Still fuckin' buried.

This time, i'm dumping either some peppermint or caramel booze into my hot chocolate. If it's gonna be a snow day, might as well be a drunk day, right?

I wish i had some new books to read. I mean, I have literally everything my favorite author, the esteemed Kurt Vonnegut Jr has written, but cracking them open makes me depressed.

How freakish is that? I get actually distraught thinking about the death of a man I'd never met! Despite that glaring fact, I feel like I had known him closer than most. It's silly. What's even more ridiculous, it wasn't like he died some kind of tragic death. The man was 80 something years old! It's been almost two years since he passed and I still feel... blah. It was probably one of my greatest wishes to hear him speak in person. I remember that during the first time I read slaughterhouse five, I was blown away. His style was just... different. Obnoxiously so. You know how sometimes in movies you'll hear people say things like 'It was like the first time I heard the Beatles.' That's how I feel about him.

My love for this dude extends even further than that. There was a teen comedy made around... I'd guess '99 called Can't Hardly Wait in which the main character thinks about abandoning his longtime crush that he finally connected with to go to an awesome writing workshop with my main man KV. I doubt that's the only reason I still love that movie, but it's definitely a plus.

I've been trying to write like him since high school. I contemplated majoring in creative writing, but alas, I'm not a pothead. The English department at Lincoln was a veritable who's who of eccentric dressing hippies. I'm far too square to be one of those types. I do still write short stories just for fun. As a matter of fact, I made myself a little poster of Vonnegut's short story rules:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I love those. I also love that he used to say those rules were ridiculous and often broken by authors far more talented than he.

This is turning into a drunken love letter about an old dead guy, but fuck it. He's awesome. And this baileys and hot chocolate (i know, its pretty sissy) is making my tummy warm.

I'm gonna go be productive, so couch surfing and judge judy for me!!

-fraz.