Hello, Babies

On Wednesday evening I finished listening to God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater via audiobook.  I had read the most quoted part of the book on a poster by a local artists of some renown, a Mr. Tim Doyle (who once owned and managed a comic book shop in a mall beneath a dormitory), and the quote stuck with me the way some of these things do.  What the poster said was this:

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

It is the blessing Eliot Rosewater plans to bestow upon a pair of twins born to an arsonist of ill-repute who has asked him to lead the proceedings at the twins' baptism.

Just so you know, I have been asked to officiate a wedding this coming winter. Should I be asked to officiate a baptism, the above quote shall be included in my remarks.  Other excerpts will be taken from The Bible, Ray Bradbury, and Kanye West.

Anyway, I finally consumed the book recommended to me long ago.  Thank you for the suggestion.

But now I feel like I need to read Slaughterhouse Five again.  Or all the Vonnegut novels I've read.  Again.

So it goes.

At any rate, a fine book and an interesting read as the presidential election blares out of every orifice of media and we all pound our chests about our understandings of who gets ahead and how and how we choose to look at one another as a matter of policy and, according to this novel, a matter of sanity.