By Ronald Sitton

Victim - Who'd want to shoot a black cat as cute as this?

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – I found out earlier today that some bastard shot Kilroy, my black cat, with a BB-gun. This ain’t no April Fool’s joke on Friday the 13th. He's back home, currently sitting in my lap.

I noticed Kilroy limping about two week’s ago, though he didn’t seem too put out about it. However, it got where he couldn’t jump. Last week, I took him to the doctor, who gave him as thorough an examination as I’d given him previously. The cat was not happy when the doctor put a thermometer up his butt.

The doc thought Kilroy might have arthritis, so he gave me pills to give to him. The cat does not like pills, so we had to roll him in a towel, pull his jowl back, pop in the pill with a pill popper, blow in his face to make him swallow, then watch as he foamed at the mouth like a rabid animal. All of that drama for naught. I honestly hope I don’t find the loser who shot him because I don’t know what would happen, though I do know it wouldn’t end pretty.

Sadness continues

Sitting in bed yesterday due to the flu, I watched the news, i.e. what little “news” I could find flipping between the three local channels more focused on extolling the virtues of the opening of Dickey-Stephens ball park than telling the news. At least on the national news I got an idea of what had been happening while I slept the majority of the day away.

At the end of the national news, my heart sank when I heard Kurt Vonnegut died. Just a year before, he told a reporter that he planned to sue the tobacco companies because cigarettes hadn’t killed him yet, though it promised to on the side of the package. A year later he died of a head injury.

I almost didn’t read Vonnegut, i.e. if I had been normal, I probably would have quit reading for fun after being forced to read to get through high school and college English courses.

As a teen going through the advanced placement English classes to prepare for college, I read “the list” for each semester. I found it odd that books on my list could not be found on the lists read by smart friends taking advanced courses one step below the honor’s AP course.

I told myself I had to read important books instead of cool books like Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” and Hegel’s “Catch 22;” hell, those names sounded cool to a prepubescent teen. Instead, I was forced to read sappy shit like Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” – definitely not his best book – Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd” and “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and Brontë's “Wuthering Heights.” I must admit, the latter turned out to be a decent book.

At least the teachers found some intrigue for a teen-age boy forced to slog through AP literature. I’ll never forget Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” due to Tommy Dungan’s depictions of the boar’s head on the stake, covered in hundreds of flies. I peered into humanity’s dark side in Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and “Lord Jim.” I read Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” at 18; ten years later, I read it again to find life-experience MAKES that book a can’t-miss.

Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” made me consider the fantastic and to an extent, the afterlife – what if we all ended up as bugs? Stewart’s “The Crystal Cave,” Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and Homer’s “The Odyssey” made me question if history might best be described as just someone’s take on the situation, while Rand’s “The Fountainhead” took me a step further to question who determines what’s good and what motives they might have to do so.

OK, maybe I did enjoy reading a little more than the average high school kid. Maybe we had a better “list” than the students not lucky enough to be in the AP class. But Vonnegut wasn’t on that list.

I made my own lists – I’m OCD like that – a few years after my undergraduate education of things I never read or heard in hopes of finding things I might enjoy more than those I’d already experienced. When I’d meet interesting people, I’d ask them what music they listened to or what books they’d read.

Sure, I encountered a few duds here and there, but without those lists I might never have been exposed to musicians – Skip James, Professor Longhair, Hollywood Fats, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy – I adore; let alone, the books that undoubtedly influenced my life: Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge,” Penn’s “All the King’s Men,” Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Maybe you had the opportunity to read those as a kid; I never did. And as I’ve noted before, I almost didn’t read Vonnegut, which would have been a tragedy. You see, Vonnegut wrote the book at the top of my initial after-college reading list. Though I didn't pick up "Slaughterhouse-Five" (or "The Children's Crusade") until 1997, I was hooked on Vonnegut after reading it. I also recommend "Cats Cradle" and "The Sirens of Titan."

I cannot remember who told me to read “Slaughterhouse-Five.” I do remember I paid full-price instead of searching the used bookstores; I don’t know why. I didn’t know the book was about his fictionalized memoirs of the Dresden bombings. I didn’t know that, much like Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” 41 years earlier, “Slaughterhouse-Five” seems to accurately depict the atrocities and absurdities of war.

I had no idea that book would haunt me.

I went to cover a war protest march in October 2002, the first recorded pre-war protest in American history. That march against the Iraq war indirectly led to my leaving Ohio and returning to Arkansas. The only place you could find information about that war protest was in the Washington Post.

I never wrote the article I planned because of events on and following that trip, documented in part here and here. You'd have a hard time actually finding those articles since the index page that can be found is not the correct one. In fact, most of that issue no longer exists except in my files.

I’ve always felt guilty since. I rationalized that since I didn't write my article within the weekend after it happened, the story didn't meet the timeliness criteria required for news. Maybe if I’d written the story … maybe if I’d shown the photos … maybe it could have convinced somebody that the war cries of the chicken hawks were absurd. But maybe it’s best I did not write that article because I am biased against war, and that surely would have come out in the article. Isn’t that objectivity?

When I went on the trip, I told myself I was a journalist; after the fallout, I told myself I was an instructor, not a journalist. A freelancer perhaps. I knew the war could not be stopped; though it sickened me, I just accepted it. But I found out this week that my best friend will return to Iraq after originally fighting in Desert Storm as a military policeman in the Air Force, a good deal away from the front. Today he's a 38-year-old National Guardsman with two of my god-daughters, both of whom are under 5. If I had published then, would he be going now?

When Vonnegut died yesterday, I remembered how sick his book made me feel about war. That reminded me what a shit I’ve been for not stepping up to show the truth because it was easier to worry about my career instead of the truth. So I present to you, dear reader, a photo recollection of that under-covered event. Crucify me if you will for not showing this sooner. It will be no worse than my self-inflicted loathing; I’m no better than the bastard who shot my cat.