My whole infatuation with Kurt Vonnegut got its start in the men’s room at Clinton High School. I was doing that thing you don’t talk about (and no—I wasn’t yanking my wankie) when I looked up and saw the writing on the wall...
He
who writes on shit house walls
Rolls
his shit in little balls.
He
who reads these words of wit,
Eat
these little balls of shit.
Months
later, I would discover it was some graffitist’s take on a line from God
Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, by Kurt Vonnegut. The actual line read...
“Those
who write on Heaven’s walls should mold their shit in little balls. And those
who read these lines of wit should eat these little balls of shit.”
I
never much liked poetry, but there’s something about that little ditty that
stuck in my head for the past forty years. It’s down and dirty. It’s in your
face. It’s a polite way of saying stay out of my shit.
In At The Existentialist Cafe, Sarah Bakewe talked about how reading Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre changed her life. Maybe not for the better, because it encouraged her to skip more classes and eventually to drop out of school, but because it got through to her. It gave her a whack on the side of the head and made her want to learn more about philosophy, existentialism, and what it all means.
Vonnegut had that same effect on kids in the Sixties and Seventies. Here was this tall, soft-spoken, mustachioed man, trying to come to grips with his nightmares of the war, the bomb, failing families, loneliness, and the ever-changing world about him.
His words personified American youth in the sixties and seventies.
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