Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday at age 84. The bright side is, nothing having to do with his lungs ended up killing him, and I feel like he might have considered this a personal victory. The New York Times ran a really long, very well-written obituary, and the poem it ends with reminds me of something Vonnegut said about how we should carve something into the wall of the Grand Canyon about how we could have really made things better, but we were too cheap. I can't remember the exact quote, but he was going to leave it for the aliens to see after humanity is extinct. I still think it's a solid idea.

Vonnegut was a writer who made me really want to write, and I remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five when I was in high school and thinking, "I'd really love to write books," so I've been in kind of a funk all day.

In an interesting (read: morbid) side-note, Kurt Vonnegut's frequent character/alter-ego, Kilgore Trout (whose death Vonnegut recently published an article about) died, in Timequake, at the age of 84.