Breakfast of Champions changed my life.

Vonnegut was a cult figure with students in the 1960s and 1970s Vonnegut interview

One of the outstanding figures of modern US literature, Kurt Vonnegut, has died aged 84 in New York.

He became a cult figure among students in the 1960s and 1970s with his classics of US counterculture.

The pivotal moment of his life was the bombing of Dresden by allied forces in 1945. The experience informed his best-known work, Slaughterhouse Five.

He suffered brain injuries after a fall at his home in Manhattan and died on Wednesday, said his wife Jill Krementz.

( ...more from the BBC article. )

Kurt Vonnegut is in Heaven now which, as he said, is about the funniest thing you can say about a humanitarian.

The little voice always speaks the truth.

He was staring out the window while he waited, focused on nothing, when the thought came unbidden, in a quiet voice so unlike his own.  It said, "I wonder what my life would have been like if I wasn't so full of fear, if I wasn't raised to be so afraid."  The thought shook him awake, brought him back from wherever he'd been and he immediately tried to dismiss it because though he wouldn't admit it, it was true and it scared him.

Spreading the long emergency.

I told a man today that all numbers point to the world running out of oil in thirty years, that most people just think that means no more gasoline, but they're wrong.  That means no more gasoline, no more pesticides, no more plastic, no more manufacturing.  All these enterprises are available to us because of cheap fossil fuels.  Before industrialized farming, the Earth could feed about a billion people.  Now, with massive industrial farming we can feed about six to seven billion.  That means that when oil runs out in thirty years, we will suddenly have about five billion too many people who will likely starve to death.  The man said he's going to go home and forget all about that because he'll be gone in thirty years and it will all be in the hands of "you young ones."

Be careful what you pretend to be because, in the end, you are what you pretend to be.

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I know I posted about Kurt Vonnegut's passing earlier, but it was just an article.  I had to leave for work, so I didn't have time to really say anything.  I knew he was going to leave us after I read A Man Without a Country.  He lived a rich and full life, troubled and beautiful and we should all wish we lived so.  Breakfast of Champions saved or changed my life, I'm not sure which and if there is a difference, I don't know how to define it.

In the wake of Kurt's passing, I have seen many familiar and favorite quotes, mostly things he'd written or said about death and living.  However, I think my favorite is from Player Piano, and I think it's this that resonated with me and sort of pinpointed what I wanted to illuminate with my own writing.  "I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center... Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first.''

My literary forefathers have left me and gone on to the next new adventure.  Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Anton Wilson, and Kurt Vonnegut, the three authors who really inspired me to write, have all recently departed this weird, weird world and I imagine this is what it feels like when one's actual father dies - this overwhelming duty to grow up and stop fucking around, the realization that you can never be a child again, that no one will ever pick you up when you fall, no one else will protect you, shelter you, or battle away the evils of the world for you.  In a moment's notice, these are your own tasks.  You must be the rock.  You must be your own savior.

I suddenly feel like I have no more excuses.