Who is the Designated Mourner? – An Addendum to the Previous Post

Yes, yes, craziness abounds right now.  If I had one wish at this moment, it would be a direct line to the president of NBC News to beg him not to play the video footage sent to NBC by the VT gunman.

And on another completely sad note, on Marketplace today, they ran a heartbreaking story on farmers in India committing suicide out of desperation.

I, however, am still stuck on last week’s news.

I am a broken record.

I just remembered that I noted Joseph Heller’s passing with a Vonnegut-penned elegy. Now, that these two dirty old men who write of war’s horrors are gone, who among their tribe is left to mourn them?

Mourning

This is a little tardy, but in my defense, my status message on the day of his death was “R.I.P. Kurt.” I am not only mourning the man, but that period of youth, somewhere between 15-23 where a writer can completely take hold of your mind. There are three novels that I’ve forced people to read: (1) 1984, (2) Slaughterhouse 5; and (3) the Secret History. This stage in life is so universal, that the NYT editorial devoted to Mr. Vonnegut perfectly summed up the feeling:

If you read Kurt Vonnegut when you were young — read all there was of him, book after book as fast as you could the way so many of us did — you probably set him aside long ago. That’s the way it goes with writers we love when we’re young. It’s almost as though their books absorbed some part of our DNA while we were reading them, and rereading them means revisiting a version of ourselves we may no longer remember or trust.

High and Dry

This weekend I had a discussion regarding the prospect of a drought in NorCal with a visiting friend of friends. He grew up in Palo Alto, and observed that those of us who had our childhoods shaped by the great drought of 1987-1992 (pdf), now savored and oftentimes took very long showers. I do not have any information to verify his observation, but on an anecdotal level, I know that both my best friend from high school and I have the habit of taking twenty-plus minute showers.

Twenty years have passed since the start of the last drought, and it may be time to get into the habit of taking navy showers again. This sacrifice may be better than bringing back the old “If it’s yellow…” rhyme.

Now, that it’s coming back to me, I can’t believe that we spent YEARS cutting back on toilet flushing. Gross.