Venus Flytrap, my Monster High doll decorated with carniverous flowers, is the perfect pandemic mascot, as she guards the Vapo-Rub.
Stuck in the house all day with no outside activities to distract me, and limited socialization with the other denizens imprisoned in the house with me is more-or-less the perfect thing for a fiction writer with cancer of the imagination glands.
I have plenty of people to talk to, since , in this situation, imaginary people count too. And there is no end to the things I can talk about since ideas keep welling up in my head, even if many of them are totally silly ideas, and the rest are probably evil.
It helps to have a talking dog. Though my kids would argue that Jade isn’t really talking, that I am, instead, merely interpreting things I think she should be saying as if it were real speech. She does talk an awful lot about different kinds of meat and the moral imperatives of allowing your dog to eat people food. But I think it is only proper to commit to writing those things she says when we’re alone together, because, after all… a possible talking dog?
Everybody has a purple dragonette on the doll shelf that loves to play with dolls, don’t they?
But imagination is one of those things that sets people… I mean, human people, apart from all other life forms that we know. Imagination makes the man. What would we have made of ourselves and our world if we didn’t have it? Would we have invented the wheel? Fire? Term life insurance? I think not.
Peter Pan offers Alice a ride in his Skull-and-Bones Lowrider as ninjas attack Main Street Toonerville.
I may, in fact, be going a little stir crazy in the old hovel while trying like heck to avoid death by Coronavirus. I am easily as frayed around the edges as any hopeless hobo, with even my beard-trimming growing wildly erratic. Soon I may have to tell the imaginary people who surround me and question everything about me that it is not a beard any more. Rather, it is either a crocheted hippie neck-warmer rather than a beard, or maybe it has become a furred, frilly collar on my shirt like Shakespeare probably wore for the premiere of King Lear.
No, I am not going stir-crazy, or even a little bit insane. I am just letting the words unwind as they fill me up and demand to be unreeled in order to prevent an explosion in the brain.
I finished a novel a week ago. I am almost ready to start a new writing project. But severe sinus headaches and the extreme pollen count outside are slowing me down. It is alarming how green and bloomy this Spring is turning out to be. It is almost like something has magically taken the pollution out of the air and kept humans from spoiling the environment for over a month. There isn’t something out there I wasn’t aware of, is there? Beyond the pandemic and other consequences of the warming climate crisis, I mean?
My book is about a boy forced to make a new life for himself, being forced to live with a stepmother and two twin stepsisters he never met before the tragedy, and in the unfamiliar world of the nudist park where his father now lives with his new family.
But that is over now. New projects are about to take over my life. I plan on finishing AeroQuest 3 : Juggling Planets, But that is not my new work-in-progress. That is a rewrite of the novel I wrote and published in 2007 with a scammy publishing company that no longer exists. I also plan on furthering my graphic novel, Hidden Kingdom. I have been working on that thing in one form or another since college in the 70’s.
My next original writing project will probably be the novel The Wizard in his Keep. As A Field Guide to Fauns was the novel that finishes the arc of the character Sherry Cobble, this new novel will do the same for the wizard character from Superchicken, Milt Morgan. It will be about Milt’s adulthood computer wizardry and how he uses it to rescue lost orphans through a fictional world inspired by The Lord of the Rings. By that I mean Milt’s virtual-reality world will be all sword and sorcery, and revolve around a Robin-Hood-like boy-hero named Hoodwink. The in-game story, lived by the rescued orphans will magically re-unite Daisy and her two younger brothers with their lost family, though not their lost parents.
But, the whole point of this post is that things are going slower for me on this new project. The turn-around time from one novel to the next will not happen as quickly as the last time. I don’t have writer’s block. But I do have health problems. And today’s massive headache is a reminder that I am getting older fast. And there’s also a little matter of a coronavirus stalking me, hoping to catch and kill me. Ah, life just keeps getting easier!
Here I am back to doing D&D and Traveller on Saturdays. All of the art in this post was once used in conjunction with RPGs played with former students, and my own kids. I was always the game master in the past, and I used drawings and illustrations to help the imaginary adventures come to life.
Zoran-Viktor was a Mirin Ice Wizard from the Talislanta D&D campaign. The player of this character was Victor, a gifted dancer and actor from the school’s theater department. The Lawgiver was a powerful Non-Player Character in both D&D and Talislanta. The character design came from a metal figure I painted myself. Zoric was a Talislantan Thaumaturge, the player character of a weird kid who told x-rated jokes better than any other high-school boy I ever met.
Harun the Charmer was only ever used as a player-character once. The boy whose character it was provided the face I modeled it after. He was an absolutely arresting boy that had such a winning personality that people fell in love with him almost instantly.
He spent way more time helping another teacher grade papers than he did playing Talislanta games with goofy old Mr. B.
And I promise, only one of the facts presented here about Harun is a lie, in attempt to protect this young gentleman’s identity. We unfortunately lost him back in the 1990’s.
Crane the Sorcerer was an NPC trapped inside his own crystal ball by his own evil familiar well before my kids met him in the D&D adventure.
Viktor, the Snow Wizard of Ice Keep, was the father of Zoran Viktor. Victor loved playing Talislanta.
Here’s an old post from 2013 to give you an idea of what progress I have made as a writer… practically none! But, I did publish my novel Superchicken since then.
The nightmare is always about standing in front of class naked. I had that nightmare as a kid. I have it still as a teacher. Why do I so fear having everyone see what I most don’t want them to see about me, and all of them really don’t want to see… especially if they have any ghost of an idea what that might actually look like in real life? I would make an extremely poor nudist. People would go blind. Honestly.
And yet, I find myself writing about naked people far more often than is comfortable. Why? What’s the matter with me that the topic keeps coming up in my silly little fiction stories? Why was it a part of my boyhood fixations that just won’t go away? I am not a pornography writer, er, I mean erotic fiction writer, like some of the indie novelists I have…
Ironically, after a week of posting about black humor and how fast the Coronavirus is going to kill me, I received the SunshineBlogger Award. You know what “ironically” means, right? It’s when a humorist makes a joke about you by throwing a flatiron at your head.
But an award like this comes with a price. So, here are the rules;
Thank the blogger who nominated you in the blog post and link back to their blog.
Answer the 11 questions the blogger asked you.
Nominate 11 new blogs to receive the award and write them 11 new questions.
List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo in your post and/or on your blog.
So, now that I have answered rules #1 and #4, let me begin answering questions about Mickey to fulfill #2.
Moyatori’s questions:
One; In a situation where you must initiate small talk, what’s your go-to topic?
I have more than 3o years experience in public school classrooms teaching every grade level from 6th through 12th. So, when I am in need of a small-talk topic, I naturally pull out the subject of what it is like to be a nudist, or how to be a clown, or what it takes to make a good joke for a comic strip (including a willingness to draw comic characters on napkins to illustrate the point.) I know you probably think at this point that you must have missed a transition in my answer somewhere. But every teacher knows you have to stand metaphorically naked in front of a group of 30+ kids six times a day for 50 minutes a shot. And if you can’t put on an entertaining show for the denizens of the classroom monkey house, they will eat you. And if you can get them to laugh about what they are learning, they will actually remember it.
Two; If there are 25 hours in a day, what would you do with the extra hour?
I would work hard to change it back to a twenty-four-hour day. After all, adding an hour to 365 days a year, 366 on leap year, would massively screw up the calendar and throw the seasons completely out of kilter. Who knows what environmental impacts such an astronomical change would have?
Three; Would you prefer to commute to work/school by flying carpet, pumpkin carriage, or ventilated glass coffin carried by coffin dancers?
Flying carpet! Are you kidding me? Of the three, that one is the most versatile and magical choice. You could go practically anywhere at any time. A pumpkin carriage is restricted to roads, and it turns into a pumpkin at midnight. Besides, you couldn’t use it the second day because the mice that pulled it would eat it during the night. And coffin dancers? That fellow Murphy the professional coffin dancer has one leg longer than the other. You would get bounced and bruised the whole way. And the glass might break. And a flying carpet often means there’s a geni flying around somewhere near. Could I ever use two more wishes!
Four; How many hours of sleep do you need each night to feel rested?
How can I possibly answer this? A human being normally needs about eight hours of sleep. A teacher only gets five hours maximum, because of grading papers, worrying about the next day’s bomb threats and/or pep rallies, and the possibility that cheerleaders will want to shave your head or throw pies at you to motivate your classes. Once the teacher becomes a parent, then only three hours if you are lucky. And once retired, arthritis pains keep you awake. Rested? What’s that?
Five; What’s the best food to eat when stressed? (Don’t tell me I’m the only stress eater here…)
Mmmm! Pie!!! Unfortunately, also diabetic. Hmmm… green beans?
Six; If you must immigrate to another country, where would you go?
The Merry Old Land of Oz. I would have no problem with wetting a couple of witches with cold water, and you can make yourself ruler there with a few lies and balloon tricks.
Seven; What kind of songs do you listen to at the end of a frustrating day?
Classical music. I would never joke about Debussy, Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart.
Eight; What’s the best dish you’ve made recently? Mind sharing your recipe with me?
Goofy Gumbo is made with 8 beef hot dogs cut into numerous nickel-sized pieces, fried on both sides, mixed in a bowl with hash browns, red and green peppers, and a can of chili with no beans. Microwave for six minutes. Serves a family of five, or two teenage boys… not both at the same time or there will be portion fights and poop jokes.
Nine; My mom wants to learn more English by watching more TV shows. She enjoyed Grey’s Anatomy and The Handmaid’s Tale, and likes “deep” stories with diverse casts. What TV show would you recommend my mom? (Totally not asking because I don’t watch enough TV.)
Forget about TV. Go to Netflix. Find Scooby Doo; Mystery Incorporated. Try hard not to die laughing.
Ten; What’s your favourite fairy tale, and why?
I prefer any or all of the Fractured Fairy Tales from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, the 60’s cartoon show. I like them because they always end with a moral to the story that is always punny.
Eleven; On a scale of cotton candy to razor blade dripping with your enemy’s blood, are you more wholesome or edgy?
I am almost precisely in the middle. I would rate myself at the clown in face paint that you don’t quite know if it’s funny or scary holding a lollipop in the right hand, but the left behind the back, potentially holding a chainsaw. The edginess is in my subtext.
I will have to add the list of eleven bloggers later, since most of the best ones I know don’t really like doing blogging awards. I need to get some permissions first, and I have to check my calendar to determne if I know what day I am dying from Covid 19.
So, if I can find eleven willing victims, here are the questions I will ask them;
Have you ever written a humorous post that doesn’t involve jokes about sex, poop, Donald Trump, or your tax accountant?
What is the strangest blog topic you have ever written an entire essay about?
Do you like kids? And if so, do you like them to be sweet… or do you have an alternative recipe? (Keep in mind I use a lot of metaphors and am probably not a cannibal.)
As a writer, do you like to use… long pauses? Sentence fragments? Or do you eschew writing like people actually talk, like using long, drawn-out, and adjectivelly over-filled run-on sentences that seem to go on and on as if the writer doesn’t have any idea where the brakes are?
What book has had the most influence over your writing? And was it a fiction book? Non-fiction book? Instructional manual about writing?
Briefly describe the person you can blame most vehemently for turning you into a writer. This counts as a question doesn’t it?
If you had to accurately describe your writing style with a single color, what color would it be, and why?
What writer, living or not, would be the be the best choice to write your life story? J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe, Dr. Suess, or somebody even better?
If you were imprisoned by Nazis at the South Pole, what penguin-related escape plot would you plan first?
Which, in your view, is the stupidest question Mickey has asked so far?
Who is your favorite comedian? (Discounting Mickey, of course, because he can’t retaliate anyway, and nobody actually reads his books or his blog.)
This 2019-2020 school year was my first as a retired school teacher earning extra money by substitute teaching. It ended before I was ready. I not only didn’t get a chance to earn all the money I needed, I did not get the chance to see some of the kids in five different middle schools I subbed for that I had learned to like and hoped to see again before the year ended. I did put in enough time to get rehired for next year. I even got to keep my sub badge so that I can go back if the schools ever reopen again. But I despair a bit over what I have lost. My health may not be good enough to go back to the job I love so much. In fact, I don’t really expect miracles to happen that would let me survive this pandemic. If I do go back to school next fall, it is more likely to be in order to haunt the hallways than to teach again.
The last few nights I have been sleeping longer than I have at any time since I retired in 2014. And I have had vivid dreams of being a teacher in a classroom yet again. But always in schools that are only vaguely familiar and are obviously new jobs with new kids that I haven’t seen or trained before. And yet, as it always is with teaching, they are all the same classroom, all the same schools, all the same kids, just in new packages that I haven’t seen before.
One of the things that is hardest about being a substitute rather than a regular teacher is the fact that one day, one class period, is not long enough to build a relationship with every kid. You cannot get to really know them in such a short amount of time. That’s why going back to certain schools is so exhilarating because you get a chance to cover the same classes again, see the same kids, and work on being a good teacher for them in the way I used to do it for kids that were mine for an entire school year.
And I was one of those rare teachers who actually likes kids.
Many teachers never get over the difficulty of managing a classroom and doing discipline. It is for them a never-ending battle for order and quiet. They only manage it by becoming fearsome ogres or anal-retentive control freaks. Most of those only ever consider discipline to be punishing kids enough to make them mind.
Those sorts of teachers don’t believe me when I tell them that the way to do discipline is not by quashing behaviors and limiting behaviors through punishment, but by encouraging the behaviors that you want. And by leading them into the excitement of reading a good story or learning an interesting new thing.
As a sub I went into the classrooms of punishing teachers and weak-willed teachers who let students do whatever they will. Invariably you meet boys who are convinced they are stupid and doomed to fail. They suspect their parents don’t like them. And all they want to do is stop lessons from happening by being disruptive. And invariably you meet girls who think the only hope for them is to capture the right boy (without any earthly idea what the right boy will be like). And they suspect their parents don’t like them very much. And all they want to do is fix their make-up, talk about boys with other girls, and talk boys into disrupting lessons to show their manliness.
As a substitute, I also went into the classes of teachers who knew the secret and actually loved kids. They had positive posters on the wall that could be paraphrased as, “There are wonderful things to do in this life, and I believe you can do them. You should believe it too.”
And they will say to their kids things like, “Look at this wonderful thing you have done. You are really good at this. And when you do things like this, nobody can tell me you aren’t a good and wonderful person that makes the world a better place.”
Kids need to see the evidence and hear those things from their teacher. And if the teacher is giving them that, they will even behave well for the substitute with very little work on the part of the substitute.
So, I have been dreaming about being a teacher again. It is a thing that I love to do, and I fear that, because of this pandemic, I will never be able to do it again. Even as a substitute. And if that is the case, then I hope that at least one person reads this and discovers the answer to the question, “How do you become a good teacher?” Because I believe I have it right. I know it worked for me. And I think it is true even if no one ever believes me.
Most star systems in both the Imperium and what would become the New Star League are generally referred to by their primary world, the planet in the system with the most population, highest technology, and/or the dominant culture. Between the worlds of Djinnistan, Houris, and the three moons of the inner gas giant that had habitable atmospheres and ecosystems, namely Pan, Eblis, and Surtur, Djinnistan took first place not by population or culture, but because it was one of the three heart-worlds of Faulkner Genetics.
Now, I have never contended that I am any sort of expert on genetics and the science of DNA manipulation, but I do understand the dominant role that heart-worlds had in the creation of the kind of beings known as Freaks.
Freaks were genetically engineered slave races bred mostly from human DNA, though also including recombinant lifeforms made from other viably sentient creatures. They ranged from the Longlegs Speedsters of the planet Martin Faulkner’s Dream, to the Man-bull living bulldozers of Sword-World Prime, to the fire-belching Afrits of Djinnistan.
Djinnistan was the science playground of Faulkner Genetics’ number-two man, Dr. Havir Bludlust. He was a man capable of grafting and gene-splicing his own body to achieve a sort of immortality, and doing any necessary horrible thing to other beings to get the specific genetic effects he wanted in a special slave. It is rumored that he had genetically amplified his own brain and given himself two giant bird claws in place of feet. Many claim that his self-manipulations drove him to insanity, but the masters of gene-splicing were all a little bit insane to begin with.
On Djinnistan, Dr. Bludlust produced three different kinds of Freaks with a decidedly Arabian Knights sort of theme.
The little halfling-like creatures, called Peris by Dr. Bludlust, were bred for extreme creativity. They had basically the bodies of a human child with a slightly larger-than-normal head. Their eyes were large and very clear-sighted. And they thought in very innovative and eccentric ways.
One Peri engineer designed a ground car with chicken legs instead of wheels, capable of hopping over rough terrain and running smoothly at about the hunting speed of a velociraptor, providing the most common vehicle on Djinnistan because it was a design loved dearly by all Peris.
Another Peri engineer created a material-synthesizer cannon that could instantly create any kind of aquatic lifeform in the barrel and shoot it out to a distance of one hundred meters. This “fish-gun” was not particularly useful on a desert world like Djinnistan, but became a popular “trout gun” for the mountain streams of Houris. It was also used as a “barracuda gun” on more violent water-worlds like Design and Dancer.
Besides being wildly creative, Peris were also prolific. A Peri female was capable of having one baby a year for 280 years out of a normal 320-year lifespan. That’s how you end up with baby names like, “Another Danged Boy Number 152” whom I may talk about later in this epic tale.
A second main form of Djinnistani Freak is the Winged Djinn race of humanoids with hollow bones and avian wings. These people are capable of extra-vehicular flight within the atmosphere, creating slaves capable of reaching all sorts of difficult-to-reach places on jungle planets, mountainous regions, and extra-large air spaces aboard some of the largest cargo cruisers in space.
These winged beings were the most numerous peoples residing on Houris, Pan, and Eblis. They were second only to the Peris on Djinnistan, and even the third most common residents of the magma-filled world of Surtur.
The hulking and sulfurous Afrits were a unique race designed to have fire-breathing capabilities. They were not blessed with high intelligence, but they made excellent warriors, and even better artillery pieces. They were capable of vomiting napalm-like material from their own stomachs as far as half a mile away with deadly accuracy. They were also fire-proof enough to survive a direct hit from a plasma rifle fifty percent of the time. Of course, they were most common on Surtur, but found on all the worlds of the Djinnistan System.
So, this was the planetary system that Arkin Cloudstalker, Black Fly, and Lazerstone came to in order to invade, with just the three of them to conquer the entire star system.
Yesterday I posted another maudlin doomsday post. I probably gave you the opinion that all I do with my time is mope around and think about death. And maybe write a little creepy black Gothic poetry. But that’s not me. I am a lover of the humor in stories by Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Kurt Vonnegut. I am a former teacher that managed to teach the entire zoological range of possible middle school and high school students in Texas and did it without being convinced to hate them rather than love them. Yes, my heart is full of mirth and love and memories of weird kids and troubled kids and kids that could melt the meanest of hearts.
My passion is writing fictional stories about the kids I have taught, including my own three, and setting it in a fictionalized version of my little town, the place in Iowa…
My experience of the works of Kurt Vonnegut is limited to the reading of three books; Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. But it was enough to make me love him and use him as a shaper of my soul.
I deeply apologize for the fact that even though he only wrote 14 books and a bunch of short stories, I have not read everything I could get my hands on by Kurt. Three novels and one short story (Harrison Bergeron) is not really enough to compare to the many, many things that I have read by Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Louis L’Amour, and Michael Crichton. I can’t begin to count how many books of each of those four I have read and reread. But it is enough that I read those three novels and have a lifelong regret of never buying and reading Slapstick when I had the chance. Vonnegut writes black humor. The ideas are painful, and burn away flesh from your personal body of being. And at the same time, you cannot help but laugh at the pure, clean, horrifying truths his ridiculous stories reveal.
If, in the course of telling a story, you can put the sublime, the ridiculous, and the horrendous side by side, and make the reader see how they actually fit together, then you can write like Vonnegut.
Let me give you three quick and dirty book reports of the Vonnegut I have read in the order I have read them;
I read Cat’s Cradle in college. I was young and idealistic at the time, foolishly convinced I could be a great writer and cartoonist who could use my work to change mankind for the better.
In the book, Dr. Felix Hoenikker (a fictionalized co-creator of the atomic bomb) is obsessively re-stacking cannonballs in the town square in pursuit of a new way to align water molecules that will yield ice that does not melt at room temperature. Much as he did with the A-bomb, Hoenikker invents a world-ending science-thing without any thought for the possible consequences. The narrator of the novel is trying to write a humanizing biography of the scientist, and comes to observe the inevitable destruction of the whole world when the oceans freeze into Ice-9, the un-meltable ice crystal. Before the world ends, the narrator spends time on the fictional Carribean island of San Lorenzo where he learns the fictional religion known as Bokononism, and learns to make love to a beautiful woman by pressing bare feet together sole to sole. It is a nihilistic picture of what humans are really like more savagely bleak than any portrayal Monte Python’s Flying Circus ever did on TV.
Needless to say, my ideals were eventually shattered and my faith in the world shaken.
I read Breakfast of Champions after I had been teaching long enough to buy my own house, be newly married, and a father to one son. It was probably the worst time of life to be reading a book so cynical, yet true.
In this story, the author Kilgore Trout, much published but mostly unknown, is headed to Midland City to deliver a keynote address at an arts festival. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy business man who owns a lot of Midland City real-estate. Trout gives Hoover a book (supposedly a message from the creator of the universe) to read that suggests that all people (except for the reader of the book… meaning Hoover) are machines with no free will. Hoover takes the message to heart and tries to set the machines free by breaking them, beating up his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody.
The book contains devastating themes of suicide, free will, and social and economic cruelty. It makes you sincerely reflect on your own cog-in-the-machine reality.
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I bought and read when I missed my chance to buy Slapstick and needed something to take home from HalfPrice Books to make me feel better about what I missed. (Of the five books I had intended to buy that day, none were still on the shelves in spite of the fact that they had been there the week before.) It was fortuitous. This proved to be the best novel I had ever read by Vonnegut.
Like most of his work, the story of Billy Pilgrim is a fractured mosaic of small story pieces not presented in chronological order. It details Billy’s safe, ordinary marriage to a wife who gives him two children, but it is ironically cluttered with death, accidents, being stalked by an assassin, and being kidnapped by aliens. It also details his experiences in World War II where he is captured by the Germans, held prisoner in Dresden, kept in an underground slaughterhouse, and ironically survives the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies. Further, it details his time as a zoo exhibit on the alien planet of Tralfamadore.
It explores the themes of depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and anti-war sentiment. Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the fire-bombing, so real-life experiences fill the book with gravitas that it might not otherwise possess. Whether the author was ever kidnapped by aliens or not, I cannot say.
But Kurt Vonnegut’s desire to be a writer and portray himself as a writer in the character of Kilgore Trout, and even as himself in his work, has an awful lot to do with my desire to be a writer myself. Dark, pithy wisdom is his thing. But that wisdom, having been wrung from the darkness is all the more brightly lit because of that wringing. It is hard to read, but not hard to love.
I have published novel number 15, very probably the last book I will be able to finish before I die. Of course, I have said that about every novel since number seven. So, this is actually pleasant surprise number 8. That’s the benefit of always preparing for the worst.
It is hard to find gloomy-doomy pictures to illustrate this article, since I’m more of a sunshine and smiles sort of artist.
So, let me list a few of my gloomy-doomy predictions that will hopefully also turn out better than planned.
Governor Abbot is smart enough to know that opening up the the State of Texas to make the economy more profitable for rich white guys again will turn the State into a morgue full of plague victims. We have not reached the peak of the pandemic in this State yet. And our governor is smart enough to know that people will die. But he’s also evil enough not to care.
I will probably die in the next two weeks. Maybe tomorrow, knowing how my luck usually plays out.
Trump will get reelected in the fall since all the Democrats, including Joe Biden, have enough empathy to try help Republicans, sick because of Trump’s profits-before-people agenda, and then they will die from the virus, which Republican voters will not die from (because God protects idiots from the consequences of their own idiocy. Only the smart Republicans will die).
The rest of the world after Trump’s reelection will all perish in about twelve years from climate change because even Republicans cannot live on surface temperatures of one thousand degrees Fahrenheit (except of course for the Republicans who don’t understand they can actually die from excessive heat, and so, will have to design fire-proof banjos to keep on pickin’ and grinnin’.)
My writing desk (seen metaphorically)
The universe will happily percolate onward for billions of years without human beings from planet Earth. (Or possibly human beans from planet Mirth).
And the universe will end with some multiple of the number 42.
My book, seen in the link above, is still free today in Kindle e-book format. It is a story told by a ventriloquist’s dummy who has to try to stop a serial killer from killing his young friends. It is a comedy with some dark parts in it. And the book probably has nothing at all to do with the end of the universe and life as we know it… probably.
And that’s a look at all the bad things I fully expect to happen as life goes forward. So, statistically at least, there is a good chance that I will be pleasantly surprised about one or two of those things. Life can’t be all bad if you have a butterfly’s chance in Hell to have things turn out all right. That kind of irony can make even a pessimist grin.
Catch a Falling Star 
Vonnegut
My experience of the works of Kurt Vonnegut is limited to the reading of three books; Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, and Slaughterhouse Five. But it was enough to make me love him and use him as a shaper of my soul.
I deeply apologize for the fact that even though he only wrote 14 books and a bunch of short stories, I have not read everything I could get my hands on by Kurt. Three novels and one short story (Harrison Bergeron) is not really enough to compare to the many, many things that I have read by Mark Twain, Terry Pratchett, Louis L’Amour, and Michael Crichton. I can’t begin to count how many books of each of those four I have read and reread. But it is enough that I read those three novels and have a lifelong regret of never buying and reading Slapstick when I had the chance. Vonnegut writes black humor. The ideas are painful, and burn away flesh from your personal body of being. And at the same time, you cannot help but laugh at the pure, clean, horrifying truths his ridiculous stories reveal.
If, in the course of telling a story, you can put the sublime, the ridiculous, and the horrendous side by side, and make the reader see how they actually fit together, then you can write like Vonnegut.
Let me give you three quick and dirty book reports of the Vonnegut I have read in the order I have read them;
I read Cat’s Cradle in college. I was young and idealistic at the time, foolishly convinced I could be a great writer and cartoonist who could use my work to change mankind for the better.
In the book, Dr. Felix Hoenikker (a fictionalized co-creator of the atomic bomb) is obsessively re-stacking cannonballs in the town square in pursuit of a new way to align water molecules that will yield ice that does not melt at room temperature. Much as he did with the A-bomb, Hoenikker invents a world-ending science-thing without any thought for the possible consequences. The narrator of the novel is trying to write a humanizing biography of the scientist, and comes to observe the inevitable destruction of the whole world when the oceans freeze into Ice-9, the un-meltable ice crystal. Before the world ends, the narrator spends time on the fictional Carribean island of San Lorenzo where he learns the fictional religion known as Bokononism, and learns to make love to a beautiful woman by pressing bare feet together sole to sole. It is a nihilistic picture of what humans are really like more savagely bleak than any portrayal Monte Python’s Flying Circus ever did on TV.
Needless to say, my ideals were eventually shattered and my faith in the world shaken.
I read Breakfast of Champions after I had been teaching long enough to buy my own house, be newly married, and a father to one son. It was probably the worst time of life to be reading a book so cynical, yet true.
In this story, the author Kilgore Trout, much published but mostly unknown, is headed to Midland City to deliver a keynote address at an arts festival. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy business man who owns a lot of Midland City real-estate. Trout gives Hoover a book (supposedly a message from the creator of the universe) to read that suggests that all people (except for the reader of the book… meaning Hoover) are machines with no free will. Hoover takes the message to heart and tries to set the machines free by breaking them, beating up his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody.
The book contains devastating themes of suicide, free will, and social and economic cruelty. It makes you sincerely reflect on your own cog-in-the-machine reality.
Slaughterhouse Five is a book I bought and read when I missed my chance to buy Slapstick and needed something to take home from HalfPrice Books to make me feel better about what I missed. (Of the five books I had intended to buy that day, none were still on the shelves in spite of the fact that they had been there the week before.) It was fortuitous. This proved to be the best novel I had ever read by Vonnegut.
Like most of his work, the story of Billy Pilgrim is a fractured mosaic of small story pieces not presented in chronological order. It details Billy’s safe, ordinary marriage to a wife who gives him two children, but it is ironically cluttered with death, accidents, being stalked by an assassin, and being kidnapped by aliens. It also details his experiences in World War II where he is captured by the Germans, held prisoner in Dresden, kept in an underground slaughterhouse, and ironically survives the fire-bombing of Dresden by the Allies. Further, it details his time as a zoo exhibit on the alien planet of Tralfamadore.
It explores the themes of depression, post-traumatic-stress disorder, and anti-war sentiment. Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Dresden during the fire-bombing, so real-life experiences fill the book with gravitas that it might not otherwise possess. Whether the author was ever kidnapped by aliens or not, I cannot say.
But Kurt Vonnegut’s desire to be a writer and portray himself as a writer in the character of Kilgore Trout, and even as himself in his work, has an awful lot to do with my desire to be a writer myself. Dark, pithy wisdom is his thing. But that wisdom, having been wrung from the darkness is all the more brightly lit because of that wringing. It is hard to read, but not hard to love.
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