Everything Was Beautiful, And Nothing Hurt

Today is Veterans' Day. Today is my birthday. But this isn't really about me. Today is also the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Birthday. Here are his thoughts on Veterans' Day as found in the awesome awesome book known as...
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

___________________________________________

Man I miss having my birthday buddy Kurt around. This is the second one without him. Here's the obituary I wrote for him:

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."

- Kilgore Trout's epitaph

For much of my early life I hated writing. This was primarily due to grammar. To this day I still hate grammar with a fury often reserved for genocidal madmen. Anyway…Near the end of freshman year I saw an article in the LA Times about how Bruce Willis wanted to make a film adaptation of this novel called "Breakfast of Champions." The article featured a photo of the book jacket: bright orange with superhero font. I didn't even read the article, but on a purely graphic level I was intrigued.

A few weeks later I found myself in the school's library with time on my hands. While roaming the aisles I decided to look for that book from the article. Once I found a copy I began reading it immediately. When it was time to go I checked the book out and continued to read as I walked about campus. I could not put it down.

Within 24 hours I was finished. I couldn't believe what I had just read. It was fun, it was satiric, it was violent, it was dirty - IT WAS A COMPLETE EXPERIENCE. As many know, "Breakfast of Champions" was Vonnegut's answer to mid-life crisis. He was reacting to getting older by writing the most juvenile book of his career, complete with a drawing of his asshole. He was consciously trying to have fun and thankfully that feeling was able to leap beyond the page and infect me.

From that point on, grammar was no longer my master. In the past I would write something to appease the rules of grammar, now I was writing to appease myself. I had finally found my voice as a writer. This became very useful throughout the rest of my educational career. Though my writing was/is not the best thing out there, professors appreciate the fact that my stuff isn't 'paint by numbers' and have continually rewarded me to the tune of As and Bs.

Had I never read "Breakfast of Champions" high school would have been a far more stressful experience. With writing no longer being a chore, I had lots of free time to do as I pleased. It freed me up so that I was able to tech shows, see great films, go to weird places and meet new people. Without such experiences I would not be the man that I am today.

I think it is fitting that Mr. Vonnegut and I share the same birthday because though he and I have never and will never meet, he gave me the greatest gift ever – the written word. For this I am eternally grateful.

So it goes.