Kurt Vonnegut has died...

Nothing to do with bikes, but...I have been lucky enough to stumble across a few authors whose ideas and art have changed the way I see the world, and there are few things to rival that feeling...

Many were already dead when I discovered them...Gabriel Marcel, Soren Kierkegaard, Jack Kerouac, Bertrand Russell, Ezra Pound...

Some were still alive, like Hunter Thompson and, especially, Kurt Vonnegut.

When the author is living you hold out the selfish hope that more is coming...one more book, one more essay...

Now it is time to be thankful for the words that we already have. For those who may be unfamiliar with his work I humbly offer these suggestions:

Welcome To The Monkey House
Breakfast of Champions
Slaughterhouse Five
Fates Worse Than Death
A Man Without a Country

"1492. As children we were taught to memorize this year with pride and joy as the year people began living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America. Actually, people had been living full and imaginative lives on the continent of North America for hundreds of years before that. 1492 was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill them."

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
US novelist (1922 - 2007)