Where's the cat, Mr. Vonnegut?

Kurt Vonnegut, a man who has been among my favorite authors since I first picked up Cat's Cradle in my early teens, died last night at the age of 84. A ripe old age, to be sure, but age rarely makes the requiem less sad.

All week, I have been talking to students at Greensboro Day School about (among other things) hedging serious points in humor - the humor keeps people reading if it's used well and Vonnegut was a master of using humor well. I laughed my way through Cat's Cradle until I realized that it detailed the end of humanity, the undoing of the planet because of the careless use of the human mind. Not so far fetched, is it?

In a high school creative writing class, Mrs. Trail asked us to write a short story in the style of any author. Naturally, I chose Vonnegut, writing two or three pages within which were five or six chapters. In it, much of humanity had shrunk to only a few inches in height because they ate vegetables that were genetically modified to grow to enormous proportions and therefore feed more people. The newly tiny people were cared for by hippies who ate only organics and quickly built apartment complexes out of shoe boxes to tend to their tiny brethren.

Perhaps there is a heaven and Vonnegut is now sitting up there trading jabs with other giants of their fields... but I prefer to think that when we die, the energy that makes us animate disperses into the world, perhaps even breaks through the ozone into the cosmos, and that the energy that was Mr. Vonnegut is now gracing every corner of earth, perhaps implanting brilliant and ironic thoughts into the not-yet-born.

Thank you for sharing your wonderful cynicism with us, Mr. Vonnegut.

Everything in this post is a lie.