And So On.

The challenge to positive thinking that is the month of April continues unfettered.

My city was snowed upon. In damn near mid-April. Ten days shy of Earth Day, even.

Also, Kurt Vonnegut died. He was 84, and as a lifelong smoker (and coming from a family with a history of suicide, including at least one attempt of his own), he had commented many times how surprised he was that he wasn't dead. But even so, he died from brain injuries due to a fall in his Manhattan apartment, or such is the word. You'd want a guy like Vonnegut to die in his sleep, to "go to bed and never wake up" as we like to envision death in my family.

Vonnegut was fantastic. He was smart, lewd, dark, existential, pessimistic, and morbid. He is just the thing to help a sullen teenage misfit of the Midwest to manage his way through the later teenage years and into higher education. Moreso than Herman Hesse or J.D. Salinger, it was Vonnegut who spoke to me, who first suggested that life sucks so you might as well enjoy the bits that you can and not take anything else too seriously. He drew pictures in some of his books, including one in Breakfast of Champions that explicated female genitalia in a useful way for a less-than-worldly 14 year old boy.

I wonder if Vonnegut will be someone whom people will read in ten, twenty, seventy-five years. I would guess probably not, although that suspiscion is sort of blended with the idea that people won't really read much anymore, anyway. My sense is that Vonnegut's fatalism won't work for readers living past Vonnegut's own existence, and much of his work is tied to our times. Watergate is important, and inflation and "truth" and advertising and happiness, and other stuff that will seem dated post-9/11, post-GWB. If the Watergate scandal caused people to give up the idea that their statesmen were honest and -- as some post-modern theory suggests -- complicate the ideas of truth and accountability, the GWB is completely severing words and public relations from the actual work and intent of power. We have an administration that goes far beyond just refusing to admit that they lied (ala Watergate) -- we have an administration that refuses to recognize that reality does not match the things that they have claimed. Rather than admit or accept that he wares no clothes, the emperor has sworn that he is wearing clothes, rather nice ones in fact, but that we lack the ability/faith/vision to see them. This is a monster that feeds on our uncertainty about truth.

This goes beyond the poor attempts of Sissyphus to keep the rock at the top of the hill, to say to oneself, "such is life." I think we approach the point, culturally, where we are less interested in the rock staying atop the hil than we are in watching it roll back down over us. I think that Vonnegut's pessimism and fatality, shaped by the firebombing of Dresden in WWII, may come to seem sort of naive and sweet. We might come to see that pessimism requires hope, requires caring, and we won't traffic in that stuff anymore.

This is what April does to a man. Also, America.

R.I.P. Kurt Vonnegut, Freethinker.