{ 27 } "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello."

Hello dear readers. Sad news from Writer Land this week. My uncle, friend, and fellow Vonnegut-lover Gary Sellon passed away at the age of 62. He was one of my favorite people.

I was not able to go to the memorial. I really, really wanted to. Not just to pay my respects to my uncle (I can do that any day and time I want), but to be there for my family. Gary's passing has reminded me that life is short. It can end anytime, any place. Uncle Gary and Aunt Jody were visiting Mom in Vegas just before Gary got sick! As sad as it is, sometimes a death is the only way people that love each other can find the time to get together.

Alright, I'm not here to bum you out. I'm sure you have plenty of other factors in your life that can do a much better job.

Since I was not able to get to Iowa, I wrote a letter instead. I wanted Mom to read it, but she knew she would have started crying. So, she let the officiator, Pastor Jeni Bohls, read it.

When I wrote this letter, I directed towards my family but for Gary. Important fact to remember as you read it. It's rife with Vonnegut references, most of which, if you're not familiar with them, might seem a bit odd. But, as I said, it was written for Gary. If I had passed before him, and he had missed the opportunity to quote our mutually favorite author, I would have been spitting mad.

So here's what I wrote, posted for family that couldn't go, friends that didn't know Gary, and readers of my writings. I have annotated it in case you're interested in what the hell I was talking about. The first annotation is, of course, the title of this blog. You can read to annotations as you go, or view them all at the end of the letter.

As oxymoronic as it sounds, enjoy the eulogy.

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Dear family,

Brecken here. I really wanted to join you today to honor and share in the memory of one of my favorite people: Uncle Gary. But, as you know and I know and I'm sure Gary would appreciate, life often gets in the way of living. This letter will have to serve as a tribute in my stead.

 

From early on, I thought my uncle was a cool guy. When I was little, for Christmases and birthdays, he would send me a sticker book and sheets of stickers. So, naturally, I thought Gary worked in a sticker factory! I was the envy of all my school friends. Mom never bothered to set me straight. Consequentially, I believed I had an uncle in the sticker business until a few years ago.

 

Then, when I was a teenager, Uncle Gary found out I liked Kurt Vonnegut. I had spent a summer tearing through book store shelves looking to fill the gaps in my aggregation. Who should come through? Gary. He gave me his entire Vonnegut collection, complete with titles that I had no access to, this being before the age of the internet. Again, I was the envy of my friends (the smart ones, at least).

 

I fancy myself an author, so I sometimes write articles, dissertations, what-have you. Whenever I would post something I had written on-line, Uncle Gary was the only person I knew for fact that would read it. It didn't matter if it was a review of a Fort Collins restaurant or a rant on how lax I'd been on actual writing, I knew Gary would see it. If I ever got discouraged or stuck, I'd just remind myself that I had at least one loyal fan.

 

While it's easy for me to get bogged down in self-pity, remembrance, and mourning for my uncle that I loved so much, my heart truly goes out to my cousins Ryan, Larkin, and Courtney and my aunt Jody. No matter how important to me he was, I know that Gary was infinitely more important to you.

 

Jayson and Amy, at first-blush, this family might seem a little wacky. And, in actuality, it is. I think I can speak for this whole weird-ass family, Gary included, when I say we are grateful that you joined us and brought a whole new generation of Beckers and Sellons.

 

Cole, Lily, Jaxon and Jacey, you had a wonderful grandpa that loved you very much. Kenadi, you're just going to have to trust us on this one. I know Gary was happy to spend as much time with you as was possible and I know you'll grow up to make him proud.

 

I'm going to miss my uncle Gary a lot. I know we didn't get to talk as much as adults as I would have liked, nor did I get to see him, or anyone of you, as much as I wanted to. We lost a really neat and special person this week. So it goes. I am very grateful that Gary was a part of my family and someone I'd consider a friend.

 

Gary always tried to live like everyday was just another day in Paradise. “If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” Well, Gary, you have now been granted a one-way, all-expense paid trip to that Paradise. When you reach the end of the blue tunnel, know that Vonnegut is waiting for you there, microphone in-hand, to document your journey. Then you both can enjoy the dum-dums, shuffleboard, and beer.

 

In closing, I'll say to you, Uncle Gary, what Saint Peter said to Vonnegut on his last round-trip down the blue tunnel: “See you later, Alligator.”

 

Love,

Brecken

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Annotations:

1) "Farewell, hello, farewell, hello." - These are the final words spoken by Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Slaughterhouse-Five, as he is assassinated. It is the message of the Tralfamadorians, the alien race that kidnapped Billy. Tralfamadorians believe that people only appear to die; they are still alive in the past, and death is only an "unpleasant moment". In the further words of the text: "All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them."

2) "Cole, Lily, Jaxon, Jacey... Kenadi" - These are my cousins's kids, so my first cousins once removed (yeah, that's a real thing). Kenadi is the newest of the brood, born 16 August, 2012.

3) "So it goes." - This is probably the most recognised Vonnegut quote, repeted in Slaughterhouse-Five 106 times. It is another saying of the Tralfamadorians. According to the text, "When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in the particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is 'So it goes.'"  Per the Onion's AV Club, it's another way of saying, "Shit happens, and it's awful, but it's also okay. We deal with it because we have to."

4) “If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” - This quote is originally attributed by Vonnegut to his "good uncle" Alex. But Vonnegut repeated it in A Man Without A Country. When you notice that you are happy, Vonnegut urges you to "exclaim or murmur or think at some point" that phrase. I believe that, while Gary might never have said it out loud, that phrase was constantly running through his mind.

5) "one-way, all-expense paid trip to that Paradise", "blue tunnel", "Vonnegut is waiting for you there, microphone in-hand, to document your journey." - These are allusions to God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian in which Vonnegut (ficticiously?) dies multiple times at the hands of Dr. K in order to interview the dead "on the hundred yards or so of vacant lot between the far end of the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates".

6) "dum-dums, shuffleboard, and beer" - another allusion. This time to Happy Birthday, Wanda June, the only play written by Vonnegut. The Wanda June of the play is a little girl who was killed on her birthday by a drunk driver of an ice-cream truck. She goes to Heaven and she loves it: she feels that dying is a good thing and everyone that is in Heaven should be thankful to the one that sent them there. She says that they can't be mad because they're all too busy playing shuffleboard and the dead soldiers in Heaven "just love the shrapnel and the tanks and the bayonets and the dum dums that let them play shuffleboard all the time - and drink beer.". So there's that.

7) "See you later, Alligator.” - A direct line from God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian. The "last round-trip" refers to the fact that it shall be the last time that Vonnegut allows Dr. Kevorkian to kill him and revive him for a past-life interview. It is the final line in the introduction and I believe the best last thing I could have said to my uncle.

{ 26 } Poetry and Other Atrocities

Warning: this post is long and rant-tastic. It's also a great read. But, if you're short on time, feel free to jump past the diatribe on poetry and skip straight on to the (gulp) poems I wrote. 

In some sort of desperate attempt to recapture a missing part of me that I had forgotten I even had, I've been sorting and sifting through old files and old blogs, looking for little bits and pieces of writing. My really old stuff is all hand written, which is a problem because I have about a billion notebooks. But my files are limited and way easier to sort through.

To the point: I have some old new stuff to share with you again. But I should warn you that they are both poems. Faithful readers and new obsessive readers should know that I have a slight poetry fear, as I ranted about it in Post #15. The quick and dirty is thus: I find poetry pretentious and overrated.

Now hold on, hold on. I grew up on poetry. My parents were both huge poet freaks, in reading and writing (my dad had a poem published in American Poetry Anthology, 1984, ISBN 0-88147-008-2, for those of you that didn't read Post #15). Some of my first books were by Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, and Jeff Moss (some are even signed by the authors). I would regularly recite "The New Kid On The Block" and "Homework! Oh, Homework!" for talent shows.

I eventually graduated to Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Bukowski. Talk about a leap. Sexton's "I Remember" can still make me cry. I have "So This is Love" by Lorna Crozier committed to memory. Once I hit 30, Judith Viorst's age poems rang so many true notes it was startling. A glace at my book shelf and I see no less than twenty poetry books.

Now you maybe wondering, how can I claim to dislike something that I seem to have such a fondness for? Easy answer: I read too much.

Poetry for me was like a favorite food. I would eat it every day. I would devour it. I would try to recreate it on my own. I would seek it out in hidden places, looking for undiscovered gems. But eventually, as with any craving, you start to get sick of it. The love starts to wane. One day you go cheap and grab something off a food cart and then it's over. Your favorite food now disgusts you. I read so many poems by so many "poets" that I couldn't stand it.

Please don't misunderstand my "pretentious and overrated" comment. There is good and bad everything, but it seems to be that bad poetry severely outweighs the good. If poetry was a girl, I could use Longfellow's words to describe most of his own genre: "And when she was good, she was very, very good, But when she was bad she was horrid."

To point out the obvious, between my parent's history and my early readings, poems were some of the first writings I attempted. And, as I said in Post #15, most of it was, indeed, horrid. Shamefully horrid. I remember writing some of it and thinking, "Oh, man. This shit is good. It totally conveys my feels and will express to the world what an awesome talent I am." Then, years later I'll find it, read it, and wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Page after page of audacious, self-overrated crap. John Keats I was not. Hell, I wasn't even Warren G.

Enough ranting. I did have a point here somewhere... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember...

As I pointed out in Post #15 (which you should probably just go read already. It's even got a Dune quote!), I did manage to crank out some acceptable diction over the years and I was going to self-publish a book of poetry. Mostly juvenilia, but possibly some newer stuff, of which there is little). Which brings me back to my original thought: I have new old material to share, written in 2008. I think these are probably the last poems I wrote. Maybe they suck, maybe they're good. I don't really care. If nothing else, I think they do prove that I smoke too much. To sum this all up: mayonnaise.

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Keep Working - 4 Feb. 2008
Nine a.m. comes early
To those of us without a schedule.
And things are over again,
Just like they've been over before:
A final prospect which I know to be true.
The dogs scratch, the cigarettes melt
Like they've done since time began.
But now time is ending.
Sleep is an impossible dream,
A far away phantom which I cannot catch.
To try is to fail.
To achieve a small victory is to lose.
Misgivings give way to an unspoken good-bye.
What you thought was a reality
Is now a dream you will never have.
The clocks tick,
I should sleep.
Nine a.m. comes early
To those of us without a schedule.

* * * * *

Stay Busy - 27 Feb. 2008
This is an empty house.
It can be filled it with smoke,
But it is fading.
They look at me with sad eyes.
The ones we love.
The ones that need us.
I tell them no.
What else is there to say?
Another drink will not fill the void,
Yet the trying is real.
Supposing that nothing means something,
What is it that nothing means?
The house cries,
The loves cry,
Yet I have no words to comfort their grief.
Another night with my Best Friends,
Alone.

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