That Time You Saw Bigfoot Is Like That Time That I Definitely Met The Real Santa Claus

Bigfoot probably doesn't live in my woods, but anything is spooky when you photograph it in black and white!

The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster by John O'Connor
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I believe the people who say that they saw Bigfoot, even though I also think that Bigfoot is not real. I get the cognitive dissonance of having an encounter completely unexplainable except by an impossible reason. This is the only thing that explains your encounter. And yet this thing is not real.

Because when I was twenty, I definitely met Santa Claus.

At the time, I was a Senior in college. Everyone I knew was a college student, a professor, or one of the few townies also into punk rock and also too young to get into the good clubs to hear our favorite bands play. I spent a lot of time loitering downtown outside of said clubs, in class, or at house parties.

I hit the books a LOT less than my own children do, but don’t tell them that. I work very hard on my “I want you to have fun at college, but remember that you’re there to study” face.

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One afternoon in early December, when I should have been studying for finals, my boyfriend and I instead found ourselves wandering around the local mall. I needed to buy Christmas presents, ideally for less than five bucks a person, and if some pretzel bites also happened to find their way into my possession, well then so be it. My boyfriend was keeping me company because hey, any excuse not to study!

The Santa Claus spot at this mall was set up like an ice castle, with the line snaking towards the castle and Santa himself inside it. There were open windows all around the castle so that you could look in and see the kids sitting on Santa’s lap, but I imagine that when you were inside it you felt sort of cozy and private and like you had Santa all to yourself.

As my boyfriend and I walked past, I peeped through one of the windows and saw that Santa was sitting there all alone, nobody on his lap, so I impulsively called out, “Hi, Santa!”

He looked up, smiled, and I swear he gave a jolly, “Well, hello, Julie!”

I don’t think I even replied or responded in any way, because my flabbers were too ghasted. My boyfriend heard our exchange, but he didn’t respond either, because he said later that he just assumed that random guy and I knew each other from somewhere and that’s why I’d called out to him in the first place. But Y’ALL. I did not know that old guy with the white whiskers sitting on Santa’s throne! None of my professors were at all Santa-like, and this college I went to was the kind of place where the professors weren’t moonlighting as Mall Santas. My college friends were very much college-aged, and my three or four local friends were around that age, as well, with the addition of lip piercings and neck tattoos, etc. I did not know a single other soul in the entirety of Texas.

I've told this story dozens of times, to friends and acquaintances, to kids who believe in Santa Claus and to kids who don't, and I always tell it about the same (occasionally leaving out the punk scene and or my lack of studiousness, depending on my audience), and I'm always all, "I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa."

Like, yes, I recognize that logically it wasn't Santa. Logically, the person wearing the Santa suit in that mall on that afternoon did randomly know my name, or he said something else and I just thought I heard my name. It obviously wasn't actually Santa, because Santa isn't real. But also: I dunno, guys. The only rational explanation is that it was Santa.

So that's what I think a lot of these Bigfoot hunters are feeling. Logically, they know Bigfoot isn't real. But they have an encounter that is best explained by Bigfoot being real, so now they're all "I dunno, guys"ing around reddit and maybe going on the odd Bigfoot hunt and attending the occasional meet-up with other people who've had encounters best explained by Bigfoot being real. And then other Bigfoot hunters are more woo about it and have psychic links to Bigfoot and use crystals to communicate with it, etc.

And then other Bigfoot hunters… Honestly, based on O’Connor’s book, other Bigfoot hunters just seem like they want something where they can be right and everyone else is wrong, where they’ve got the truth that’s out there and everyone else is a sheeple. O’Connor compares them to Trumpers, which many of them already are, in an interesting and alarming and kind of obvious-when-you-really-think-about-it way.

Ultimately, I think that O’Connor did the work of writing an ethnography of the search for Bigfoot in a world in which Bigfoot is not real. It does mean that the book feels like a lot of… well… nothing, but that’s because ultimately, there’s nothing to tell. Bigfoot isn’t real, and the search for Bigfoot is just a bunch of people poking around the woods, finding out that Bigfoot isn’t real, and ignoring that in favor of continuing to wonder if maybe Bigfoot is real. I think O’Connor could have made the storytelling more dramatic, but likely only at the expense of the individuals who I think he was trying his best to treat respectfully. It reminds me of The Cold Vanish, in which the author has more dramatic stories to tell, but those stories often involve tearing apart some extremely vulnerable moments in the lives of vulnerable people, in ways in which he ought to be ashamed. This book, on the other hand, toyed with being boring, but nobody was victimized by the telling.

I think O’Connor’s most interesting and most important point is this:

“The ties that bound together flesh-and-blooders with the woo’ers and idly curious had everything to do with pursuit of the extraordinary and in turn with a desire to understand the world. A commonality, it seemed to me, that hitched them to the rest of us and to the great folkloric heroes and heroines of the past. And even, in a sense, to scientific tradition.”

In O’Connor’s worldview--and mine!--everyone wants, or should want, a meaningful life. A life that understands, perhaps, its place in the world. A life, perhaps, that understands the world itself. Personally, I’d love it if the world and everything that happened in it made sense and had a greater purpose to it! It doesn’t, and I find my meaning elsewhere, in my husband and children, in the pursuit of knowledge, in writing and in creating, but I’d love it if it did. Is it those who cannot find their meaning elsewhere, and who cannot take comfort in the meaningful fiction of organized religion, who find it in conspiracy theories and tempting untruths like these? Are they the ones wearing Trump hats and protesting floridated water and insisting that Forrest Fenn’s treasure is still out there and searching for Bigfoot?

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Fetishizing the Concept of "Hockey Player" Does Not Make a Book Hockey Smut. There Has to Actually BE Hockey In It!

Yes, I am also STILL slogging through A Court of Silver Flames! Not right this second, though, because my Heated Rivalry audiobook just came in...

Mister Hockey by Lia Riley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If it’s supposed to be hockey smut, then why is there no hockey?

Like, yes, there *is* a hockey player in the book, but 1) he not only never plays hockey in the book, but he also never so much as puts on his uniform or steps out onto the ice, and 2) he’s pretty much already decided to retire by the time the book opens, so is he even really a hockey player in the official professional sense? That present tense is barely hanging in there!

Without any actual hockey, the book instead becomes smut that revolves around the simple fetishization of “hockey player” as object, which is fine but not what I thought I was going to be reading. Jed doesn’t do anything particularly hockey-forward, so he’s basically just embodying the concept of hockey player in this book. There was a second, when we learn that Breezy hid all her Jed merch before she let him in the door so he wouldn’t find out she was a superfan of him in particular, that I thought this idea of fetishizing the concept of hockey player would be an important topic in the book, perhaps one that the book ends up speaking to and complicating and making us think about what it is to both love hockey and to enact a fandom that makes sexy CapCuts of players and calls going to games “visiting the boy aquarium.” But no. Breezy doesn’t really spend any time thinking about the man vs. the myth and what it means to love one vs. the other, other than to mention in passing that this was easily resolved (in the right direction, of course!), and even when her previous lack of full disclosure causes her to be the one that Jed accuses of selling his private information to reporters, it’s not really about that, as Jed himself later said, and it’s solved with basically zero effort on either side.

@gasquatchmama Ladies, I think they're on to us...it's quite a show. #hockey #hockeywarmups #stretching #hockeystretches #fatherfigure ♬ Father Figure - George Michael

Or rather, Breezy puts forth a LOT of effort, but for some reason Riley decides to make Breezy’s actions irrelevant to the solution? And also, that podcast confession is the cringiest thing a romance character could possibly do, and if someone did that to me, I don’t care how blameless they were for whatever I’d accused them of, I’d never speak to them again. I’d burn their face out of photos and try to forget they’d ever existed, solely for my own sanity. Honestly, I might have to murder them and then invent time travel and go back in time and murder all their grandparents just to make sure I’d erased their entire timeline.

I do like that both Breezy and Jed are portrayed as kind of stupid, making basic jokes and inane puns and bad decisions and rolling way too hard on commitment without letting nearly enough time pass. There’s a lid for every pot! The strongest part of the book was their meet-cute through their first sex scene, when I could pretend that the stupid things they said or thought were just because of nerves and their awkward chemistry could be read as adorable rather than off-putting. It was only after that when I looked at my hoopla app, saw I was something like 70% through the entire book, and went, “Uh, oh…” There was plenty to flesh out to make the book longer, resolve some of these issues, and basically just carry its weight. The conflict with Breezy’s mom was just abandoned with an unrealistic insta-fix, the same with the mean library director but in the other direction, Jed’s brother remained mostly off-screen, and, oh, right… NOBODY PLAYED HOCKEY!!!

@more_than_parents Boy aquarium anyone? 🤣#boyaquarium #hockey #hockeyromance ♬ Pony - Ginuwine

I did appreciate the attention paid to the issue of concussions in sports, because as a fan of hockey I’m very concerned that the players stay safe (and I wish they’d wear their neck guards!), but I did NOT appreciate the way that the wider impact of Jed’s brother’s concussion injury is portrayed. Jed announces that he’s solved the problem of his SIL trying to sell his private information by… paying off her house? I get that money does solve problems, but not ONLY money! Can you not, like, talk to the SIL about, you know, your feelings and her feelings and your boundaries and what she needs for her family to thrive economically and emotionally and maybe have some therapy and commit to spending more time together so she’s not isolated and offer to take your nephews for a few weeks so they can have quality time with a male role model? No? Just… money? Okay…

Oh, and I'm not buying for a second that an independent bookstore focusing solely on children's titles is going to thrive in this day and age. Sorry, Breezy, but you're about to have a hobby business propped up by your boyfriend's professional hockey money.

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TIL I Was Definitely Lead-Poisoned As A Child

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers by Caroline Fraser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve had a Special Interest in serial killers since the summer between my younger kid’s freshman and sophomore years of high school. Told that she could take any classes she wanted that summer at the local community college, she chose 1) Introduction to Food Safety, which enabled her to get her ServSafe certification and set her up to take a proper baking class at the college the next fall, and 2) Serial Killers and Their Victims. This latter was in some ways EXTREMELY inadvisable, considering it was WAAAAY more graphic than I stupidly thought it would be and thank goodness, I guess, that it was online so the professor never realized that one of his students was only fourteen years old, but it also encouraged the kid’s academic interest in Criminology, taught her the concept of “ethical true crime storytelling,” and made her probably the most safety-conscious of all her college peers. She told me once during her freshman year that several of her hallmates never locked their dorm room doors.

“I asked them,” she said, “if they had any idea how many serial killers there are currently active in the US, because it’s a lot!”

Whenever someone pisses her off she also speculates about how they fared on the MacDonald Triad as a kid, but that’s a different issue…

@horror_chronicles Replying to @Taylorkay #greenscreen #horror #horrortok #horrorcommunity #psychology #psychologyfacts #macdonaldtriad ♬ Suspense, horror, piano and music box - takaya

Because she was only fourteen during this class (oops!), I often helped her study, so I, too, read the entirety of Serial Killers and Their Victims, spent several months talking too loudly and too often about Jeffrey Dahmer, and, while I’m admittedly less married to my kid’s commitment to “ethical true crime storytelling,” I still seek it out.

Murderland doesn’t perfectly embody ethical true crime storytelling, but I think it comes about as close as you can when the subject of your book really is the criminals and not the victims. Like, yes, there’s a lot of blow-by-blow details of what victims endured, and that always skates the line of what is necessary to tell the story vs. what is simply lascivious, but I never felt like my gaze was inappropriate. And anyway, this was NOTHING compared to the level of graphic detail in Serial Killers and Their Victims! I also felt like there was a proper point to all the detail: making it very clear that these serial killers were as they were because they were also walking Superfund sites.

The universal lead poisoning of our older generations has become a cultural joke at this point, but it is genuinely horrifying how prevalent heavy metal contaminants and chromosome disruptors and just general poisons were. The constant smelter pollution of the Pacific Northwest is one thing, but apparently everyone who was in the vicinity of a car was actively lead poisoned? Like, DUDE, I was born in 1976, and have actual memories of the not one, but TWO Ford Pintos that my family owned! Thankfully nobody ever rear-ended us while I was riding in one, but I was absolutely being lead poisoned well into the 1980s.

When I asked my partner if he thought that he had been lead poisoned as a child, he said, "I spent much of my childhood in Europe." Well, la-dee-dah, Mr. I'm Too Good for Lead Poisoning! You've got to deal with it secondhand now, don't you?!?

Murderland had another personal-ish connection in its discussion of Israel Keyes, a sometimes suspect, at least among armchair investigators, for the disappearance of local college student Lauren Spierer. I'm pretty sure that all the real authorities have long dismissed him, but reading about all of ground that all of these serial killers covered, just driving back and forth and murdering people along the way, honestly makes me not want to rule him out. I mean, Ted Bundy's road trips often involved detours to seemingly random spots just to abduct and murder random people, so it feels possible, however unlikely, that Keyes or another active serial killer could have done the same. That's not my own personal conspiracy theory, though. Like everyone else in town, I've got my own pet conspiracy theories and, overall, just the wish that somehow somebody will figure out what happened to her so her loved ones can have closure.

Elaborating the full context for all the environmental poisoning people, especially the economically disenfranchised, were subject to was a LOT: the history of industrialization, the biographies of prominent corporate families, the geological history of the Pacific Northwest, the shoddy decision-making at every level that led to shoddy construction projects that further disenfranchised the vulnerable. That, combined with the elements of memoir, did cause me to get pretty lost in the weeds sometimes. What I really needed were maps and timelines and graphs; after a while, there was so much information I was trying to hold onto that the author simply jumping back and forth between serial killers confused me. I read a whole crime committed by BTK before I realized I wasn’t reading another Ted Bundy joint!

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My Potato Soup is Terrible But My Pie Is Delicious

The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie: Recipes, Techniques, and Wisdom from the Hoosier Mama Pie Company by Allison Scott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Our theme for Thanksgiving this year (other than Indian take-out, because that’s a given) was Pies, and thanks to every other patron of my local public library also taking a particular late-November interest in pie cookbooks, The Hoosier Mama Book of Pie was the only one that had made it out of my holds queue and into my house by Thanksgiving week.

So this is the book that three novice pie bakers paged through to determine our Thanksgiving pies!

I settled on Peanut Butter Pie with Chocolate Ganache. The kid picked Cranberry Chess Pie. My partner decided on Raspberry Pie, but then the kid was all, “...nobody’s going to make pumpkin?” so for love of his daughter, he condemned himself to also making a second pie, the Pumpkin.

We’re all notably basic cooks. As far as I know, the kid has never once so much as turned on the stove in her college apartment’s kitchen. I cook pretty often, but something usually goes wrong, and that something is me. For instance, I have attempted potato soup twice within the past year, both times using well-regarded recipes, and ruined it both times, even though I have the suspicion that potato soup is the easiest and most basic of soups. My partner at least will follow a recipe, but generally as ham-handedly as it’s possible for one to follow a recipe and still have it regarded as following the recipe. It’s like his reading comprehension tanks as soon as he starts reading recipe instructions. Which I feel like is a really fair thing to do, because for some reason recipe instructions are often so inscrutable!

I’m happy to report, however, that by Thanksgiving Day, the three of us had created four perfectly passable, perfectly delicious pies!

I did not believe that the graham cracker crust I made was going to hold together like a store-bought crust, and I still don’t understand how graham crackers plus sugar plus butter equal a functioning crust, but it did, indeed, hold together quite nicely. I don’t know if the peanut butter filling was my favorite--I somehow wanted it to be more peanut butter tasting, I guess?--but the chocolate ganache was AWESOME on it, and it made a ton. I heavily drizzled it on the peanut butter pie, and then dipped homemade rum balls in the rest, and now I’m going to have to do that the next time I make rum balls, too, because that was freaking delicious.

The all-butter pie crusts came out awesome, too, as did everyone else’s pies. We feasted so hard on them Thanksgiving morning that I spent the rest of the morning with a sugar headache, and to be honest, as soon as that felt better I went back for more pie.

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If You Discover a Hidden Treasure Sore Losers Will Call You a Liar and Low-Key Threaten Your Life. Sounds Fun, Right?

This is supposedly the location where Forrest Fenn's treasure was found. I drove right by it!

Chasing the Thrill: Obsession, Death, and Glory in America's Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt by Daniel Barbarisi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Slightly off-topic, but Ready Player One was AU Forrest Fenn fanfic, right? It’s got the same vibe of treasure seekers turned fanatics to a religious level, keyed into a cult of personality around the creator of the hunt, to such an extent that the treasure hunt is genuinely conflated with and requires an intimate knowledge of that creator. The only difference is that Ready Player One is the Mary Sue fanfic version in which the hunter succeeds because he works the hardest and has come to know the most about the creator, the hunt is solved in a way that provides everyone involved with full closure, and life becomes better in every way thanks to the treasure.

The real Forrest Fenn treasure hunt did not go that way. The winner wasn’t one of the more highly-engaged fanatics. He did not willingly offer closure to the masses of other eager treasure hunters. He only unwillingly offered what few details we currently have about the solution to the hunt and the location of the treasure after being wrongfully sued by a crazed fan. It’s unclear if anyone’s lives were made better, particularly the finder's thanks to the existence of apparently boundless crazed hunters, and it’s very clear that many lives were made much, much worse.

Here's the location of the treasure at the top compared to a couple of the search spots the author visited in the book. All the spots are within the boundary of Yellowstone National Park.

Since the treasure hunt is concluded, I had a lot of fun reading through people’s “solves” in Barbarisi's book and then Google Mapping them to see how close they were. Most of them were not close, but it would probably kill you to have spent all that time searching Madison River but just… one mile too far downstream. I’d almost have rather been one of those New Mexico losers who were sooooo far off! I would have been very interested to see what these search moments looked like in the book’s draft that was written before the treasure hunt’s conclusion. I wonder if there were moments that would have attempted to foreshadow a different ending? I also would have been interested in maps of these various solve locations and images of what various hunters took to be their major clues. Like, one hunter claimed that a copse of trees looked like the Periodic Table of Elements and that was a clue? Picture, please!!! I’d love to someday explore the thesis that many of these hunters’ interpretations and solutions say much more about them than about the actual Fenn hunt.

We took a family trip to Yellowstone in 2014 and stayed in West Yellowstone, which means that we drove past the treasure twice a day and I probably could have met some hunters in the hotel restaurant if I'd known to look for them. In this photo, however, my partner and the big kid are not looking for treasure--they're looking at geysers!

Barbarisi’s own participation-ish in the hunt gave out “Almost Famous” vibes, and I thought it was interesting to witness him, a full-on journalist, out there as hunt-crazy as the rest of the people he was profiling, trespassing on fragile natural features and wrecking the wonders of Yellowstone. I feel like it was just dumb luck in a couple of instances that he didn’t end up in my favorite non-fiction book, Death in Yellowstone. And if he was out there doing all that when he definitely knew better, it makes one wonder what all the other Fenn hunters, at least the ones who didn’t die in their own mishaps, were up to on other people’s property and on federal land and in the wonders of nature. The stuff we know about, the attempted kidnapping of Fenn’s granddaughter and the break-in on his property and the deaths, are bad enough, but how many fragile locations were trespassed on and how many historically important sites were dug up in the process of wild solves? I agree with US attorney Bob Muarray, who prosecuted another hunter who dug into a historic cemetery on Yellowstone property in search of the treasure (despite Fenn stating on more than one occasion that the treasure was NOT buried, which... to be fair, in the photos the finder eventually released, the treasure when he came upon it sure looked buried to me!), who said, "A national park is no place to stage an adult treasure hunt motivated by greed.”

Signage I saw during my 2014 trip to Yellowstone. 

I feel like there was something unfair in Fenn’s game, maybe something that he didn’t even realize would be unfair when he created it, but definitely something he played on later and chose not to ameliorate. The finder stated that he solved the hunt by engaging in close reading of the poem, specifically with authorial intent in mind, combined with scanning related first-person material for how it could speak to the poem. Essentially, he conducted a college-level critical analysis as he was taught in Freshman Comp at his highly-selective liberal arts college. But he seems to have been about the only hunter, at least profiled in Barbarisi’s book, with this type of analytical skillset. Many others exhibited demonstrable ignorance in the methods of critical analysis, particularly creating a reasonable thesis statement backed up with textual evidence and a clear chain of logic connecting the two. This is evidenced by the multiple hunters who took the phrase “House of Brown” as an attempt at toilet humor, or the hunter who decided that Fenn’s direct statement that the treasure was north of Santa Fe meant she should search south of Santa Fe because if you go north all the way around the planet then you end up south again. As I had to explain to MANY of my own Freshman Comp students over the years, just because you can think of a connection doesn’t make it evidence-based and logical! Looking through so many hunters’ theories and seeing how most of them were based on what were essentially delusions was a depressing look at the level of higher-order thinking in the wider community, not to mention the tendency to devoutly buy into highly illogical and objectively fantastical conspiracy theories.

Yellowstone's geyser basin, 2014.

But what I feel like these hunters who lacked analytical skills and critical thinking brought to the hunt is a level of fandom that Barbarisi strongly hinted that Fenn was pretty into. The conventions held in his honor read as more like tent revivals, with more effort focused on Fenn’s cult of personality than on parsing the poem and debating its interpretations. A group of PhD students would NEVER! I wish there had been an academic conference held on the treasure, because those conference papers would have been ON POINT. This tendency towards cults of personality also reads to me as a symptom of a culturally illiterate society that lacks critical thinking skills.

@hersh3y The Forrest Fenn treasure ending is SUS! Jump down this conspiracy rabbit hole to connect the truth! #conspiracy #forrestfenn #thechase ♬ original sound - Hershey

I think that the finder’s ultimate refusal to offer the most rabid hunters full closure by revealing every detail of his solution and his complete methodology, up to the point of refusing for a long to time to even disclose the location of the treasure, is also evidence of these disparate views of the hunt taken by disparate segments of society. Like fans of a TV show that’s abruptly canceled, these rabid hunters seem furious that the hunt didn’t have a TV-friendly conclusion, and many have gone on to further their conspiracy theories and write their own fanfic that ranges from “the hunt was rigged” to “it’s still not solved here’s where it actually is.” Some of the comments on the finder's Medium article are so chilling! To be fair, it DOES feel crazy for someone to have expended all that effort and time and money--multiple hunters were bankrupted by their hunt!--and not only not find the treasure, but also not find out how close you were to the treasure and what you got right and where you went wrong. But nobody asked these people to become this obsessed, or promised them a fruitful resolution to their obsession. Nobody owed them anything. 

Also, I just need you to know that there is real literal Forrest Fenn treasure fanfic.

Castle Geyser, 2014.

The thing that disenchanted me the most about the concept of the modern-day treasure hunt is the description of taxes. So, you spend all that money and time finding a treasure, but it’s all gold nuggets and ancient relics and shit so you’ve got to sell it before you can actually have any spendable money from it in your hands, but in the meantime the government works their asses off to estimate all the taxes you owe for the treasure, with a value estimate that you may or may not actually achieve when you sell it, and then you have to pay those taxes, which might be $500,000, BEFORE you’ve actually got any actual treasure money in your hands?

No, thank you. As with most get rich quick schemes, this one is way too slow and I’m way too lazy to ever.

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I Alphabetized All The Jailed Authors At The Kurt Vonnegut Museum

I really fell down on exposing the kids to modern American literature in high school (although my coverage of esoteric ancient texts, gothic horror, and Greek mythology was exceptional, ahem), up to and including neglecting to have them read anything by our very own local son, Kurt Vonnegut.

Even more of a shame, because they would have loved Cat's Cradle, for instance, and Slaughterhouse-Five would have been an excellent supplement to a World War II study. Although only the older kid really dipped back into modern history in high school (we studied modern history very extensively in middle school, so the younger kid still knows about Hitler and AIDS and the Berlin Wall and all the important stuff!), and she still jokes about our "fun Mommy/daughter" date with popcorn and cookies and hot chocolate... and Schindler's List, yikes. I'll be minding my own business cross-stitching on the couch, and suddenly she'll be all, "Hey, remember that time we watched that heartwarming drama about found family in beautiful, war-torn Poland? I'm definitely not still traumatized!"

Sorry, I guess, but being traumatized by Schindler's List is how you know you're not a sociopath!

Anyway, the kids and I were BIG field trippers, so the only way I hadn't visited the Kurt Vonnegut Museum in Indianapolis before was that I fell down on my duty to provide my children with their full component of modern literature to study.

However, both my partner and I, for various reasons, read plenty of Kurt Vonnegut for our sins while we were in college, and so a few weeks ago we took ourselves on our own field trip to the museum.

I do think this museum is best appreciated if you're familiar with at least some of Vonnegut's work, so it was well-suited for our own little Saturday morning date of wandering around and reading labels and looking at interesting stuff. And there's an extra fun looky-loo aspect when you're both local!

As in, I am OBVIOUSLY going to drive by these houses!

Because I'm literally that nosy I also spent a bit of time trying to figure out where Kurt Vonnegut Sr. moved to in his final years, since the place was apparently just the next county over from me, and thus even more driveable for my looky-loo nosy self, but everything in Brown County is so middle-of-the-woods and also middle-of-nowhere that I couldn't work it out.

Oh, well, current residents of the house that Kurt Vonnegut Sr. lived in at the end of his life, you can mark yourselves safe from me driving slowly past your home and gawping... at least for now.

There weren't a ton of personal artifacts of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s own, but there were a few precious and interesting objects:

I WOULD like to show the kids that course schedule! They go through agonies each semester getting their schedules finalized, and somehow they always manage to make it my problem, too. One kid's school has them register in waves, so you get a Round 1, from which you're guaranteed to get at least two of your four picks but you probably won't get all of them, and then by the time Round 2 rolls around all the good classes are full. The other kid's school lets them put their complete schedule into a "shopping cart," and then they run a lottery for every class that's overenrolled, so she'll be minding her own business trying to study for finals and get an email telling her that she lost the lottery for her most-anticipated class and so got dropped from it, and then three days later she'll get an email saying she was dropped from her next most-anticipated class, and she'll have to wait until the day before classes actually start next semester to scramble for open classes with the other unlucky kids.

When their dad and I were in college, we stood in line to meet with the registrar, and during that meeting we worked out every single aspect of our schedule, alternate classes and all, so that when we walked out fifteen minutes later we, just like Kurt Vonnegut Jr. up there, had our final schedule in our hands. IT WAS FAR SUPERIOR!

I thought this was an interesting display, in that it makes overt a gap in our understanding of Vonnegut's life, caused by the fact that nobody was taking photos of the help:

It's sort of like those who did the real labor of keeping house and caring for the children are the equivalent of ephemera, utilitarian and constant on a day-to-day level, but rarely valued enough to keep. It's crazy how quickly knowledge is lost when it's not carefully preserved.

A large part of the museum was devoted to the Dresden bombing and Slaughterhouse-Five:

This is the most viscerally upsetting of Vonnegut's novels, and I'd been prepared to see upsetting images and displays, but it was pretty visually gentle. I think this was the only actual artifact--

--although many of Vonnegut's quotes were highlighted:

I'm impressed with Vonnegut's processing of his war-related trauma, and I wonder what combination of his personal characteristics made him able to do that? My Pappa very rarely spoke about his part in the war, until he finally grew so old that I guess the memories eventually lost some of their bite and he was able to relate some very disturbing stories that I'd never heard before. Even with everything that he wrote, I wonder if Vonnegut also had war stories so disturbing that he never told them?

Here was another good artifact--evidence of a writer's life!

The museum has also recreated Vonnegut's habitual writing set-up, in case you, too, want to try your hand at the most ergonomically incorrect situation possible. Dude wrote in a low-slung easy chair pulled up next to an honest-to-god coffee table that had his typewriter sitting on it! You'd write your ass off just for the pleasure of getting up and stretching your spine out once you hit your word count!

I really like it when writers are Virginia Woof's idea of "writers-of-all-trades," so I thought it was interesting to see that Vonnegut also turned his mind towards song lyrics at least once, as well as writing an exceptionally charming note to the singers:

My search for that song led me down a rabbit trail of discovery, and I'm delight to tell you that Vonnegut himself recorded versions of some of his books on genuine vinyl record albums, and those albums are now on Spotify!

This introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, read by the author, is absolutely brilliant:

Is his authorial voice exactly how he spoke, or did he read his work so wonderfully that it feels like he was simply speaking it impromptu?

Spotify also has this exact album whose cover I photographed because it cracked me up:

Vonnegut SINGS on this album!

My latest Spotify Wrapped was messed up because I sometimes listen to podcasts in the middle of the night to help me fall back asleep, and then those podcasts just keep playing softly under my pillow for the next four hours. So excuse me for a few moments while I go make myself a Kurt Vonnegut playlist for future bouts of insomnia...

Other large parts of the museum were focused on the importance of the arts--

I should make a quilt that has a favorite book quote on it, because this is beautiful!

--and on the issue of banned books. As part of that exhibit, I think, or at least tangential to it, was my favorite display in the museum, this one on authors who have been jailed:

I should probably confess that these books were not arranged alpha by author, with their spines tidily aligned with the edge of the shelf, when I arrived... but they were when I left!

The display was really cleverly created by putting the information about each author's jail experience on a bookmark in that book, and I read every. Single. One! They were also hilariously non-discriminating about circumstance. Authors who were wrongly jailed for things that shouldn't have been crimes, like Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, and Daniel Defoe--

--were right up in there with authors who full-on murdered people!?!

Okay, I looked this up, and it's pretty crazy. The murder of Honorah Parker sounds devastating, and I can't imagine what it would have been like at the time, knowing that a couple of teenaged girls brutally murdered one of their perfectly nice and perfectly normal mothers like it was nothing. People only found out about Anne Perry's history because Peter Jackson made a movie version of it which got journalists interested in finding out what happened to the murderers. It seems like both women did their jail time, were rehabilitated, and led solitary and upstanding lives afterwards. A career writing murder mysteries is a choice, but I guess your brain wants to write what your brain wants to write. 

Anyway, that information was so wild that afterwards my partner and I had to go and eat Korean barbeque about it:

And yes, I DID just request a few of Anne Perry's Christmas mysteries from my local public library. Just because I've smashed my 2025 reading goal (108 books read of my goal of 104!) doesn't mean that I can't still get festive!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!