“Kurt’s Up In Heaven Now” -or- “Somebody, sometime to sometime, He tried.”

No semicolons will be used in the following blog on account of the fact that semicolons stand for absolutely nothing, they are, according to Kurt Vonnegut, transvestite hermaphrodites.

I’ve been waiting for significant enough prompting to kick start this blog again, and hopefully this occasion can begin the slow, dull sputtering of passing thoughts and complete B.S. (which, if you are not familiar, is shorthand for the excrement of a male bovine, and is colloquially used as a term for words of questionable truth, character, and general usefulness).

This, unfortunately, is my event. Kurt Vonnegut is dead. After a only day of mourning, I am ready to share a bit about my good friend and favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut.

First off, we are not really good friends, at least not in any conventional sense. I never met him or spoke to him or even wrote him a letter. But anyone who has read a Vonnegut novel feels as though Kurt is their seedy, back-alley partner in crime.

I don’t believe Kurt is that upset about being dead. He talked about death a lot. In fact, he claimed to have been trying to commit suicide for most of his life by smoking cigarettes, seeing as how they promised to kill him right on the package, but took so long to deliver! Speaking of suicide, Kurt’s mom committed suicide when he was young by swallowing a bottle of Drano (and he shares this information just as casually and seemingly out of place as I do). Kurt also claimed to be a secular humanist. Although he talked much about God, he always professed that he did not believe in God, on account of what a bad place the world is. Engraved on one of the tombstones in many of his books are the words, “Life is no way to treat an animal.” Kurt’s dissent was not without humor, though. In fact, he wrote that at is funeral, he wants someone to start out by saying, “Well, Kurt’s up in heaven now” simply because it is a funny thing to say at the funeral of a secular humanist.

Kurt’s admitted alter-ego in many of his books, the writer Kilgore Trout, is freed by Kurt himself at the end of Breakfast of Champions and as Kurt cries, Kilgore Trout floats away calling out in Kurt’s father’s voice: “Make me young, make me young, make me young.” The next line of that novel is the last line. Instead of the traditional “THE END,” Vonnegut chooses a much more accurate phrase to place at the end of the book: “ETC.” In another book, we are shown what Kilgore Trout wants his tombstone to read:

SOMEBODY
SOMETIME to SOMETIME
HE TRIED

Another tombstone in Vonnegut’s books reads:

EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL,
AND NOTHING HURT.

As time passes, Kurt will no doubt remain “a master of contemporary American literature. The author of eighteen highly acclaimed books and dozens of short stories and essays.” Kurt the author will be remembered for “his black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination.” Kurt now crosses the divide from being “one of the best living American writers” to being one of the best writers, without qualifiers.

My tribute to Kurt would not be complete without re-referencing the fact that I believe in the use of dual titles because of Vonnegut. Let me end in Vonnegutian style with a drawing and a word.



ETC.