I have just smoked an Al Capone cigarillo and downed a triple shot of Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel Tennessee Whiskey.

I neither smoke nor drink. Much. But when I do, I go for the Good Stuff. Or rather, I go for what I personally, in my white-trash-with-a-college-education sort of way, consider to be the Good Stuff. The Al Capones are 100% tobacco dipped in cognac, and the Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel is 94 proof.

I stopped buying the regular Jack Daniel’s Old Number 7 Brand (Black Label) a few years ago when they cut it down to 80 proof. Might as well use it to water your rhododendrons now.

But the Single Barrel is still righteous. If they cut that down below 94 proof, Jesus had better come on back. Because there sure as hell won’t be any point to life on Earth anymore.

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People I admire need to stop dying on Wednesdays.

I mean, God Damn.

Anybody wanna trade me for Thursdays?

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When I was in high school, one of my very best friends was LB. LB and I had a lot in common. We were the two smartest kids in our class. (Note, however, that I grew up in a small town where being the “smartest” merely meant that you hadn’t shot off any parts of your own body yet.) We both had crushes on the same girls. (He stole one right out from under me. Well, not exactly. But I still feel that I owe him an ass-kicking.) We played basketball together on summer nights and tried to tell each other jokes in German. (The jokes in German usually centered around the girls on whom we had crushes, one of whom he stole right out from under me.)

In other words, LB and I were tight like brothers. We confided just about everything to each other. And I figured that twenty or forty years after high school, we’d still be telling each other what was what.

Then one day, I loaned him a book. It was a book that had ripped the skin off my brain like a hood being ripped from a hostage’s head. The book was BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

About a week later, LB handed it back with a look of disgust on his face. He hadn’t finished it.

“There are some things,” he said, “that I don’t need to be shown pictures of.”

LB and I were still friends after that. But not like we were before.

Because that was the moment I knew he wouldn’t be my buddy forever. That was the moment I knew there were things that meant the world to me that didn’t mean dick to him.

Also, it wasn’t long afterward that he stole a girl right out from under me.

A Google search reveals that he’s now a physician specializing in the treatment of headaches.

Whereas I keep trying to figure out new ways to cause them.

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My friend and Brainiacal colleague Steven Gould has already pointed out that Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. bore a striking resemblance to Mark Twain. I do not believe this was by accident.

Like Mr. Twain, Mr. Vonnegut updated the language and structure of his fiction to suit the time in which he lived.

Furthermore, both Mr. Twain and Mr. Vonnegut recognized that humanity is pretty much a pack of red-assed baboons bent on self-destruction . . . and that this fact is truly funny, considering that the red-assed baboons are also humanity’s only hope.

Plus, they both liked to smoke.

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The title of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s story in AGAIN, DANGEROUS VISIONS was “The Big Space Fuck.”

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When I was in graduate school at the University of Kansas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. came to campus to speak. The title of his lecture was “How to Get a Job Like Mine.” (I believe this was the title of all his college lectures.)

Mr. Vonnegut had a packed house in Hoch Auditorium, which at that time probably held between two and three thousand people. He was introduced by my instructor and graduate adviser, the science-fiction writer and scholar James Gunn. Professor Gunn gave a witty and spirited introduction during which many in the audience talked amongst themselves.

When Mr. Vonnegut came to the podium, he began by saying that he had only rarely been introduced by anyone so distinguished, or anyone he admired so much, as Professor Gunn.

And then Mr. Vonnegut paused for ten or twelve seconds, looking out at his audience with those sad, bag-laden, rebuking eyes.

“You don’t even know what you’ve got,” his eyes said. “You poor, beautiful dipshits.”

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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. died at the age of 84 from a head injury suffered in a fall several weeks ago.

Now, consider that he narrowly escaped death in the bombing of Dresden . . . that he chain-smoked for decades . . . that depression led him to attempt suicide . . . and that he almost died in a fire in his Manhattan apartment a few years ago . . .

And now he dies from accidentally banging his head.

He would LOVE that.

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I have spent every day since my sixteenth birthday feeling as though I have come unstuck in time.

I often awaken in the mother night, convinced that Ice-Nine is real.

I have breakfast with a big chunk of my karass every Saturday.

And now I am lighting another Al Capone and pouring another triple shot of Jack Daniel’s Single Barrel.

I will step outside where I will blow the smoke into the sky and raise the amber liquid to the sun.

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut.

There is a mockingbird at the top of a live oak.

Poo-tee-weet?