God Bless You, Mr Vonnegut

Thank you for giving so much to me in my life, especially joy.

Thank you for The Sirens of Titan. As decent an explanation of world history as any, that the Trafalmadorians were using us to display messages to a stranded traveler. That the "telos" of human achievement was a can opener, as important as the Great Wall of China.

Thank you for Cats Cradle. Your sympathy to religious discipleship was as kindly as your disparagement of it was accurate.

Thank you for Slaughterhouse Five. How it taught us to feel about war. The craziness of it. And our looseness in time and space.

Thank you for Welcome to the Monkey House. You must have known about my people. That the control of population growth should be accomplished by local anesthesia of the body below the waste, and that this should have been invented by a Grand Rapids druggist, with the origianl purpose of giving it to monkeys to keep them from copulating on Sundays when he walked home from church through the zoo. Especially on Easter.

When you lived in Schenectady, did you step into the Dutch Reformed Church there, and meet the pastor, who grew up in Grand Rapids, and whose father was my own predecessor?

Your death is of the sort you might have chosen for one of your characters.

I hope that you're having fun on some planet somewhere with Montana Wildhack.