I wish I was like you, easily amused

I need to get back home to cool cool rain
The nights are hot and black as ink
I cant sleep and i lay and i think
I need a drink of cool cool rain

I was going to sit down and write about duck butter, screaming seagulls, and other assorted tales of this weekend’s East Hampton debauchery, but that hardly seems appropriate right now.

If you haven’t heard yet, this morning a man opened fire on the Virginia Tech campus murdering, at last count, 31 innocent people. I can’t say I’m shocked by stuff like this anymore, but you’re never prepared for something like this. I have a few friends down in Blacksburg, so I spent the better part of the hour after I found out trying to find out if they were okay. Thank God they are. We (college students) run around feeling invincible, not thinking for a second that we might not live past 25 years old. This is a reminder that we aren’t.

Everyone knows that The West Wing is the greatest show ever to grace a television screen. I was reminded of a part of a speech that President Bartlet made in the episode “20 Hours in America.” A suicide bomber ran into a swimming meet on a college campus and killed several people.

The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They’re our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars.

At any rate, for University of Maryland students, there’s going to be a service at noon in the Chapel:

We will host a quiet reflection tomorrow in the West Chapel on Tuesday beginning at noon. Included will be the opportunity to light candles of reflection and leave words of sympathy. This will coincide with a memorial service to be held at the same time at Virginia Tech. We are naming this opportunity “A Day of Sympathy and Reflection in honor of our friends at Virginia Tech.”

I don’t read very many books. I really should read more, but I’m just lazy. However, there are two writers that have absolutely captured me every time I pick up one of their books. One of them is Jon Krakauer, who writes excellent nonfiction. The other is Kurt Vonnegut. His works probably aren’t for everybody with the dark humor and satire. But, whether it is his short stories or novels, I have enjoyed everything I have read from him.

I have always preferred good short stories to full books and I’ve made several attempts at short stories, a couple of them I’ve posted in this space. In Bagombo Snuff Box, Vonnegut gave his 8 simple rules for writing short stories:

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.

Brilliant. Rest in peace Mr. Vonnegut.