Oh my and good-bye.

Kurt Vonnegut, at 84, of course it was bound to come but I find myself slightly ill with melancholy from the news anyways. I have cried more this morning for his death than for some friends who have died recently (which isn’t saying an awful lot, I rarely cry when people in my life die anymore), so close has his writing been to me. Was one of the authors I have cherished most in my life, ever since my mother first handed me a copy of Breakfast of Champions when I was fourteen. And then came Slaughterhouse Five and Welcome to the MonkeyHouse and Cat’s Cradle and Mother Night and the Sirens of Titan and Bluebeard and on and on, one book after another a part of my adolescent rise into adulthood, the development of my own sense of ironic humour and the understanding that politics could be non-dogmatic in literary expression.

Oh my and good-bye Kilgore Trout, Billy Pilgrim, and Mr. Vonnegut. We will have a drink and a smoke for you tonight. The world is a much better place for the words you gave us to mull over, no matter how pessimistic they were at times.

And so it goes.