Below The Fold

Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
I read that line a few moments ago. He was 84 years old.
When I started college in the fall of 1993 at the University of Northern Colorado, I was not in a happy place. I was love sick for my high school sweetheart, who was away at school in Kansas. We were trying the long-distance thing, doomed to failure as so many of those first-year of college relationships are. But I was a naïve 18-year-old, convinced I would succeed where so many others had not
I didn’t make friends easily in Greeley. My roommate was a nice guy, an artist from Chicago. I got along well with him and his girlfriend. But the vast majority of the folks I seemed to meet were from small town worlds, and I was coming from a fairly urban high school. The Ku Klux Klan had a presence on campus at the time; UNC made national news when a group of them circulated “nigger hunting licenses” on campus. I hated that place.
So I did what came naturally. I read. I locked myself in my dorm room in Wiebking Hall and I read. And all I read was Vonnegut. My roommate turned me onto him. I started with Sirens of Titan. And then it was on to Cat’s Cradle, God Bless you Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, Deadeye Dick and Hocus Pocus.
At the same time, I discovered my deep love for the written word… or, perhaps a bit more accurately, the act and art of writing. I started writing a CD review column for the student paper up there, the UNC Mirror.
It was also right at the beginning of the information era, and we still hadn’t really figured out how to use email correctly. So I wrote letters to my girlfriend in Kansas. I wrote and wrote, and I read and read.
Vonnegut probably had as much to do with my course from there as anything. Somehow, between the aching loneliness and the romantic isolation, my muse was born, delievered from somwhere among the dog-eared and tattered pages of Vonnegut’s tomes on Humanism. And now, 84 years after his visit to this world, he is gone.
So it goes.