The big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart.
—Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan (1959)
Apropos of nothing, I suppose, but that line has been banging around in my head.
I'm sorry I never met Kurt Vonnegut. ("He's up in Heaven now." [laughtrack]) Or maybe I'm not. I'd probably bore him. I don't have anything to say to any heroes—living or dead, real or fictional—and it doesn't bother me that much. Let us all keep our distance.
I've gone months now, if not years, without reading much of substance. Some articles here, some books there, but nothing much that gave me the Batman slap that I got from reading (some) Vonnegut for the first time. Maybe it's time to go back. That or Ed Abbey or Hunter Thompson—something to make the time go by, something to make the words coming in and going out have a little more something, I don't know what. I don't if that's something that's missing, but I miss it.
I don't know if Vonnegut was the inspiration, or if finding his writing was like finding a fellow thinker and that's why I latched on, but I've always felt comfortable in what I felt was the underlying current to all of his works that I read:
Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember, which he said should be carved in big letters in a wall of the Grand Canyon for the flying-saucer people to find, was this:
WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT
BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAPOnly he didn't say 'doggone.'