So it goes

Usually no good news comes just as one is preparing to retire for the night.  This is no exception: Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday at the age of 84.

There are hundreds if not thousands of reasons why I write, none more important than any other, all spinning in the middle of my mind trying to help me make sense of what it is I am trying to say.

Most of the time when I write, I sit at a desk in a spare bedroom that we have upstairs.  It faces east and during the day what I see depends on the time of year. In the summer I can barely see anything other than trees, their leaves concealing what is beyond.  We live over a flight path to O'Hare, and in the summer I can usually only hear the planes.

When the leaves fall, I can see almost an entire neighborhood of homes beyond the shells of the leaf-less trees.  I hear the planes before I see them, and then they pass in between the branches, seemingly.

I get distracted by the view a lot.

To my left is a bookcase that has three shelves full of an assortment of books.  There is no real order to it, except perhaps for height.  I tend to store my books in descending order.

Sometimes when I am having difficulty transposing what I am saying in my mind to the screen of my computer, I look at the top shelf of the bookcase and see these titles displayed in a row:

Slaughterhouse-five
Cat's Cradle
Breakfast of Champions
Bluebeard

Sometimes it takes a while, but I always wind up figuring it out.

And so it goes . . . the man was a genius.