Kurt, Jr.

I was reading Kurt Vonnegut's novels these days. I find them incredibly infectious. They make me write like this:

Half an our ago, I saw a young couple in a caffé in Arese. Arese is the Italian town where I live. The two were standing by the bar and enjoying an espresso when the girl noticed some green fruit in a refrigerated exposition box. Now and then, she would interrupt their chatter and say 'Wow, figs!' or 'Those can't be figs, can they?' and so on. The guy tried to see the figs but he couldn't. From where he stood they were hidden behind a large bowl of oranges. Furtively, he tried a few more times but always with the same result. As far as he was concerned the figs, or whatever it was, did not exist.

At the cash register, the lass asked the cashier 'Are they really figs?'.

The guy made a last attempt to see what she was talking about but his perspective was wrong again. I could tell from his eyes the exact moment when he gave up. He was born unlucky and he knew it.

It turned out they were not figs. It also turned out that if the young lady could not have figs, she had to have something. She got a honey bar.

It made me suspect that she was pregnant. When a human female is pregnant - which means when there is a completely new human being growing in her belly - she is supposed to crave all the time something strange and inaccessible to eat and her man, provided she has one, is supposed to do everything he can to satisfy her cravings.

There is scientific evidence that several other living species behave likewise, while nothing of the sort has ever been observed in any dead species. This is because in the living species, the behaviour helps the female find out whether the male is worth a dime and capable of taking care of the progeny. Dead species have no progenies to speak of so no such test is required.

It is not a very efficient test anyway.

Completely new human being

At the beginning of its life cycle, a completely new human being looks like the picture on the right (only it has no frame around it). It looks like a dot. Unless you put it under a real good microscope -an act which would kill it - you can't see anything but a dot.

The drawing is actually a reproduction of a famous five-million-dollar painting of a completely new human being, neatly framed and hung on a wall in the Louvre Gallery.

Louvre is a large and elaborate building in Paris, France, where they have many rooms full of pictures hanging on the walls. The pictures represent all kinds of things so they are much like written Reflections, only you can't put them in your pocket and read them on a train. They are mostly too large for that and, besides, there are uniformed men with shotguns ready to shoot you if you did.

Shotguns are instruments designed to put pieces of lead through remote bodies of human beings. There is a man with a shotgun standing by the picture of the completely new human being, too. It is his job to put one or two pieces of lead through your body should you try to take the picture away. He is a friendly man and, given the dismal state of the French job market these days, he is glad to have the job. As long as you leave the picture alone, you can walk up to him and ask 'Are you glad to have this job?' and he will tell you 'You bet I am!'.

At this point, having explained all about completely new human beings looking like dots, I could, if I felt like it, make the perfectly logical jump from dots to Euclid's geometry, and from Euclid to Einstein and to his much abused theory of relativity and from there to how being poor or rich is all relative, and so on.

That's what I mean by writing like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

But seriously, after having read most of the Kurt's stuff, I can't help wondering what else can I possibly write about. The guy said it all already. There is not much one can add except, perhaps, this:

     Even being an unwavering beam of light does not really help.
     It just makes the rest all the more painful.

Right now, my problem is whether I should go on writing.
You see, I feel and think like Kurt and sometimes I even write like Kurt.
It is evident that there had been a reincarnation or something and I really am Kurt. But if that's the case then I have already done all my writing!

The citation 'unwavering beam of light' is from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions
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