Today is a sad day
Today the world lost a treasure. Kurt Vonnegut died today. He was my favorite writer. A few summers ago, whilst still at Florida, I took a summer and read his collected works. It was quite something to read that kind of volume from a single writer. I feel like I really understood and saw and agreed with some of the themes that I found to be recurring in his novels. He placed a high value on large extended families. This of course wasn't hard to see -- he came out and explicitly stated this more than once. But he sold me on it. When I marry and father my sons, I hope to move my mom down the street from wherever I'm living. Everyone is the star of their own life. When I get waited on at the coffee shop, my waitress probably doesn't care about my issues -- she's got her own problems. He put a lot of stock in random chance and often wrote against the existence of a divine plan. Which of course fits in with his humanism.
I regret that I won't get to read any new Vonnegut. But he's up in heaven now.
So it goes.