Kurt Vonnegut: Accepting the Carl Sandburg Award

This is one of the best speeches I've ever read, hands down. I've printed it off and read it again from time to time. I e-mail it to whomever I think might actually read it. And I think it's important right now, when socialism is being bounced around town halls and the media like it's a dirty word.

As I've said before I agree with almost everything that ever came out of Kurt Vonnegut's dear mouth. And Carl Sandburg? Who could forget that fog comes on little cat feet? It was kind of Mr. Sandburg to point that out to us. It is one of my favorite poems. It was even short enough, that my dumb ass could memorize it. Wasn't that kind of him? It saved my ass in English class a few times.

Let me state right here (and if SB ever runs for office, and I might, you have it here definitively) that I am a socialist. Some pinhead with a bullhorn yelled at all of us lined up to get into a Kerry/Edwards rally years ago, that we were all a bunch of damn communists. After being momentarily startled that anybody actually still considered communism a threat, I yelled back that he had it wrong and that I was actually a damned socialist.

I believe in universal healthcare. I believe that the wealthy should pay more taxes than the poor or middle class. I could go on and on, but Mr. Vonnegut put it all so much better than I ever could.

So, here you go: http://www.vonnegutweb.com/archives/arc_carlsandburgaward.html

Please read it. I don't ask for much, but I'm asking this of you. You won't regret it. I promise.

And God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut. Wherever you are.

If This Isn't Nice, What Is?

"My late Uncle Alex Vonnegut, my father’s kid brother, a Harvard-educated life insurance agent in Indianapolis who was well read and wise, was a humanist like all the rest of the family. What Uncle Alex found particularly objectionable about human beings in general was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy.

He himself did his best to acknowledge it when times were sweet. We could be drinking lemonade in the shade of an apple tree in the summertime, and Uncle Alex would interrupt the conversation to say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

I myself say that out loud at times of easy, natural bliss: “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Perhaps others can also make use of that heirloom from Uncle Alex. I find it really cheers me up to keep score out loud that way."

--Kurt Vonnegut

I say "If this isn't nice, what is?" quite a lot to honor, Mr. Vonnegut, my favorite author and maybe my favorite human being. And then I almost always add, "God bless you Kurt and Uncle Alex wherever you are. I hope it's nice." It's a ritual I have, and if no one else is around, I say it to the cat or the dog. Who gives a shit? The main thing is to say it and thereby to recognize happiness. It's American Zen.

Divorce

Divorce is a full-time job.

--Kurt Vonnegut

Fuckin A, Mr. Vonnegut. Fuckin A. And God bless you, wherever you are.

SB is Forty-Fucking-Three

Well, fuck me
SB is 40-fucking-3!

Off work today. Just sitting here with a lovely cup of Starbuck's White Mocha Cappuccino in the quiet house, with the excellent company of my absolute best friends in the world, Ginger and Mercer. They don't talk a lot and that makes for a good morning in my book. Incidentally, SB was born at 10:02 at night. There was no way my ass was making an appearance in the morning. Also, the bars aren't open then. I held out until dark.

[I just yelled at my absolute best friend in the world, Ginger, because her dumb canine ass is trying to eat the cat's food.]

I took the day off from work today because I am fucking old, and I didn't want to be hassled about it. People do dumb shit and think it's humorous as hell on birthdays. I hoped to avoid that.

I don't even know how I got this age. I sure as hell don't want to celebrate it. As Kurt Vonnegut once asked: How did that happen? Christ, SB is three years older than John Lennon when he was shot! And believe me, John Lennon was the height of maturity to me when that shit went down. I can't believe I've out-lived him. I really can't.

No big plans today. It's cold and rainy here in Ohio, and I asked Mother Nature to cooperate and give me a nice warm sunny day today, but that bitch is fickle. So, my ass is just going to bag around and do what I feel like doing. Mr. SB is out of town on business and won't be back until the early evening, so it's just me and the two furry kids and the bed and probably several naps on the no-agenda. I love to sleep. If sleep were an Olympic event, SB's ass would take the Gold. I'm old, therefore, I nap.

Anyhoo, for you youngsters out there, I can't speak for anyone but myself, but personally, I don't see any recompenses for getting older. Frankly, everything is going to hell, and I don't feel like I've gained any wisdom or greater acceptance of things. I just get up to piss more during the night and sleep worse and ache in the places that I used to play (as my wise old friend Leonard Cohen would say).

In fact, I did some standing lunges the other day, and instead of feeling muscle-sore in my butt cheeks and thighs, my damn knee is sore, because I'm too goddamn fat, and I'm putting too much stress on my knees while lunging. It's not a good exercise kind of sore--just an old joints kind of sore.

So there's that. And I sound really depressed about my age, and I am, but I am looking forward to my long weekend and being on my own schedule. I am just depressed that I even care at this stage about no longer being rail thin, starting to have a more weathered-looking face and thinner hair, and not sleeping around more when I was young, skinny, and single. I was really cute, and I didn't date enough or fuck enough, and goddamn it--I'm older and not as cute and married now--and I will never be able to remedy that situation. It is simply over. That's the worst thing about ageing, it narrows your options.

Regrets, I've had a few. . . [Note: I'm hearing Sid Vicious's version here, not Frank Sinatra's.]

So that's the sum total of my wisdom at 40-fucking-3, kids: Fuck more! Okay, I'm just kiddding. Sort of.

I know I'll regret this honesty in a day or two, but right now, I'm feeling old and brave. Not wiser, just braver. Maybe that is the only recompense. You give a shit less.

Can you imagine the shit I'll say by the time I'm in the nursing home? I really WILL be like my hero, Grandpa, in Little Miss Sunshine.

Fuck you, I can say what I want! That's what I should have named this blog.

Mother Pleads Guilty in Son's Starvation Death

SB is not feeling very humorous today, folks. Not least of all, due to this story. If you haven't guessed, I gave up on human beings long ago. I figure that makes me REALLY SMART, since it took Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain much longer. They were oldsters when they threw the towel in. I'm ahead of the curve!

Mother pleads guilty in son's starvation death
Cult member believes child will be resurrected
By Justin Fenton | justin.fenton@baltsun.com

March 31, 2009

A 22-year-old woman accused of starving her infant son to death pleaded guilty Monday afternoon to one count of child abuse resulting in death and will be released from jail in exchange for her cooperation against her co-defendants, who prosecutors say are fellow members of a cult called 1 Mind Ministries.

The unusual plea agreement also includes a "process of deprogramming" for Ria Ramkissoon and the promise that charges will be dropped if 2-year-old Javon Thompson is resurrected. Ramkissoon's attorney said his client insisted on the clause, which he believes is a first in American legal history, because she still holds out hope that her son will be brought back to life.

Prosecutors say the five suspects belonged to a small group of adults and children whose leader, Queen Antoinette, is accused of ordering members in January 2007 to withhold food and water from Javon. She believed he was a demon because he did not say "Amen" after he was fed, according to a statement of facts read by prosecutors.

After he died, Antoinette laid Javon's body on a couch, and the others knelt and prayed while Ramkissoon danced around the body, Assistant State's Attorney Julie Drake said. The group carried his remains in a green suitcase when they later moved to Philadelphia.

"Queen Antoinette asked the group, 'Do you believe he can be raised?'" Drake said. "Everyone said yes. She told them if everyone believed and had enough faith, Javon could be raised. So the defendant sat by the decomposing body and prayed for his resurrection."

Ramkissoon received a 20-year prison sentence, with all but time served suspended, followed by five years of probation, if she testifies against other members of the group. Defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said Ramkissoon is still brainwashed by the cult and will undergo two eight-hour sessions of "deprogramming" with a cult expert after she is released. She looked away from her mother, Seeta Khadan-Newton, as she was led out of the courtroom.

"Ria does not to this day believe she was victimized by a cult," Silverman said. "She believes that the child will be resurrected, and that if she gives up hope of that happening, it would call decisions she's made in the past into question."

He said his client is "just as much of a victim as her son."

Prosecutors said the resurrection clause of the agreement stipulates a "Jesus-like resurrection, which is distinguished from a reincarnation" as an animal or object.

Javon's paternal grandmother sobbed during the hearing and said she was outraged that Ramkissoon will be freed if she testifies.

"[If] you take a life, you're supposed to get a life taken from you," Geraldine Ridgely said outside the courthouse. "This is a serious crime. This is a baby - he didn't ask to come into this world."

Antoinette, 40, and three others - Trevia Williams, 21, Marcus Cobbs, 22, and Steven Bynum, 42 - were set to go to trial yesterday but the case was postponed because Antoinette and Williams did not have legal counsel. They have repeatedly refused representation by the public defender's office, and Antoinette claimed Monday to have reached an agreement with an attorney whose name she could not remember.

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

Plath's Son, Nicholas, Commits Suicide

I remember Kurt Vonnegut saying something once about being the son of a suicide. He considered suicide himself (as most of us do) and even attempted it once, but in the end, he figured it was a poor example to set for his children. Kurt said that as the child of a suicided parent, in the back of your mind, whenever you have a problem, you consider suicide as one possible option.

Lost your job? Commit suicide. Wrecked the car? Commit suicide.

I'm not sure why, but I have always remembered that. The article below from the NY Post certainly makes one wonder. God bless you, Nicholas. Good journey.

Plath's Son in Suicide
By HILLEL ITALIE, AP

Nicholas Hughes committed suicide at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska, last week 46 years after his mom, poet Sylvia Plath, killed herself. He was 47.

From the time Plath died in February 1963, her husband, poet Ted Hughes, tried to protect their children, Frieda and Nicholas, from their mother's fate and fame.

He burned the final volume of her journals, angering scholars and fans, and waited years to fill his kids in on the details of her suicide.

And only near the end of his own life, in his "Birthday Letters" poems, did he share his side of modern poetry's ill-starred couple.

"In 1963, you were hit even harder than me," Ted wrote Nicholas in 1998, mere months before dying of cancer. "But you will have to deal with it, just as I have had to."

Plath became a cult figure through the novel "The Bell Jar," about a suicidal young woman.

Nicholas Hughes, who never married and had no children, hanged himself on March 16, State Troopers said. A fisheries biologist, he spent more than a decade on the University of Alaska-Fairbanks faculty but left about a year ago.

Frieda Hughes told The Times of London that her brother, who was younger than she, "had been battling depression for some time."

Nicholas Hughes earned his master's from the University of Oxford and his doctorate from the University of Alaska. At the time of his death, he was involved in a study of king salmon.

"I would really like to see him recognized in his own right, not just as the son of two famous people," said friend Mark Wipfli, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Alaska.

"He was an incredibly wonderful person."

David Foster Wallace and a New Direction

There are four primary writers who have become touchstones for me. I don't just read them, I learn something about myself and life by coming in contact with their words and intelligences. These four writers are: Samuel Clemens, Kurt Vonnegut, Wendell Berry, and David Foster Wallace.

I must admit that I have only recently discovered David Foster Wallace (DFW), due to the news of his suicide and the upset that his death caused the literary community. Like many, I find DFW's suicide particularly troubling. He was considered perhaps the most important, intelligent, promising writer of my generation and for good reason. The more I read David's work, the more I understand the huge hit we all took with his passing. I am in awe of his fine intelligence, his humanity, his wit, and his plain humility and decency as a writer and as a person. I can do no justice to him by trying to describe him further, so I'll stop trying and instead post a commencement speech that he once gave in a separate post today. The speech encapsulates and illustrates the qualities that I just pointed to.

I think it says something highly troubling that one of the finest and celebrated minds of my generation chose suicide as an out. I know that he struggled valiantly and long against making that choice.

When I read DFW, many times his writing perfectly reflects feelings and struggles that I have had personally. I think most of us can agree that's what good writers do. He nails it on the head, so to speak. I recognize myself and my own struggles in his words. Lately, I have been having a sort of depressing struggle with the direction of this blog.

At one point, I seriously considered abandoning Sarcastic Bastard and letting it become a ghost blog. I even considered starting a second more serious blog, but I frankly don't have the energy or the inclination to maintain two separate blogs.

When I started the blog, I only wanted to make people laugh in these bleak, kind of horrible times, but I have been feeling sort of shallow and like a sham because sarcasm is, by its nature, shallow and mean and unsubstantive. Let me point out that I'm not talking about removing humor as a major element of this blog. I would just like to bring something more to it.

I ran across this DFW quote yesterday that perfectly explains what I am writing multiple paragraphs here trying to get at, especially if you swap the word sarcasm for the word irony.

"Irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks…. It is unmeaty . . . I find gifted ironists sort of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but I always walk away feeling like I’ve had several radical surgical procedures…one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow… oppressed."

As a result of this insight and the struggle I have been having over the content of this blog, I am changing the direction of Sarcastic Bastard. I'm still going to do humorous posts, because I don't think I could survive day-to-day without laughing, but I am also going to post on more meaningful, substantive things.

If I lose some readers, that's okay. I'm willing to pay that price because the blog is something that is representative of me, and I would like to continue to be proud of the work and to feel like it's not just entertainment, but sometimes meaningful, and that maybe it might help someone to feel less alone as a human being.

David Foster Wallace was a professor who expected his students to work hard and to grow in their potential as writers. I refuse to expect less of myself.