Slaughterhouse At Sea

An Homage to Vonnegut and Some

American Lit is my work in progress, 1984 is where Draft Project7 rests. A ghost of election years past. Space and time did not stop Vonnegut. I can only imagine his psyche. I doubt I would have wrangled my own had Vonnegut not given us a look see.

Splitting a child’s psyche, like house-breaking a puppy, is, to some, the only way to “make” a child behave in a predictable way. I am not going to argue methods or practices.

1971 was not an election year, but one where, in this tribute to Vonnegut, a fourteen-year-old was ripping the guts out of living things, at sea.

The man with the mop and bucket in the galley of RV Bowser, was the teenager covered with blood and guts on the 32’ gillnetter, half a century earlier.

The third son had skills to aquire. Dispatching countless fish with a razor-sharp shiv was one of them. The memory stayed with him. The skills never left him.

A screenplay without dialogue? Not going to go far, that is for sure.

But the effort so far has given us all respite from electionyearing.