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God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait
to find out for certain what my wampeter was,
and who was in my karass,
and all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

–Bokononist Last Rites

Cat’s Cradle was the first Vonnegut book I ever read. I was thirteen. My crazy best friend, with whom I skateboarded and listened to the Sex Pistols and threw chocolate donuts at office buildings in the middle of the night before we ended up fighting and never speaking again, lent it to me. It was red, it was old, it reeked of old book. I think it’s still on a shelf in Miami in my old room; it is vastly superior to the gaudy new Delta paperback I have. But it’s all still Cat’s Cradle.

I don’t know if it’s the stress and fatigue of this final phase of dissertating, or the angst and uncertainty of figuring out WTF I do with my life next, or just a really crappy week I’ve been having, but a little piece of news that ultimately has little impact on my life made me weep a little bit, sitting here in a crappy apartment full of aborted and fossilized potential. What the hell?

Or maybe it’s just that I feel like some piece of that youthful vitality and belief in all the promise of life and all the possibilities of the future that I felt as a blithely carefree 13-year-old just died with the author. Real suicides smoke Pell Mells.

God rest your soul, Kurt.