This was a planet where everything happened much too fast

Deadeye dick 👁️

I hadn’t read Kurt Vonnegut in over fifteen years. I don’t give him enough flowers for shaping, maybe even kickstarting, the reading habit I’ve developed over my lifetime. Truly. He was on one, and for most of high school I was heavily picking up what he was putting down. But like all first loves, you must move on to greener pastures.

Recently, I bought a dusty old copy of Dead Eye Dick — a title I hadn’t tackled in my youth. The binding glue of the paperback had long since dried out. It seems like this was fished out of the deep end of a pool. Left to try out, then shipped off to the local thrift.

You crash head first into adulthood. Jobs. Kids. Pressures and lows you’ve never experienced. No big explosions, no sharp turns. Just a long flat road. That’s Dead Eye Dick.

A kid makes a terrible mistake, and it ruins him. Not in the obvious way. No jail, no big fall from grace. Just a quiet slide into the lazy-boy. Pretty much like all Vonnegut, you read it at seventeen and think it’s strange and kind of dated. You read it at thirty seven and see your reflection staring back at you with this weird, menacing smile.

Dead Eye Dick doesn’t grow. He doesn’t fight back. He just accepts it all. Life moves around him, and he stays still. That’s the part that hurts the most. Not the crime, but the drift. The way he disappears into a life of small routines, polite conversations, unremarkable meals. That middle aged emptiness you don’t talk about, because there’s no headline in it. Just time passing, and you watching it.

Vonnegut doesn’t dress it up. He puts it out plain. Life’s strange. People fuck up. They fuck up all of the time. Most of us don’t get punished in public ways, we just end up forgotten.

Dead Eye Dick doesn’t ask for pity. It just shows you what it looks like when nothing much happens for the rest of your life. And if that hits too close, maybe that’s ok.

Sometimes the brutal nihilism of Vonnegut can be a bit heavy handed. But often times he is so dark that you kind of just have to laugh from fighting tears. I’m glad we’ve found each other after all this time. We can hold hands and watch it all burn while we smell the hydrangeas.