HE was my favorite writer, for starters. Writing is important to me, so this was a pretty big deal. The morning I heard he was dead, it felt like someone had just flicked a match into my brain.

The feeling was strange—hard to explain—I knew I wasn’t sick or hung over or anything, but still my mind felt clouded and heavy—the kind of feeling I thought one might get coming out of a coma.

I kept to myself, wandering around the house, watching T.V. but not remembering any of it. I didn’t realize how awful I felt until sometime in the late afternoon while I was eating a nice little casserole of Three Musketeers bars and Tostitos, swearing under my breath with the realization that Vonnegut’s death meant that he was no longer alive. I know that seems really obvious now, but then it was like a miserable epiphany. I never really perceived him as being dead; he was always alive. He was in magazine articles there were pictures of him in all sorts of newspapers. He was still smoking his Pall Malls and they still hadn’t killed him. And I was happy for that, and I had taken it for granted.

I was smug in the thought that there was still hope for him to publish something brilliant again; I was happy there was still a breathing voice of reason in this increasingly irrational world.

You know, I don’t even know why exactly I am writing this article. I have no outline or general idea on what I want to say. I need to just say something to help me feel better, to help me give flesh and blood to whatever emotions are squirming in my head. So here goes. I am just going to blot down everything unfiltered from my head concerning the recently deceased, my favorite writer.

I am not going to give a quick little biography to convince of how cool he was or how he influenced “an entire generation” or something. And I am not going to try to understand or mimic the man’s genius—those are things I can’t and won’t ever be able to do. All I want to do is give a simple thank you to him, a plain homage from a small guy from Nowhere, Wisconsin, to a brilliant man of philosophy, letters and creativity.

I want to thank him for getting me through my sixteenth summer, for inspiring me to write my own stories, and to ignore any limits of zany creativity my mind might conjure up. Thanks for being my guiding light in writing and introducing me to the one-sentence paragraph grand slams.

Thank you, thank you, and thank you.

My utmost gratitude to the grumpy old humanist for Kilgore and Leon; Dan Gregory, Rabo Karabekian, Circe Berman, and Paul Slazinger and Terry Kitchen; for Billy, Roland, Valencia, old Edgar Derby, the Tralfamadorians; for the half seal, half man creatures living in the future in the Galapagos; for Dwayne Hoover and his bad chemicals and Midland City; for Bokononism and the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent; for Winston Rumfoord and Salo and Malachi Constant and the Martian invasion (Nuts!); for Felix Hoenikker, Eliot Rosewater, ice-nine and the nihilist who destroyed the narrator’s apartment in Cat’s Cradle.

And that’s it, really. I’m happy he was busy, busy, busy throughout his life and I will miss him.

So long, Kurt. I guess it must feel pretty good for you to escape the awful realities of C-students from Yale, to flee the planet that is dying faster every day, and to ditch the only country in the world whose national anthem is gibberish and has a bunch of question marks in it, and whose motto should be, “In nonsense is strength.”

I just want to let you know that in my opinion, no mistake was made, that you made it to the right planet and the right country; God knows, this world needs a voice like yours more than ever.

So that’s it. The karass will miss you and so will I.