Timequake

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Imagine this: A great American university gives up football in the name of sanity. It turns its vacant stadium into a bomb factory. So much for sanity. Shades of Kilgore Trout.

What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist?

Hooray for firemen!

Again with the firemen!

it was wicked to hate that many people all at once.

‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’

Young Booboolings didn’t see any point in developing imaginations anymore, since all they had to do was turn on a switch and see all kinds of jazzy shit.

There was a high probability back then, with so few shows to choose from, that friends and neighbors were watching the same show we were watching, still finding TV a whizbang miracle. We might even call up a friend that very night, and ask a question to which we already knew the answer: “Did you see that? Wow!” No more.

I hate to tell you this, friends and neighbors, but we are teensy-weensy implications in an enormous implication.

The Garden of Eden,” said Trout, “might be considered the prototype for the Colosseum and the Roman Games.”

“All Satan wanted to do was help, and she did in many cases,” he concluded. “And her record for promoting nostrums with occasionally dreadful side effects is no worse than that of the most reputable pharmaceutical houses of the present day.”

The John Steinbeck was in the carriage house.

Deadeye Dick reference?

Because of her, his ding-dong didn’t work anymore.

Ha

So Frank went home and killed himself the first time.

“It used to be said of a man who had suffered a catastrophic setback in his line of work that he had been handed his head on a platter. We are being handed our heads with tweezers now.” He was speaking, of course, of microchips.

This bitch, and there was nothing else to call her, tipped off the feds about where Dillinger would be that night. She said she would be wearing an orange dress. The nondescript gink by her side when she came out would be the man the gay director of the FBI had branded Public Enemy Number One.

Holy pooteeweeting Vonnewhat?!

One kid I knew shot a golden eagle. You should have seen the wingspread!

In public lectures, I myself often say, “If you really want to hurt your parents, and you don’t have nerve enough to be a homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.”

Uh...

Father supposed he could still demonstrate his manhood by fishing. But then my big brother Bernie spoiled that for him, too, saying it was as though he were smashing up Swiss pocketwatches, or some other exquisitely engineered little pieces of machinery.

And I now believe, with David’s help, That writer’s block is finding out How lives of loved ones really ended Instead of the way we hoped they would end With the help of our body English. Fiction is body English.

I wish I’d invented Rollerblades.

Low bar, Kurt, low bar.

“What grownups had done to grownups left no doubt that the human race should be exterminated,” said Trout. “Rehashing ad nauseam what grownups had done to children would be gilding the lily, so to speak.”

Pepper asked this rhetorical question: “Why is it so important that we all be humiliated, with such ingenuity and at such great expense? We never thought we were such hot stuff in the first place.”

Leon, I said, was accidentally decapitated in a shipyard accident in Sweden, where he had been granted political asylum and was working as a welder.

Galapagos

On the Academy side of the wall, hanging over the rosewood desk of Monica Pepper, was a painting of a bleached cow’s skull on a desert floor, by Georgia O’Keeffe. On Trout’s side, right over the head of his cot, was a poster telling him never to stick his ding-dong into anything without first putting on a condom.

When Trout realized how close his cot had been to her desk during the fifty-one days before the timequake struck, he would remark as follows: “If I’d had a bazooka, I could have blown a hole in the wall between us. If I hadn’t killed one or both of us, I could have asked you, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like that?’”

“If your brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off.”

appoggiatura,

“He shrieked, ‘TING-A-LING, YOU SON OF A BITCH!’”

Monica herself had spray-painted “FUCK ART!” in orange and purple across the steel front door.

“If there is a God, He sure hates people. That’s all I can say.”

“Perfectly understandable, Dudley. For anybody who could believe in God, as you once did, it would be a piece of cake to believe in the planet Booboo.”

“Trout himself must have died years ago. I certainly hope so, and may his soul rot in Hell.”

“When will you ever learn that nobody cares anything about you, you, you, you boring, insignificant piece of poop? Your whole problem is you think you matter! Get over that, or sashay your stuck-up butt the hell out of here!”

“It might as well be a Chinese barber college as far as I’m concerned. I don’t write literature. Literature is all those la-di-da monkeys next door care about.

“Those artsy-fartsy twerps next door create living, breathing, three-dimensional characters with ink on paper,” he went on. “Wonderful! As though the planet weren’t already dying because it has three billion too many living, breathing, three-dimensional characters!”

“In my entire career as a writer,” said Trout in the former Museum of the American Indian, “I created only one living, breathing, three-dimensional character. I did it with my ding-dong in a birth canal. Ting-a-ling!”

At this point in the story, Trout asked this rhetorical question, an aside with a paragraph all to itself: “What the heck?”

“Goebbels has a clubfoot,” Trout wrote. “But Goebbels has always had a clubfoot. That is not the problem.”

The third is from my son Mark, pediatrician and watercolorist and sax player. I’ve already quoted him in another book: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” One might protest, “My dear Dr. Vonnegut, we can’t all be pediatricians.”

Hitler wears one. He won it as a corporal in Western Civilization’s first unsuccessful attempt to commit suicide.

When I got home from my war, my uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he bellowed, “You’re a man now!” I damn near killed my first German.

Trout wrote of Eva Braun, “Her only crime was to have allowed a monster to ejaculate in her birth canal. These things happen to the best of women.”

Hitler still hasn’t lost his sense of humor. He says, “How about ‘BINGO’?” But he is tired. He puts the pistol to his head again. He says, “I never asked to be born in the first place.” The pistol goes “BANG!”

The Bible may be the Greatest Story Ever Told, but the most popular story you can ever tell is about a good-looking couple having a really swell time copulating outside wedlock, and having to quit for one reason or another while doing it is still a novelty.”

I will go to my grave wanting to pet their butts and boobs.

This is not how adults talk.

He appears to be heaping scorn in particular on Native Americans, who have already been adequately penalized, one would think, for their stupidity.

Vonnewhat?!

Then again, I am a monopolar depressive descended from monopolar depressives. That’s how come I write so good.

“I didn’t need a timequake to teach me being alive was a crock of shit. I already knew that from my childhood and crucifixes and history books.”

killed when she was grabbing door handles of fast-moving vehicles while wearing Rollerblades.

Rollerblades again?

“Boop-boop-a-doop, dingle-dangle, artsy-fartsy, wah, wah,” and so on.