Kurt Vonnegut

Heard the news on the way in to work today. I read my first Kurt Vonnegut book when I was 13, it was Slapstick, and I’ve forgotten most all the details except for “Hi ho.” It’s like that with a lot of his books, Slaughterhouse 5, Sirens of Titan, Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, I get them confused with each other because I don’t remember which specifics go with which books, just the bigger events – the Ice-9, the three statues, the time traveling. Galapagos is easy to remember because the title of the book is where it all happens. I’m a big sucker for apocalypse fiction and he did it so dreadfully well, felt like sitting down at a meal you know is poison but it’s so beautiful tasty you can’t stop eating. But he always made such perfect and absurd sense. Maybe that’s the mark of a good satirist, he presents an impossible situation that somehow clears away all the noise and obfuscation of politics and salesmen and religion and society, and in that moment the central issue, what really matters, you can see it clear, it shines like a beacon in the fog of b.s. and self-serving crap that is the everyday world we live in. Aw man. We’ll miss you, Kurt.