everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt

Let's take a break from politics and remember the one-year death anniversary of the most acerbic and kick ass writers to have ever lived....

My first image of Kurt Vonnegut was through the masked ballerina that forever scarred me. Her image was haunting, the elegance of her dance destroyed by the weights strapped to her legs, her beauty shrouded within a stifling, muggy facial mask, all her potential hidden among handicaps forced upon her by a totalitarian government so everyone would be treated equally.

I hated Kurt Vonnegut for creating the idea of her. I hated him for frightening me, for describing the most disturbing image of a dystopian world, which even seven years after first reading it still freaks me out.

She is one of the main characters in his short story, "Harrison Bergeron," one of my first and favorite works by the ridiculously insane Vonnegut.

With Vonnegut's passing last April, obituaries lauded him as a master of science fiction and complexity, metaphors and allegories, but I never thought of him as any of those things. He always just seemed like a grizzly old World War II vet intrigued by the scientific possibilities of the future who had the fortune of knowing how to write.

He was someone who had the unique ability to chuck around one-liners from a rocking chair as easily as taking a breath. He was acerbic, ironic, witty and painfully pragmatic. Vonnegut braved a POW camp during the Allied bombing of Dresden, and could write everything I never could and make it sound spontaneous. He could turn convoluted sentences into hard-hitting juggernauts, and somehow have everything make sense.

Like many impressionable eighth-graders, I used to read until I fell asleep under my blankets and dream I was a famous writer, and I was always most impressed by how minimally Vonnegut wrote. He didn't delve into grandiose metaphors about willows and wuthering heights - he made up words of his own, such as "Duprass," "bokonon," "foma." My favorite being "karass," the idea that a group of people are collectively conducting God's will in carrying out a precise, universal task.

In "Slaughterhouse-Five," the main character, Billy Pilgrim, notices how you never realize when you're happy until pain takes its place. He notices how peaceful it is immediately after a war, how the stagnancy after a horrible catastrophe leads to nothing but silence. Vonnegut was the same way; his complexities lay in how uncomplex he was, how he could just sit around after a massacre and make an observation about how quiet it was.

His advice was as simple as his writing. "Be a sadist," he told aspiring writers. "No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of."

He didn't take himself seriously and he realized the role of writing was about make-believe places, characters and plots, and not about the writer at all.

That's why, truthfully, Vonnegut would laugh at this post. Like when PBS once asked him how life was treating him, his response was a sober, "Well, it's practically over, thank God." After taking one look at the words written here, he'd probably ask, "What were you thinking? You spent 500 words writing about some fleshy old man decaying underground?" He'd say it that way, too: crassly, masochistically. Then he'd probably shrug his shoulders, whistle and sigh, "So it goes ..."

He was the most beloved sadist I've come to known.