ShitOuttaLuck

“So it goes.”

I’m a big fan of his work and have read many of his books. Cats Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Player Piano, Breakfast of Champions. Every book of his I could find, I would pick up, read the first paragraph and be immediately sucked in. He had this way of grabbing my attention, and keeping me turning pages in quick succession and making it difficult to set back down until it was done.

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes.”

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Video Interview with Kurt Vonnegut on PBS’s NOW

Technorati Tags: arts, literature, Vonnegut

Just testing out ecto. Mainly because I’m really, really bored watching very wealthy people eat.

Good news, we have two shows we’ve just added. Both are all-ages and both are in San Jose. Be sure to mark your calendars!

Technorati Tags: blogging, shows

I’m back. It sure is nice to be home. A four nights in a hotel room in New York by myself is about four days too many. I didn’t really know anybody or where anything was at, but it was an interesting trip to say the least.

Getting a cab was easy. The ride in was punctuated by a driver who seemed to want to intimidate me. As we pulled out of JFK, he broke into song.

“If I was god… I would kill all the men.”

That didn’t get a rise out of me, so he turned on Air America radio – I think hoping to get me riled up, but that didn’t do it either.

He got me to the hotel and that was what’s important.

The rest of the week was uneventful. I worked late every night, so I didn’t get out and see any sights, but I walked around the Chelsea neighborhood the hotel was in and discovered there wasn’t much to see there anyway.

I stayed at the Maritime Hotel, which has this total nautical theme – 4 ft porthole windows, murphy beds, dark woods and blues. It was nice enough and walking distance to where I was working. While there, I got hooked on Deadliest Catch – seemed appropriate for the room.

I came back on Friday and had a rather unpleasanto wait at JFK. Jet blue has some pretty terrible digs there. The terminal they’re in is probably as old as anything there, and it looks it. Dirty and cracked and run down. My gate was detatched from the main terminal. I had to ride a bus to get there and once you’re there, you might as well stay there. One bar and two snack bars. Waiting there was worse that waiting at Oakland. Of course, nothing is worse than Oakland’s baggage claim area in terminal 1.

So that’s my weekend in a nutshell. Nothing to brag about. I’m just glad to be home.