No, seriously, i can't imagine what it would have been like not to have Kurt Vonnegut in my life. The ideas, the books, the concepts that are part of my thinking that came from every story or book he wrote. It's like, well, porbably how some people feel about Hemingway, Tolstoy maybe, Fitzgeralid? I don’t now, since none of those ever moved me and certainly nothing they said ever planted tendrils in my brain the way Vonnegut did.

There’s the fact that you don’t know it but most of you are part of my karass (See CAT”S CRADLE).

There’s the fact that I can’t THINK that title without hearing “no damn cat, no damn cradle” and that book’s been around since 1963, though I can’t swear when I first read any of his work.

There’s the time my mother and I spent hours, literally hours, probably three hours trying to remember his name because that story, oh my god, that fantastic story and we just were in a place where we could NOT recall the author OR the title, just the subject and this was before search engines and internets and the library was closed. And we couldn’t let it go. But we couldn’t, and it wouldn’t. something like three hours after this started, I sat down with an almanac that had a list of authors and I thorught my this time, I wouldn’t have known the guy’s name now even if I SAW it. And oh, damn, it had to begin with “V” but there he was. And suddenly I could pick up the phone and say “Kurt, Vonnegut, WELCOME TO THE MONKEY HOUSE” and we were okay. (The story was “Harrison Bergeron”.)

Roses are red and ready for plucking
You're sixteen and ready for high school.
From BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

If you don’t know or remember his thinking, his creativity, his stories, his passion or his wit, if it’s been too long since you read SIRENS OF TITAN or whatever you read those years ago, if you want to know some great great stuff, go visit http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut. A great collection of thoughts from books, essays and tv appearances is there, and tells you pretty much who Kurt Vonnegut was. What he thought had felt was in all his fiction, the stuff I admit to being most familiar with. I remember the fake commencement speech supposedly given at MIT and how it could have been him (MIT’s commencement speaker that year was Kofi Annan, an alumnus of that school. Who knew?) I didn’t read a lot of later stuff, but oh my, everything he wrote stuck to me somehow.

Of every thing he said, this one – which appeared on a poster some time ago is the best, my favorite, the finest, whatever. I never bought the poster because – well, this is em we’re talking about and I don’t get joy out of pictures of babies, which was the picture on the poster. Sorry. But I hope it’s not completely weird then that I saved this quote and it’s here on my computer, just in case, just for whenever I might need it. It’s from GOD BLESS YOU, MR. ROSEWATER which he wrote oh my god over FORTY years ago? Anyway, published in 1965 – holy smokes – and if he’d never written another word (and thank the gods he did), well, dayenu.


“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'”