"Somebody shoot me while I’m happy!"

Kurt Vonnegut's 1997 book, Timequake, used a quote that Vonnegut credits to jazz pianist Fats Waller, “Somebody shoot me while I’m happy.” That thought hit home hard with me.

Earlier this year, I wrote a piece marveling at my recently deceased friend’s attitude toward preserving his life as long as possible, “I want to see what happens next.” I did, and still do, love that attitude, but I don’t share it. I suspect Keith had some kind of unfounded (in my opinion) faith that everything will somehow miraculously “work out for the best.” I love that attitude in anyone, but I suspect it is not much less insane than the intense desire for chaos that plagues much of the world, especially the so-called “conservative” populations all across this planet. My friend believed that human beings, under the right kinds of incentives (impending extinction, for example), could and would band together to stave off the death of the species; largely because he had a complex and convoluted intense love for nature and our planet, which included the species most likely to destroy it all in a fit of ego, arrogance, and stupidity. I am totally with him on the first part. I wholeheartedly love the planet we call “Earth” and everything living on it, except humans. And I am totally baffled by the logic or rationale that led to his faith in our species. I’m not saying it’s wrong, I’m saying I don’t understand or share that faith in humans. From my observation deck, it looks like more than enough humans worship chaos and imagine that, if you toss the world into instability, all the quarters will flip in their favor and they’ll end up rich and powerful. That experiment has been run repeatedly throughout history and it always produces the same sad outcome.

Vonnegut's Timequake also included a made-up biblical bit that should have been included in at least one of the 2,000 versions of the so-called "Christian Bible." Adam and Eve informed God, "that they like life all right, but that they would like it even better if they could know that it was going to end sometime." Even better, would be knowing when. Everlasting life might be ok if it were just going to be Adam and Eve and the flora and fauna of the planet. But once those 930-year-old progenitors started puking out their 9 to 1,000 or so offspring, they had to become hoping for an end to the chaos and foolishness. Like me, I suspect those imaginary founding humans probably just hoped that they were having fun when the balloon popped. Suffering for what either is or feels like an extended period before dying sounds, to me, like the worst possible way to go. Those rich guys who are found dead with a half-suffocated prostitute pinned under the lard asses probably went out as happy as they ever were. How is that not ideal?

In Timequake, Kurt also wrote a succinct analysis of evolution, human beings, and the kind of crazy crap that random selection has produced on this planet, "I have to say that the giraffe and the rhinoceros are ridiculous. And so is the human brain, capable, in cahoots with the more sensitive parts of the body, such as the ding-dong, of hating life while pretending to love it, and behaving accordingly." Kurt desperately tried to generate a personal philosophy of optimism, but he was a realist and reality kept dragging his hopeful-self back to the dirt. When Kurt was well into old age (at 83), he told Rolling Stone Magazine he wanted to sue the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, “And do you know why? Because I'm 83 years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me." A few years earlier he told a Progressive Magazine interviewer the reason he chain-smoked Pall Malls was “I’m trying to die, but it’s not working.” He was clearly hoping someone would kill him while he was feeling good. It didn’t happen, though. Kurt died at 84 as a result of brain injuries from a fall at his home, and it took a few weeks for that injury to do him in. I would bet he wasn’t happy when he died.

Optimistic people baffle me. Mrs. Day keeps telling people she is having so much fun at this point in her life she wants it to go on like this forever. It won’t, of course. Our declining empire will continue to crumble, the crazed wingnuts will do everything they can to blow up anything that resembles decency and civilization, the media and the lucky quarter-flipper billionaires will finance it all hoping to get even further on top, and it will all continue to swirl around the toilet bowl of disaster and extinction. But for right now, this short unsustainable moment, For my money, this is as good a time as any for "somebody shoot me while I’m happy!" Actually, almost anytime between 2001-05 would have been perfect. 2008 was the last gasp of the old Musictech College as an educational facility and the beginning of the Age of McNally Smith College of Making Doug, Jack, and Harry rich. Before that downer moment, the school was a hotbed of creativity, academic direction, and cooperation. The downward slide to the school’s eventual despicable demise was rapid and predictable and no fun to be around. I retired in 2013, but the lights had long gone out of the building before then. During the summers, I was wallowing in the luxury of the brief moment when the Motorcycle Safety Center’s training philosophy was “adult learner centered” and offered a lot of room for creativity and individual instructor personality. But, if I had a moment to reflect and react, if a school shooter had appeared at any time during that amazing period of my life I’d have gladly stepped between everyone else in the Musictech building (except Jack or Doug) or any of my motorcycle students and taken one for the team. I would have absolutely died happy, assuming it was a quick death. Any other kind voids the inspiration for this saying.