Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope: “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of b

How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.551

One thing I don’t like about computers in the home is they cheat people out of the experience of becoming. The important life experiences are food, sex, but also becoming. And this involves reading, studying, practicing an art, whatever.

— Kurt Vonnegut, 1999

Vonnegut: “What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

He told us that one reason he and his friends wanted to start the commune and learn to “live off the land” in a simple way was that “we want to be the last people on earth.” Vonnegut said, “Isn’t that kind of a stuck-up kind of thing to want to be?” In the way he spoke and the way he wrote, Vonnegut was always coming up with the plain-spoken words