in Heaven

If you haven't already, you should look at http://www.kurtvonnegut.com/. It's fitting, I suppose.

Is it just a sign of maturation when your heroes die?
Or the people you look up to?
From Kurt Cobain to Shannon Hoon to my dad to Layne Staley to, now, Kurt Vonnegut, it's always the same. Something just goes missing. Those people are no longer there to look up to, and their ideas aren't there to guide you any longer. It's time to take what you've gathered from them, turn it into something of your own, and stop looking for advice from old comfortable places.

It's time to become "B." Perhaps. And that requires and catalyzes maturity.

Just felt like I should say something.
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

Shakespeare was a hack.

For all the flowerly language of love and kings and evil done behind closed doors, it's rare that Shakespeare speaks truthfully and directly to ones soul. I say this as I rapidly approach the halfway mark of Brothers Karamazov and awaken from my own blindness and isolation ever so slightly with each reading. BK is quickly becoming my Bible. The abiguous words of Paul and the much interpreted statements of Christ can't hold a candle to the direct and often combative words of Dostoevsky. His language is clear and plain and to the point. Oft illustrated by the most poignant of narratives, I've never been so painfully close to desperately wanting to live a different life.

My respect for Kurt Vonnegut only grows as my meager mind attempts to grasp the realities and illusions of ideal reality put forth by Dostoevksy. I realize my mind is nothing like his, and that my understanding of whatever universal truths are being espoused is so incredibly obtuse... I'm sure that, through the dense language and meaningful antecdotes the ideas available are tenfold of that which I am able to grasp. If I was a strong man instead of a sick man and a spiteful man I would rise to the occasion and forge, in myself, a picture of the ideal. Now that I can see that ideal so clearly. But I, like most, am attached to things that I've learned to love. And those things aren't freedom. And they aren't love. And they aren't brotherhood.

Zosima's words are amazingly prophetic. Our stuff is our freedom? While it's not an uncommon idea among those with vision, our stuff holds us hostage. My car doesn't make me free. The music that I claim to love doesn't make me free, nor do the stories in which I lose myself. Is it not all transient? Did Edison really do the world a favor? Or is the true nature of music present only in its ephemerality? My house isn't my castle. It too simply constrains me. The solitude and silence that I pursue to the detriment of all relationships provide only the illusion of freedom and never a true peace.

This all sucks. My random thoughts of things that have already left my mind. Dostoevsky's grasp of what it means... rather what it SHOULD mean to be a human living with humans is amazing. Here's hoping I don't learn only to forget.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

I would just like to say Happy birthday to Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

That, and "thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou"