Triumph and Tragedy

This week there is both triumph and tragedy. The triumph is that my nephew Evan is a doorstop no more! The young lad has crawled for the first time! Of course, the proud mother (my sister) will now need to deal with something that can not only cry, but can now cry in various locations without third part intervention. Hopefully for her, parenting challenges will continue to come one at a time so they can be mastered before a new one arises.

The tragedy is the loss of one of my favorite authors. Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84. I was not first introduced to Vonnegut in an English class (though I eventually met him there as well). I originally read Slaughter House Five because no one could explain to me what it was about. Having eventually read all of his books, I can say that this applied to most of them. I can’t really tell you what a Vonnegut book is about – I can only tell you to read it. I did not like everything he ever wrote, but I liked most of it. Vonnegut’s stories help you see reality from a different angle. They help you realize that it is only reality is you accept it as such. Vonnegut was one of the major influences in what I consider my healthy skepticism of anything base enough to become a “social norm”.

My favorite of his short stories, The Powder Blue Dragon, is a story about a poor boy who saves up enough money to purchase an expensive sports car (the Maritima Freschatti) and then destroys it. He kills it with speed – fusing the brand new engine by dropping the hammer and quietly urging it on “explode…..explode”. Why work two jobs for years and years to buy something that you’ll just destroy? It was the car that made him feel inadequate. It was the dream of owning such a car that made him want to be something other than what he was. By killing it, he killed his own inadequacies and was able to live in his own reality without torment. This story spoke to me and I reread it frequently. So, in honor of this great author and reluctant philosopher, let’s all find one thing that we’ve taken for granted for too long and say “bullshit!”