shabletha: and so it goes

Kurt Vonnegut was my first favorite author. Well, my first favorite author was the collection of people who wrote the Black Stallion books, but I gave up on being a jockey some time in late elementary school and didn't latch on to anyone again until we read Slaughter House 5 in highschool.

I'm not sure if people can understand the significance of finding a true counter-culture rebel with a cause in something that was being shoved down my throat unless you too found yourself trapped in a hoity-toity southern private school where everyone thought they were better than you but smiled to your face and focused on the most materialistic popularity oriented aspects of life, never thinking to see if they would like you because you weren't like them.

I wanted to be Kurt Vonnegut. I wrote my papers that semester in a copy-cat style that probably allowed me to get a passing grade only because my teacher was happy to see that I finally gave a shit about anything in school. I read other books that criss-crossed characters from that one. His work solidified my affinity for books and movies that deal in time travel. Not just going back to the past, but loops where your actions that haven't happened yet change what happens in the now.

One of the most memorable things I read by him in the last ten years was a piece in Playboy's millennium edition. He told the story of being a young boy riding down an old dirt road when his father pulled their Studebaker over to the side of the road and he and his sister leaned forward and they all looked at the odometer as it stroked 100,000. Just because. If we shared nothing else on the millennium, we shared a collective pause to stop and look at the odometer.

And now we can stop to share a collective pause and reflect on Kurt Vonnegut's contribution to our lives and our society.

I searched Google for a photo to put up here. There is no lack of selection, but it was difficult to find just the right one, with the right mix of anguish and mystery and "I know something you don't know" and happiness and love for life. I think this is the one: