So It Goes

 Once upon a time, a very clever man wrote a book, and at the very beginning he explained to his readers what they were about to discover: "It is about what life feels like to me." The name of the book was Slapstick. It was not the first book by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. that I read, but it was the first one I read with a hard cover. It was bought for me as a present. Brand new. 

I was fourteen at the time. My cerebral cortex was still growing at a stunning rate, as I was still in my prime brain years. I was soaking up words and ideas at a pace that I can only imagine now. Reading this book is what gave me the idea that I might, one day, be a writer. This is because I too was so desperate to explain how life felt to me. So much of my earliest writing was done as knockoffs of stories that I had seen or read as a child, but by the time that I was in junior high, I was ready for something more. The novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. were perhaps there to be enjoyed as humorous science fiction, but carried enormous life lessons with the tales of space travel and the bending of time. They were enormous for me, anyway. 

Which is where I began to lift bits and pieces of style. Refrains such as "So it goes," and the way he would periodically implore his readers to "Listen:." Mister Vonnegut would walk a tightrope of insisting that his stories were just stuff and nonsense, but they all turned out to be deadly serious at the same time. 

A few weeks ago, at our weekly family meeting, we arrived at the Big Question portion: "What job do you wish you had?" I struggled for a moment to decide, and fell back on my earliest childhood imaginings of being a makeup artist for Universal monster movies, or an animator for Disney. It never occurred to me that I probably should have gone for the obvious: I wish that I could have been Kurt Vonnegut. 

It is no coincidence that the next writer that I adopted was a student of Vonnegut's. John Irving was all about wrestling, Maine and sexual obsession, not Tralfamadore and Indiana. Overall, the movie adaptations of Mister Irving's novels have been easier to stomach than those of his mentor. Sadly, only George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse Five can hold a candle to its source material. 

Currently, there are no plans to develop any of my writing into a major motion picture. Which, if you've seen the abomination that is the Jerry Lewis-starring film version of Slapstick, probably turns out to be good news. And that is how life feels like to me. 

Today.