'Slaughterhouse-Five' & 'Cat's Cradle'

Kurt Vonnegut -- like jazz and baseball -- was something America got right.

The difference being Vonnegut was a pest, an itch that couldn't be scratched. He was the irritable underbelly of the United States. A ballsy and heady midwesterner, with all the common sense and know-how of a pig farmer and the worldly knowledge and jaded view of someone who has seen a ghost.

Vonnegut, in short, was everything that America was not when he was publishing his mix of science fiction, absurdity and black comedy. He had the sensibilities and the hope. However, he was not deluded enough to think this world, this life was a rosy and sweet as most everyone wishes it was.

Vonnegut was our Jiminy Cricket. He was our conscience. He had fought on World War II and witnessed one of the greatest tragedies in modern warfare (the fire bombing of Dresden). Vonnegut had seen all the hardships and death that any one human could take. He put them into his stories. These crazy characters are all apart of Vonnegut's past, the ghosts in his closet. Some are real and others imagined. Either way, they represent all of the irrational, violent and insane thoughts and actions that course through our veins and throughout our lives.

Vonnegut was beauty. Despite all the darkness and seeming lack of faith in humanity, he actually had an undying and relenting faith that people could be good and that we could all get along, if we really tried. I may not feel the same. And in some dark recess of Vonnegut's heart he might have had some mixed feelings ... because that was kind of the point. Vonnegut doesn't want us turn our back on one another. He also doesn't want us to just blindly walk down the dark alley or follow without raising some objections or questions. He wanted us all -- if nothing else to be skeptics.

My copy of Slaughterhouse-Five I received from a professor in college. I was taking a class with the man. He also taught an entire course on Vonnegut. I went to his office and as I was leaving, he gave me a copy from his shelves.

My copy of Cat's Cradle I got when my wife was cleaning out her deceased grandmother's house. In it were shelves and shelves of old science fiction, textbooks, Boy Scout manuals and an old copy of Cat's Cradle.