Tree wrote:100% Hypothetical Kenny: It's the morning of April 1st and your kids are up, but they are entertaining themselves. You and your wife begin to enjoy some "morning intimacy" until the phone rings. It's a strange time for somebody to call, so you answer it. It turns out to be a friend pulling a lame April Fool's call. Your kids take the phone call as license to come into your room and that rare "morning intimacy" is cancelled.
Just Worse: It's the morning of
February 14th and your kids are up, but they are scared shitless. You and your wife are in the throws of some incomparably intense "morning intimacy" as your entire city is
pounded from above into searing flame and dust.
Just Better: You read Kurt Vonnegut's
NYT obituary, which notes that Vonnegut suggested that
"The firebombing of Dresden... was a work of art.” It was, he added, “a tower of smoke and flame to commemorate the rage and heartbreak of so many who had had their lives warped or ruined by the indescribable greed and vanity and cruelty of Germany.”
You immediately recall
reflections on 9/11 speculating on the ways it too was a (different) kind of artwork. You were a casual Vonnegut fan, enjoying many of his novels, and neither knew nor are related to anyone injured or killed in Dresden in '45 or New York in '01. You think about spectacular, internationally orchestrated mass killings as artwork all day. This is your privileged curse.
Kenny Daily: You live in a beautiful city but you live in what your friends call "a Blade Runner apartment."
