Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 1922-2007
So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84. It happened last night according to the news sites, of complications from a fall. I think he would have been amused at that. 
I never met him, which already feels like something I will regret decades from now. It was a life's goal that will just have to be scratched off, unfulfilled, more through lack of opportunity than lack of effort.
I first discovered him in the dingy attic of an old firehouse during a tag sale, a setting I imagine he would have liked. It was a dog-eared copy of Slapstick with its cover half torn off and it was on sale for a quarter. I'm not certain why I bought it - I had never heard of him and was only a year out of my Goosebumps stage - but felt immediately drawn to the clown on the cover. I finished it in a few days and promptly found others. I didn't read all of his books with the next month or even year, much as I wish I could claim otherwise. I did read them steadily, however, a necessarily and ubiquitous supplement to my literary diet.
I read Slaughterhouse Five as my father drove me to my second year of Summer Scholars. His old, red truck smelled of copper and I sat hunched to avoid the towel on the passenger's side floor. Much earlier that morning, my mother had stepped barefoot on a piece of broken beer bottle left in the front yard after one of my older brother's parties. She severed an artery and that truck had been soaked in her blood as my father drove her to the hospital. I already felt so lonely to be going on this adventure, having left my first real girlfriend Jen and my best friend Nick back in Beacon (she would leave me for him before I returned, though I wouldn't know for a week), and the knowledge of my mother's blood around me made my escape into the book all the easier and necessary. Even now the opening line, "Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," bring it all rushing back.
Read the rest at http://www.xenex.org/journal/20070412.php
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