I awaken to the news that Kurt Vonnegut is dead.
I groan. And I utter, "Oh, no."
We need him now. It seems we will always need him.
But Vonnegut, 84, took a bad fall in his New York City apartment a couple of weeks ago and on Wednesday he let go, and came "unstuck in time," joining his character Billy Pilgrim of "Slaughterhouse-Five."
Floating around in time, I remember first picking up "Slaughterhouse-Five" as a college student and having my budding anti-war viewpoint shaped, molded, reinforced.
Back then, it was Vietnam.
Now it's Iraq.
But Vonnegut was funny! Yes, he was sad and saddled with melancholy, but man, he was savagely humorous, even while writing his memoir of being a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during World War II when our armed forces carpet-bombed the city. Vonnegut and the other POWs were ordered out of the bunker to stack up the bodies. So it goes.
We need his sense of humor, now more than ever. I know, I'm paraphrasing a Richard Nixon campaign slogan, but that's OK. Vonnegut would understand, he would laugh.
I met my favorite writer, finally, on a May afternoon in 2003, on the porch of my second favorite writer, Mark Twain, in Hartford, Conn. At that point you could have just ended my life on the spot and I would've died quite fulfilled.
The war was on. It was two months old. Naturally I asked him about it and he shook his head sadly. He said it was "undertaken so casually."
"We hate war," he said, meaning his generation, which had seen World War II up close.
Ever since this new war began, he spoke out against it. He wrote about it, he gave lectures about it.
He said about "shock and awe" that it "can be compressed into one word: murder."
In his last book, "A Man Without a Country," he wrote that we had surrendered to "a pitiless war machine."
And he asked: "What can be said to our young people now that psychopathic personalities, which is to say persons without consciences, without senses of pity or shame, have taken all the money in the treasuries of our government and corporations, and made it all their own?"
The second time I met Vonnegut, in February 2006, with the war still on, I asked him what young Americans could do to oppose the actions of their government.
"We have to get (elected) people who represent the working-class stiffs," he replied.
And so in November 2006 there was an electoral revolt of sorts, and Democrats re-took control of Congress, but still the war goes on and on.
Later that night in Hartford, he told his audience he didn't believe in Heaven, but he then said this: "I want them to put on my tombstone: 'The only proof you need of the existence of God is music.'"
Play on.