I picked up Kurt Vonnegut's last book - "A Man Without A Country". Published in 2005, when Vonnegut was 82, it is a collection of essays. For the most part, they aren't very good - rambling diabtribes about the dangers of petroleum dependance and the stupidity of the Bush administration. They are what one might expect from a man in his 80's - fading reflections of the man at his peak. If I could make it to his age and still had fading reflections of his talent, I'd be pretty pleased. There are occasional glimmers of what Vonnegut was at his peak, and one example that stands out is an excerpt from a book Vonnegut was unable to finish:

I have become a flaming neuter. I am as celibate as at least fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. And celibacy is no root canal. It's so cheap and convenient. Talk about safe sex! You don't have to do anything afterwards, because there is no afterward.

And when my tantrum, which is what I call my TV set, flashes boobs and smiles in my face, and says everybody but me is going to get laid tonight, and this is a national emergency, so I've got to rush out and buy a car or pills, or a folding gymnasium that I can hide under my bed, I laugh like a hyena. I know and you know that millions and millions of good Americans, present company not excepted, are not going to get laid tonight.

And we flaming neuters vote! I look forward to day when the President of the United States, no less, who probably isn't going to get laid tonight either, decrees a National Neuter Pride Day. Out of our closets we'll come by the millions. Shoulders squared, chins held high, we'll go marching up Main Streets all over this boob-crazed democracy of ours, laughing like hyenas.