Featured Prose | February 10, 2023

In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, our latest prose feature investigates a curious aspect of online dating. Finding a partner in life is hard enough. Finding someone on Tinder is close to impossible. Mikka Jacobsen’s essay takes us on a series of Tinder dates during which Jacobsen tried to figure out why so many men listed Kurt Vonnegut as a favorite author in their profiles. “Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder” first appeared in print in  TMR 43:3 and was published in Modern Fables by Freehand Books (copyright © 2022 by Mikka Jacobsen). You can read an interview with the author here.

 

Kurt Vonnegut Lives on Tinder

By Mikka Jacobsen

 

Someone like Chuck Palahniuk, I’d totally get. You ever read Choke, about the sex addict?” I grip my throat and shudder.

“Or Bukowski.” Luca nods solemnly.

“Yes!” I squeal. “Exactly! Bukowski. That’s good.” We are milling under a weak spring sun outside a breakfast diner, postfeast. I’ve been enthralling Luca by telling her something weird about Tinder. All married friends like a good Tinder story. They find it hilarious and thrilling, the way single friends find the same story humiliating and terrible. On Calgary Tinder—amidst the rifle-shining and gleaming scales of fresh-caught fish, the deer carcasses and camouflage, the “partners in crime” flashing peace signs while proudly “living life to the fullest”—I’ve noticed an odd and surprisingly literary phenomenon. Nearly every second male profile lists Kurt Vonnegut as its favourite writer. I say odd, but I’m not yet sure. I myself have never read any Vonnegut. In fact, the only person I can recall loving him was Trevor S. from grade twelve English, who had a burning passion for Slaughterhouse-Five, spiky blue hair, and a weight problem like my own. We were hardly friends, though I knew no one else as frenzied as I was by books. Perhaps this is why I remember that he loved Slaughterhouse-Five—though it could be the title itself, which is magnificent and lodges in the mind. I don’t recall much else about Trevor, except that he wore the same massive nubby black sweatshirt every day, and I imagined he had a crush on me. Do I need to say he was not popular? Well, neither was I. But in terms of tiers, I fancied mine one above his and thus didn’t wonder much about him.

So. Has Luca read Kurt? Does she like him? Would she say he’s most suited to chubby blue-haired high school boys? Is he worth the investment?

Luca thinks for a moment. Her face loosens from the Bukowski grimace. A flash of mirrored sunlight flickers over her cheekbones. So there is truth, I think with an admiration surprisingly untouched by envy, to the phrase “pregnant glow.”

She opens her mouth to say something undoubtedly clever, but before she can get any word out, a man with a pompadour, leather jacket, and aviators thrusts into our conversation, scarf flying as though he’s been blown in by a wind. Heretofore, he’d been leaning against a bicycle rack near the diner door, presumably waiting for his name to be called.

“Slaughterhouse-Five,” he barks.

“Pardon me?” I say, taking a step backward.

Luca has doubled over in laughter.

“Slaughterhouse-Five,” he says with the authority of the pilot he appears to be impersonating, “is the only one you need to read. If you’ve read that one, you’ve read them all.”

He looks like he’s about to offer more advice, but I grip Luca by the sleeve to tug her away.

“Well,” says Luca, still laughing, “that is the only one I’ve read.”

***

Of course, not everyone lists a favourite author on a dating app. But in the words of a meme attributed to John Waters, “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” My Tinder profile is snappy and announces its literary prowess. I list my favourite authors in order—Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson. Hint to the reader: if any date opened conversation by asking my thoughts on “The Glass Essay,” I’d be undressed within the hour. This has never once happened. Not even on a date with a self-published author who promisingly announced his favourite book as Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I germanely asked if he’d ever seen a ghost (my first-date banter is exceptional). He sneered! “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?” he said. This after it had been made clear, by my mention of the early-aughts afternoon television show Crossing Over with John Edward, that I do and fervently. The self-published author made a horsey sound of displeasure over what he called an evolutionary failure. By that he meant me.

“I thought,” he tsked, “that humans had evolved past the need for banal superstitions.”

The pervading love of Vonnegut seems intellectually interesting in a way that almost nothing about a dating app is intellectually interesting. So I have decided to read him. If nothing else, it will make for more unforgettable table-side banter. I will read Vonnegut and forthwith date only those who call him their favourite writer. A timely and novel literary experiment. Likely a divining rod for true love.

***

The first thing you will notice about Vonnegut is that he loves a simple, muscular sentence. Both prose and plot line are as easy to follow as Simon Says, which is perhaps why he is beloved by high school boys. But do not mistake syntactic simplicity for undeveloped craft. The well-chosen verb, the surprising image—both blossom in Vonnegut. Take, for instance, this wet dream of a sentence from Cat’s Cradle: “He exhaled fumes of model airplane cement between lips glistening with albatross fat.” Stop and read it aloud. Such crisp prose! Such imagination! Or consider the snips of dialogue uttered by one of Vonnegut’s more rounded women characters, Bluebeard’s termagant Circe Berman. Said to narrator Rabo Karabekian: “You hate facts like poison.” So sharp! Said of the self-important writer Paul Slazinger: “the spit-filled penny whistle of American literature.” What a zing!

In keeping with this slick style, Vonnegut more than once pronounces hatred for the semicolon. Reading his 2005 collection of essays, A Man Without a Country, you might cringe over this strange aphorism: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing.” (Indeed, the “hermaphrodite” is a common trope for Vonnegut. Bluebeard’s Mussolini-loving Dan Gregory calls Joan of Arc one after Rabo offers her as an example of a woman who has excelled in a field besides domesticity. Rabo can’t think of any others.) You would likewise be hard-pressed to locate more than a handful of compound-complex sentences in any Vonnegut book. The man barely has use for the comma. He does, however, have a great penchant for italics.

It might be easy to cast Vonnegut as a purveyor of boyish machismo. Chapters are peppered with his hand-lettered bathroom-graffiti-like slogans and cartoonish drawings, such as the asterisk-esque asshole that appears in the prologue of Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut’s voice is irreverent, antiauthoritarian, the same spirit that animates teenagers immemorial. His mode is satirical, and he possesses a dry wit that, one might argue, rather mercifully sandbags the current deluge of outrage rising all around us. Ours has burgeoned to a self-serious climate where it feels almost impossible—and always crude—to make a joke of any sort (more on this later).

Despite the joys of his irreverence, however, it is all too easy to sink in the morass of sexism, if not outright misogyny, muddying the plots of Vonnegut’s novels. The steady stream of male veteran narrators who lust after and often eventually bed a much younger woman—Cat’s Cradle’s eighteen-year-old Mona Monzano, for example, a denizen of the fictional Caribbean island San Lorenzo, whom the twice-divorced narrator calls a “sublime mongrel Madonna.”

Vonnegut’s women characters are often so stock and paper-thin you can’t help but feel a fresh tide of anger when encountering them. This is particularly so in Slaughterhouse-Five. Billy Pilgrim’s mother (whom Billy naturally dislikes) is described as a “standard-issue, brown-haired, white woman with a high-school education.” Billy’s wife, “ugly Valencia,” is rich and fat and perpetually eating candy bars. Billy’s proposal of marriage to Valencia is thought to be “one of the symptoms of his disease.” She dies of overexcitement and poor driving. The pornographic film star Montana Wildhack, a very young and buxom creature entrapped with Billy in an extraterrestrial Tralfamadorian zoo, raises Billy’s child while Billy absents himself to time travel at will. Vonnegut illustrates Montana’s breasts with a crude drawing that features, in between mosquito-coil nipples, a locket containing the lines of the Serenity Prayer—an indication of his twin obsessions: sex with young women and free will. In the prologue, where the Vonnegut-like narrator explains the decades-long gestation of Slaughterhouse-Five, we get ideas such as this on a war buddy’s wife: “Mary O’Hare is a trained nurse, which is a lovely thing for a woman to be.” We see reporters who took the jobs of men during World War II called “beastly girls.” To be fair, Vonnegut, a true misanthrope, seems to dislike men as much as he dislikes women. Or at least the vileness of his male characters suggests this is so.

Possibly the strongest argument for women is made in Bluebeard. As the title suggests, and as all Vonnegut books do, Bluebeard peers behind the doors hiding the bone records of villainy. In Vonnegut’s analog, Bluebeard’s forbidden room becomes veteran Rabo Karabekian’s locked barn. Instead of murdered wives, the barn contains an enormous realist mural depicting World War II atrocities. The mural is titled Now It’s the Women’s Turn. Reading Bluebeard made me think a bit differently, kindlier, about Vonnegut, though it seems inescapably obvious that his prose is of a staunchly different generation. A sort of “dad joke” writer, who frequently uses words from the fatherly lexicon—snooze, old fart. A writer whose aphorisms read like this: “We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.” A writer who pens a wisecrack thus: “My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.” I can easily imagine my own father making such quips. And I’m not sure any of this bodes well for my latest man-catching stratagem.

It seems, too, that the world agrees with the man in the aviators. Slaughterhouse-Five is everywhere considered Vonnegut’s masterpiece. No one I ask can name another of his books, not even Breakfast of Champions, made into a 1999 feature film starring Bruce Willis. “There are novels so potent,” writes James Parker of the Atlantic, “and so perfected in their singularity, that they have the unexpected side effect of permanently knocking out the novelist: Nothing produced afterward comes close.” Parker is waxing rhapsodic about Slaughterhouse’s continued relevance on its fiftieth anniversary in March of 2019. And I must say, at times I too find Slaughterhouse strikingly prescient, at least in its cynicism and apocalyptic visions. Visions induced, like our own, by atomic weaponry and fossil fuels. But even so, even so. Why is the book so popular among the twenty-five- to forty-five-year-old males of my Tinder filter? There are many counterculture writers, writers who celebrate machismo, antiwar and pacifist writers, funny and satirical writers. Why Vonnegut?

***

“So, why Vonnegut?”

I am at an Original Joe’s, where Brad, the first of my Vonnegut dates, suggested we meet. I was initially put off by the Original Joe’s suggestion. If you’ve not had the pleasure, think chain restaurant and let the name guide your imagination. But things are looking up. It turns out they have a taco night.

On Tinder, Brad’s profile consists of glamour shots and a few requisite action scenes that look to be professionally done—in uniform with a stick on the ice, muscles bulging up a climbing wall. In the few sentences that make for getting to know someone on Tinder, he has written a fairly creepy line: “Let’s be perfect, together, Forever.” Reading this, I was both immediately suspicious and electrified.

Brad shrugs. “I like science fiction,” he says dully. “You know, before I went to medical school, I worked for NASA.”

I spill ground beef into my lap. Brad largely ignores my Vonnegut question so he can continue to talk about his work. Abruptly, he sets down his fork. Brad has a hobby. He’s already told me. The hobby is an endless search for the perfect fork. The perfection has to do with the shape of its tines. So Brad sets down his subpar-tined fork, wipes his puckered pink lips with a napkin, and retrieves his wallet. I admit I am startled by this swift turn of affairs. He removes a five-dollar bill, smooths it with a snap, and lays it on the table. Five dollars, I’m about to inform him, will be a tad shy of the bill that has not yet arrived because I’ve not come close to finishing my taco. But no.

“I used to be an engineer,” he says, tapping the top of the bill.

Lettuce hangs from my mouth.

“I helped design the Canadarm.”

I, naturally, have never heard of the Canadarm. It takes a minute before I realize it is featured on our currency. When I brag about this to my friend Eliot later, he scoffs. “What is he, like, seventy?”

“A doctor and an engineer?” I say around the lettuce.

“Yup.” He folds away his wallet.

I’m gulping wine while Brad tries to catch my gaze over the orange flicker of the fake tea light.

“Neither of us,” he announces, “has any time to waste. So let’s not beat around the bush.” Brad has blinding, denture-like teeth. He is wearing a suit jacket. I am wearing purple lipstick and a halter top.

My lips curl in a lewd smile. “That’s a funny phrase, if you think about it. The other day, a friend told me a story about how he was facilitating some government training session and inadvertently said ‘bent over a barrel.’ He’s worried he might be fired!”

“I have five questions,” says Brad.

“Oh!” I think Brad is proposing a game, or that we are meant to be having a nice time.

One: Have you ever been married?

Two: Do you have any children?

Three: Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime?

Four: Do you have any addictions?

He wags a finger at me. “And that includes smoking.”

“Five,” he concludes: “Is there anything you want to tell me before this goes any further?”

I am so flabbergasted I actually respond to this blaze of rifle fire. Brad, blowing on the barrel and holstering his gun, informs me that he approves. I do not have time to wonder whether equating childbearing with crime is appalling or pleasing.

“Now,” he says, “I’m sure you’re wondering the same about me.”

“No, actually. I was wondering what you liked about Kurt Vonnegu—”

That wagging finger again. “I’ll play fair.” He steadies his gaze and without pause shoots off his five-point response.

“And five,” he says, out of breath and winking. “I’ve already confessed my fork fetish.”

“Five, five,” I am thinking. “Like, as in Slaughterhouse?”

“You’re sure you don’t smoke?” he asks as we move through the door and part ways.

Since Brad never told me, I’m left to my own devices to guess what he likes about Vonnegut. Perhaps, I think with self-satisfied glee, he enjoys how the women in Slaughterhouse are mere props. Perhaps he cackles over the only woman mentioned in the Dresden plot, the one in a photograph attempting to copulate with a horse—a slice of historical pornography carried by the masochistic soldier Roland Weary. Perhaps, due to his affiliation with NASA and the robotics industry, Brad simply admires the science-fictional elements—Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians and their fourth-dimensional concept of time, where everything that has ever happened and will ever happen occurs simultaneously and where unpleasant states, such as death, are just one moment of many that can be visited at will. But even the Tralfamadorians are implicated in the seedy and the pornographic. They imprison Billy Pilgrim and Montana Wildhack naked in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore so Tralfamadorians may watch the humans mate.

“So far, Kurt, you have not fared well,” I’m thinking as I beg a cigarette from a teenager at a bus stop. I bow, and she cups a lighter about my mouth. “It may as well be Bukowski or Palahniuk,” I mutter.

Under our cloud of smoke, the teenager nods in sympathy.

***

Years ago, I worked at a not-for-profit resource centre run by and for people with disabilities. I found the job difficult. My English degree, I felt, had not equipped me for the complexity. I managed the centre’s volunteer program, and this was often humiliating for all—a twenty-three-year-old in a velvet minidress commandeering a group of disenfranchised middle-aged adults. I was, according to my own boss, meant to boss these volunteers around. “Our mandate is to provide workplace skills. Office skills,” she said, “so that a volunteer might get a paying job someday. You have to impose structure. Office-like expectations.”

Can you imagine? I’d have to reprimand a former nurse with fibromyalgia for a too-long break or command a fifty-five-year-old in a wheelchair to fold a stack of brochures all afternoon or shame Steve for looking at Facebook while I myself spent the day looking at Facebook. I was asked to tell Jordan, my favourite volunteer, to stop answering the phone after another staff member complained that his voice was unintelligible. Our main office task was awarding the decals that allowed you to park in accessible stalls.

If you’ve ever held a job like this, where you were in charge of adults who are treated like children, you might understand the surge of ugly pity I am hoping to hide as I smile at Lance—my second Vonnegut date—with his stringy corn-coloured hair and moon face. He has a graying tooth and dust of sugar on his chin from a half-eaten donut. His breath smells of sour coffee. I have the embarrassing sense of being in charge on an outing with the resource centre’s volunteers.

“I haven’t sat across from a pretty girl for a long time,” he is saying, rubbing a shaking hand over the sugar, his whiskers. “It’s nice.”

I feel like the Tralfamadorian who compares a moment in time to a bug trapped in amber.

A wistful look breaks over Lance, a look of such terrifying longing that for a moment I wonder if he has just been released from prison. The first much-whispered-about woman I ever knew to online date—back in the early aughts, in the days of Plenty of Fish—when this fallen woman brought her new boyfriend to a barbecue, my friend Lauren whispered to me that he was a killer. He’d been convicted of murder! Twice! Once at his own brother’s wedding! No one was to talk about it. “Since it might set him off,” Lauren said.

I in turn whispered this to my then boyfriend, Jeffrey Makin. Jeffrey liked Lucky Lager and nicknames. He called himself, after he’d downed a few Luckys, “Makinmania.” He called me “Slug,” for reasons to do with my pace—not, he said, my physique. He called my tiny, beautiful, blonde best friend Alice, who is brash and a breaker of things and has a voice like a linebacker, “Killer.” During the barbeque, Makinmania inevitably emerged. And he kept calling out to Alice, loudly, across our backyard.

“Hey, Killer!” he yelled as I hissed for him to pipe down, darting my eyes at the online boyfriend, “grab me another Lucky.”

“Hey, Killer,” Makinmania shouted, “how ’bout some ketchup?”

Lance doesn’t have the look of a criminal. He does have the aura of someone used to being treated as though he doesn’t possess rights or dignity. It turns out Lance has for some time been living in a group home for men with schizophrenia.

I take this news with a blink and ask about Kurt, a nice neutral subject. All the while I remember showing Lance’s Tinder profile to Alice. It had looked fine to me: no guns, no carcasses, no costumes, no wraparound sunglasses.

To which she replied, “Mikka, no.” She found his photos menacing.

I said rather defensively, “I like to give people a chance.” This, it now appears, is a bald-faced lie.

Lance doesn’t want to talk about Vonnegut. Whom he really wants to talk about is David Foster Wallace. When he finds out I’ve just finished Infinite Jest, he is ecstatic. “The footnotes,” he is saying, “they’re meant to be structured like a tennis match. Do you get it? Do you? Like, back and forth, back and forth. Your eye becomes the ball.”

“What’s your favourite Vonnegut book?” I say, trying to abate the climbing DFW exuberance.

“No,” he shakes his head. “I’m talking about Wallace.” He sounds almost scornful over my stupidity.

“Looks like my kombucha is all done.” I feel a tremor of guilt as I hurry myself away from him, glancing over my shoulder to ensure he’s not attempting to follow and calling out a false promise that we might do this again sometime.

His face looks dull in the sunshine.

I both wish and do not wish that Lance and I had talked about Vonnegut. I would argue that much of Slaughterhouse-Five’s originality and profundity is found in Billy Pilgrim’s own mental illness, PTSD. The abrupt jumps through narrative time—a veterans’ hospital in New York state, the slaughterhouse in Dresden where he and fellow prisoners of war survive its fire-bombing, a scene from Billy’s wedding, the ruins of a plane crash—this narrative time travel is either Billy experiencing the true nature of time, as shown to him when he was abducted by the Tralfamadorians, or a symptom of PTSD. Vonnegut’s form—the shortspliced scene, the quick dive through decades—fuses to the content and acts as both brilliant plot device and heartrending metaphor. What might it be like to read Slaughterhouse with a brain full of what Vonnegut calls “bad chemicals”? How would it feel to follow a character who believes wholeheartedly in his own delusions, particularly when Vonnegut leaves space for an alternate reading, where Billy Pilgrim’s ability to “come unstuck in time” is offered as not merely psychosis but semi-plausible reality?

***

The comedian Kabir and I are in a wooded tavern. I am waiting for him to say something funny.

“That’s the thing,” he says, “everyone always expects a comedian to be funny.”

“Exactly!” I say.

“We spend time crafting jokes, we’re hilarious onstage. But in regular conversation? No.”

Let me tell you, this is a shock. I almost think he is wisecracking.

“Vonnegut?” He looks at me like I’ve also said something deeply unfunny. “Yeah, I read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school.”

That’s it. He moves on, telling me about touring schedules, his new routine. I’m so hardwired to listen to a man’s voice that I attend, like a cocked-head spaniel, to descriptions of comedy clubs in Grande Prairie and hecklers in Fort Mac, to confessions of pennilessness, to a long tale on how a comedian gets his start. Like a rapt audience, I listen and listen without being once asked a question myself.

It is only later, when I take stock of the date, that I fantasize about a more interesting conversation, where Kabir offers erudite intellectualisms about literature. What truly elevates Slaughterhouse-Five, he is saying in my mind, is satire. If satire’s mode is one of derision, it seems to follow that the satirist is a cynic and a misanthrope. Undoubtedly the most famous British satirist, Jonathan Swift, was a human hater if there ever was one.

Yes, Kabir, I am thinking, I completely agree.

“Humanity deserved to die horribly,” Vonnegut’s recurring science-fiction writer character, Kilgore Trout, says in Breakfast of Champions, “since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.” Maybe this is tongue-in-cheek? But keep in mind that Kilgore Trout is often thought to be a stand-in for Vonnegut. Reading A Man Without a Country, essays written in the era of Bush Jr. and near the end of Vonnegut’s life, it is hard not to come away infected with the bitterness that seems to have eaten through the essayist himself. He compares Americans to Nazis. He suggests that new strains of disease, such as AIDS, are signs of the earth trying to rid itself of human life. He cites The Jerry Springer Show and announces, “Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too.” The final piece in the collection is a poem simply titled “Requiem.” Its last lament is spoken by the Grand Canyon: “‘It is done.’ / People did not like it here.” A sentiment that perhaps, in the end, reveals Vonnegut’s true twin obsessions: satirical biblical exegesis and human extinction.

Surprisingly, “Requiem” isn’t the bleakest moment in a very bleak book. This comes when Vonnegut renounces his own comic voice. He writes, “Humor is a way of holding off how awful life can be, to protect yourself. Finally, you get just too tired, and the news is too awful, and humor doesn’t work anymore.” On admitting that he is no longer funny, Vonnegut writes, “There may have been so many shocks and disappointments that the defense of humor no longer works.” Note the passive construction here, the tentative maybe of the assertion—not even the writer himself knows why. It is heartbreaking that Vonnegut, so hotly funny in Slaughterhouse-Five, has given up. If the satirist’s desire is to exaggerate folly in order to ameliorate it and if Vonnegut’s focus across his oeuvre is to lampoon the stupidity and atrocity of war, then it is surely no surprise that he finds himself unable to muster even a derisive laugh. And this was in the years of George W. Bush. What would Vonnegut think if he were living today?

To be honest, Kabir, I’m not always sold on satire. Maybe because I was bullied so much as a child. In some ways, it’s like the worst species of hipsterism. A mocking irony that only others in the know understand. If you are smart enough to be in on the joke, the humour works caustically. But if you take it in earnest? Your mustache suddenly feels creepy.

I love old country music, and I own a copy of Merle Haggard’s classic album Okie from Muskogee. The lines of its title song are what, to my mind, Trump means by MAGA. Okies from Muskogee don’t smoke marijuana or take LSD. They don’t do things like burn their draft cards on Main Street, and they still wear “manly footwear,” like football, and respect authority figures. I have never played this record in company, as my love of it fills me with shame. Recently, I was listening to Cocaine and Rhinestones, a podcast about the history of twentieth-century country music. The host, Tyler Mahan Coe, devotes a whole episode to this song. It is, he argues, satire. The first time Merle played it live, a group of Green Berets rushed the stage. Merle thought they were going to attack. But the Green Berets loved it; they wanted Merle to play the song again. Coe suggests that after the very people Merle was making fun of came to love the song, he couldn’t then say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m making fun of you.” The whole song is a joke! When I told this to a country singer friend of mine, he seemed shocked that I hadn’t known this, or figured it out myself.

I am now free to love Merle Haggard openly, but understanding his mockery feels both exhilarating and bleak. I do love a good joke, but not one made at my expense. And for the most part, I dislike irony in others, preferring to its distancing intellectualism the vulnerability required of earnestness. And so much of humour, so much of Vonnegut’s humour particularly, relies precisely on irony. It’s what makes his work so hard to critique. If I balk at his portrayal of women, for instance, or how many of his male protagonists are middle-aged men sleeping with near teenagers, or a flimsiness of characterization, or his essay in A Man Without a Country where he opens with the line “Let’s talk about women” and proceeds to describe our central ailment as an addiction to talking, then maybe I’m just not getting it. Maybe Vonnegut is mocking the very types of people who do and say and believe these things. And if I take any of it at face value, I’m missing the point entirely. I’m a uniformed private out there in the crowd, fevered with adoration and singing along with Merle about Old Glory and “living right and being free.” My lighter ablaze and a tear in my eye.

Are we becoming a culture of bad readers, a stunned species that has no use for context or careful and slow consideration? My gut reactions to Vonnegut—my insistent feminism, for instance—feel dangerously like a symptom of the plague of outrage leaping its way through the public forum. It seems that nobody, anymore, has a sense of humour. Perhaps, given the way things are, we simply can’t. Yet I worry about a whole culture of Bush-era Vonneguts, a world where people can no longer laugh, even derisively. But then, I worry too about the kinds of things defended by can’t-take-a-joke retorts. Think of the storm that raged in the comedy world about whether male comedians ought to tell rape jokes (their answer, the men’s, was resoundingly yes). Or the endless and tiresome debates about “political correctness.” I like to think of myself as a funny person, even a funny writer. I, like Vonnegut of old, use humour as a way to skirt ruin. But as I read Vonnegut, I feel an oddly split consciousness. Part of me is appalled, and part of me can’t tell if that was always and in each instance the point. And, to be honest, it troubles me that he remains so popular, so revered. In another 2019 golden-anniversary Slaughterhouse commemoration, Kevin Powers of the New York Times calls Vonnegut a writer of “unmatched moral clarity,” a writer who “could cut through cant and sophistry and dissembling to expose our collective self-deceptions for what they are.” It’s hard not to feel a bit disappointed by all this. How can someone of such gender-biased prose continue to be lauded as a writer of unparalleled conscience?

I hadn’t even remembered the dick jokes in Slaughterhouse-Five when I was out with the comedian, likely because Kabir was so insultingly unfunny. But they’re all I can think about now as I sit rigidly on a blanket in Riley Park with Vlad. It must be a nervous reflex. I ruefully must tell you that Vlad has turned up looking nothing like his Tinder profile. He has wraparound sunglasses, a sharp and alien-looking Adam’s apple, and an Eastern European accent.

The lack of resemblance, he assures me, is not what I’m thinking. He, Vlad, is a psychotherapist. One so irresistible a client became enamoured. When he told her nothing must happen between them, she created a fake (!) Tinder profile and lured him into a drawn-out online romance. Until Vlad discovered the truth and almost died over the ethical implications. This is the reason for the fake photographs.

“The lengths people will go,” he says.

I suspect he’s married.

Forever careful to protect a man’s feelings, I decide to stay for a polite-but-not-misleading amount of time. I’m still curious about Vonnegut, though none of my dates seems interested in talking about him. I’d thought I was on to something, an uncovered coincidence that might, if properly pursued, lead to love. Perhaps I don’t need to tell you that I’m partial to this kind of fatalistic thinking, synchronicity and signs in the firmament. But I now wonder if favouring Vonnegut isn’t just more empty social-media signaling. A counterculture writer, somewhat literary, someone you remember reading once in high school and whose hipness, by your naming, might rub off on you. Rub off! Plus, all those dick jokes! Slaughterhouse-Five literally opens with a man-from-Nantucket-style limerick and contains, I am afraid to say, the declaration that, Billy Pilgrim “had a tremendous wang.”

Vlad doesn’t mention the dick jokes. All he wants to talk about is Anaïs Nin.

Sadly, by this point, I can’t rise to the occasion.

***

If anyone ever asks, what I think is most profound in Vonnegut is the struggle to come to terms with the notion of free will. Of all the visited planets in the universe, say the Tralfamadorians, “Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.” There’s no such thing, they tell Billy Pilgrim. Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening simultaneously. In fact, they know how the universe ends. The Tralfamadorians are testing a new fuel for flying saucers, a “Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears.” Billy asks why, if they know this, the Tralfamadorians don’t stop the test pilot from button-pressing. “He has always pressed it,” they say, “and he always will.” A lurid analogy indeed in the Cold War era of Slaughterhouse-Five. After events both banal and genocidal, the narrator includes the phrase “So it goes,” the phrase being the existential motto of Tralfamadore. Might this explain—maybe at a subconscious level, maybe the psychotherapist could have told me—why Calgary Tinder so likes Vonnegut? Because, really, Tinder is a galaxy of infinite choice in the realm where we’ve been so often sold the idea of destiny. And who, when plucked up by its hormonal squalls, doesn’t believe that love is somehow ordained? And this feeling! Isn’t it one that makes life, for all its terrible weather, worth living?

The element of chance that so often attends the lore of soulmates can lend one a sense of complicity in the universe: if I hadn’t gone to the party, if she hadn’t missed her train. But this very element appears vapid in the face of technology like Tinder. How terribly sad. I want to believe, more than anything, in fate. Vonnegut does too, I think. Yet he equally despises those who would surrender free will. Isn’t this desire an ultimately childish wish to never be held to account? Which is why Tralfamadorian explanations of time and fate are so appealing. But I am an admitted believer in ghosts and psychics, John Edwards and palm readers. I want to find order in a mostly awful world. I want, like a child, to be assured that my life will be beautiful—a beauty that is always in the future, written but not held in my palm. I think it has something to do with hope. As Vonnegut says of this need in A Man Without a Country: “Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead—the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.” Surrendered, as Vonnegut himself seems to have done.

Still, he continued to write.

Technological progress, another target of Vonnegut ridicule, steals from romantic myth that hopeful, fatalistic element and has made a cynic out of me. I don’t know if so much choice, so much free will, is good for us. At the same time, without it, as Vonnegut’s novels so smartly suggest, no one is responsible for anything. That dick pic has always arrived, and it always will.

So it goes.

***

Mikka Jacobsen is a writer from Calgary. Her essays have appeared in the Fiddlehead, subTerrain, and the Puritan, among others. She has a PhD in English from the University of Calgary. You can find her online at https://www.mikkajacobsen.com/