Kurt Vonnegut, dead at 84

I like reading obituaries of writers just to reassure myself that if I do so choose to follow in their footsteps, and the path I'm on leads me to places that at the time seem unlinked, not to follow a standard progression, or to places where there seems no clear up and down or forward and back, that this is okay; the job of a writer is not noble, honorable, distinguished in such ways that should prevent me from doing other less important things.

Vonnegut, I'm happy to say, worked in PR and advertising, which is exactly what I'm doing right now, though he ended up writing about people who wanted to destroy such places. I'm already ahead of him in that respect, having written a story about a former ad executive who goes crazy in small part because of his occupation and his obsession with it. But it's nice to see that all in all, Vonnegut suffered pretty much the same inadequacies most people suffer, and though his choices in life led to extraordinary consequences, the choices themselves were never all that unusual.

When will I return to writing? When will the world stop turning? The answer, for now, is the same: 42.