Anyway, my eyes are burning, and I don't know what from, but I think it might be from the new brand of soap that I bought the other day, you know, it is heavily perfumed, and Bozzie's eyes don't do heavily perfumed, and no, I wouldn't have bought it if I knew it was heavily perfumed, but I didn't know, and so I bought it, but I've thrown it away already, so maybe it wasn't the soap, because my eyes are still burning.
I read my first Vonnegut novel in 1970 when I was in the air force and stationed on the island of Crete. I was cruising the base library, just looking for something to read. I was a very undisciplined reader back then. I would read almost anything that caught my eye, like if the book cover was flashy, or the title was interesting, or if the author's name stood out, and Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade hit on all three whatever's, and I'm not really sure if the title was or the Children's Crusade or and the Children's Crusade, but you know, it really doesn't matter, does it. So yeah, that was the first Vonnegut novel I had ever read. It was a fairly new book, I think it was published in 1969, and ummmmmm, the name Vonnegut sounded vaguely familiar, so maybe I had read a short story or two by him in one of those sleazy men's magazines that always seemed to be laying around the barracks way back then, but yeah, and I read it, and I probably read it all in one night, and I probably stayed up all night reading it, and by the time I was finished reading it I bet my eyes were burning as much as they are burning now. So between then and the time I started college in 1973 I guess I had read most of Vonnegut's stuff, and yeah, I think Slaughterhouse Five, and Cat's Cradle, and The Sirens of Titan were my favorites, but you know I liked most of them, but I sort of started not liking his stuff a book or two after Slaughterhouse Five, and I don't know if it was because his stuff didn't seem as good, or maybe, and this is probably the more likely scenario, maybe I started not liking him because he was becoming very popular, and I resented that, I mean, I didn't resent him his fame and fortune, I resented the fact that he was no longer a cult figure, and that reminds me of a discussion I had with the professor of my American Literature 1945 to the Present class, and the present then would have been 1975, and there's a lot more present now than there was back then, but such is life, and yeah, the discussion between my prof and me, ummm, we were in his office talking about, well, post WWII writers, and of course Vonnegut's name came up, and back then Vonnegut was not part of any curriculum, no way, no how, nu-uh, never, and my prof asked me what I thought about Vonnegut not being part of the curriculum, and I pondered this for a minute, nah, I didn't ponder, I don't think I have ever pondered anything in my life, but I did think for a minute, and then I told my prof that I was kind of glad that Vonnegut wasn't taught, I told him that I wanted to keep Vonnegut to myself, to keep Vonnegut as my own secret little guilty pleasure, I mean I didn't want just anyone to read Vonnegut, I wanted only cool people like myself to live the Vonnegut experience, and my prof pretty much agreed with me, except for the part about me being cool, and you know, I'm not sure which novel this is from, I think it might be the one after Slaughterhouse Five, but I'm not sure, and I'm sorry that I don't remember the titles of all KV's novels, and yeah, I'm going to start referring to him as KV now instead of Vonnegut, because it's really late, and I'm really tired, and I actually feel that I can write forever and not feel like stopping, but yeah, the part, the part, the part, the part of one of KV's novels that has stuck with me for over thirty years is the one part where the hero, or the protagonist, or the guy, yeah, let's just call him the guy, the guy goes into an adult bookstore and he starts looking at some of the girlie magazines out front, the old time girlie magazines, the ones where the models never got more naked than their bras and panties, and the book store manager came up to the guy and told him not to waste his time on the bra and panties magazines out front, they were just out front for show, then the manager told the guy that the good stuff was in the back room, and the guy, the guy who had been wistfully browsing through the bra and panties magazines, and I think wistfully is the perfect description for what the guy was doing, yeah, wistfully browsing through the bra and panties magazines, and the guy said nah, these are good enough for me, and yeah, I knew exactly what the guy meant, being all wistful and all, yeah.
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