Two Kurts in Three Days: R.I.P Kurt Vonnegut

Most days, I ride to school in a cramped, loud, dust-caked van with a fifty-five-year-old bus driver named Frank. Frank is almost entirely bald, has a great sense of humor, and, much to the chagrin of the younger occupants of his van, likes to listen to oldies. And he listens in the worst way possible too: with the volume just barely audible so that it is loud enough to hear, but quiet enough to be less music than a constant underlying presence. This constant subliminal annoyance, when coupled with the piercing chattering and giggling from some of the younger students, serves to creates a situation that can, quite frankly, be miserable. And I sit closest to the radio, up front in the passenger's seat, so when Frank gets out of the van to slide the door open for another student (a luxury I do not have as the designated shotgun-rider; I have to open my own door), I take those brief seconds to quickly change the station to something, anything, other than oldies. This tends to turn Frank's bald spot red, which is probably the real reason I do it.

And just my luck, this morning I happened to flip to NPR (another potential annoyance) just as they reported Kurt Vonnegut's death and saw fit to remember him by reading aloud a couple of lines from Player Piano. And then Frank stepped back into the van, evaporating rain water rising from his head, and flipped the station back to Oldiez 93.3 ("We spell oliez with a Z!") just in time to hear the commentator admitting to buying the cliff notes for Slaughter House 5 in high school. Then Frank looked over at me (hiding a smile) and said, "My bus, my rules, my radio, buddy!"

And then when I got to school (and escaped Frank's glare), some of the first words said to me were from my English teacher (with whom I had planned to read another Vonnegut novel before the end of the year), who looked up at me and said, "Jonah, did you hear Kurt Vonnegut died?" So it only seems right to spend today's post honoring this wonderful author, hilarious cultural critic (how's about a memorial Comedist holiday, SteveG?), and ground-breaking story-teller.

And as can be told from my rambling prose above, any further mock-sentimentality or fractured story-telling on my part would only serve to belittle and offend Vonnegut's tremendous legacy. So I will end with a quote from A Man Without a Country, not his best book, but certainly his most confessional, and the one I have enjoyed the most.

" As a kid I was the youngest member of my family, and the youngest child in any family is always a jokemaker, because a joke is the only way he can enter into an adult conversation. My sister was five years older than I was, my brother was nine years older than I was, and my parents were both talkers. So at the dinner table when I was very young, I was boring to all those other people. They did not want to hear the dumb childish news of my day. They wanted to talk about the really important stuff that happened in high school or maybe in college or at work. So the only way I could get into a conversation was to say something funny....
When I'm being funny I try not to offend. I don't think much of what I've done had been in really ghastly taste. I don't think I have embarrassed many people, or distressed them. The only shocks I use are an occasional obscene word. Some thing's aren't funny. I can't imagine a humorous book or skit about Auschwitz, for instance. And it's not possible for me to make a joke about the death of John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King. Otherwise I can't think of any subject that I would steer away from, that I could do nothing with. Total catastrophes are terribly amusing, as Voltaire demonstrated. You know, the Lisbon earthquake is funny.
I saw the destruction of Dresden. I saw the city before and then came out of an air-raid shelter and saw it afterward, and certainly one response was laughter. God knows, that's the soul seeking some relief."