Disco ball bless you, Mr. Vonnegut

oh man oh no. i just did a horribly cartoonish gasp with hand over mouth thing when this hit my feed reader*.

Damn shit. Fuck. Seriously.

We share a hometown, so aside from never having been able to get enough of his books I've always felt a certain kinship with Vonnegut. He verbalized the cognitive dissonance of being a sane person in the world, a dissonance that smacks you in the face every day if you pay too much attention in the city-surrounded-by-cornfield that is Indianapolis. I'm hyperbolizing, but it's fun. In my more grandiosely nerdy moments I've pondered the notion of sharing a karass.

His grandfather designed the Athenaeum, the building where a lot of my most formative theater experiences took place. Where a lot of my growing up took place, actually. Now that I'm thinking about it, I remember starting Welcome to the Monkey House, the first book of his I read, in that building. I'm realizing right now that there are way, way too many memories down the Athenaeum train of thought, so I'm not going to follow it.

Actually, something similar is true of Shortridge Jr High, where the young Vonnegut went to school. When he went there it was a high school, though. I didn't attend Shortridge, but its very nice stage intersected with my work several times in my teens and I spent a good deal of similarly memorable time there. Both places exist for me very strongly, in my head or in my memory, in a much more resonant way than most - I have no real idea how to describe this. I'd like to point to my prediction from last week that I might not make consistent sense for a while, and just leave it there.

None of that's actually about Vonnegut's writing, is it? I don't have anything, is the thing. I'm not sure what that's about, but in any event, tonight I'm glad I have a 'heroes' tag to slap on this post in order to make up for my lack of substantive praise.

All of that said, I'll now be totally irreverent by mentioning how I'll always love the part of the otherwise of-debatable-quality Rodney Dangerfield movie Back to School where he hires Kurt Vonnegut to write his paper on Kurt Vonnegut, and it gets a failing grade.

The most correct response here seems to be, And so it goes. And so it does. The last book I read of his was God Bless You Dr. Kevorkian, though, so I'm inclined to just say "See you later, alligator."

UPDATE: There are, unsurprisingly, a mazillion brilliant posts around the internets in response to Vonnegut's death. In a way, seeing this outpouring - this common appreciation for his portrayal of the absurdity of pretty much everything humans tell themselves they do - is reviving my blood-pressure-saving sense of humor about the bullshit that's out there, which can only be healthy. Again with the unsurprisingly, Amanda has an incredibly insightful post about this [I just know that search string is going to turn up in my google analytics (which I mainly check for the entertaining search strings) sooner or later].

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*Which, ok, is an improvement upon the instantaneous tears when I was told that Johnny Cash had died. Even though I had morbidly predicted when June passed earlier that year that he wouldn't stick around much longer, damn that one socked me in the stomach.