Yeah, I reviewed a Vonnegut book a few months ago. So what. The man just died, have some compassion.

“Cat’s Cradle” is considered one of Vonnegut’s better works. So, to put it in perspective, it’s really, really really good.

This book, like arguably all of Vonnegut’s works, is a quick read—due not only to his accessible word counts, but also his humorous style in perpetual conjugal intimacy with some truth of eternal importance. His writing is simultaneously light and vast. Any contemporary writer lives in his shadow.

I was reading the book in my room, thoroughly engrossed, and I read a passage about a poem that was scrawled in feces on the floor of the protagonist’s kitchen by a nihilist. The poem is:

I have a kitchen.

But it is not a complete kitchen.

I will not be truly gay

Until I have a

Dispose-all.

I loved the poem so much I wrote it down in hung it up in my own kitchen. I then reminisced about Vonnegut’s writing and its effect on my life. His “masterpiece,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” redefined the way I view literature and art. Then I contemplated his mortality. He was 84 and had been suffering from emphysema for years. I wanted him to stick around a while longer. Little did I know he died that same day.

I guess that was a vin-dit, or a very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism. When I found out he had died, I felt like what Vonneguts writes in “Cat’s Cradle:”

The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels-tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity of every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.

Now that’s what I call the sign of a good author: when a book manifests itself in the life of the reader. We’ll miss you dearly, Mr. Vonnegut.