I'm not big on basketball, which has always struck me as overly simple. I mean, is there anything more meaningless than the first three quarters of a basketball game? Normally I don't express these views because basketball players tend to be freakishly tall.

Recently, for reasons outside my control, I found myself awake at 6 a.m., and would you know that six grown men were playing basketball at the playground? Seriously. Even the sun was at Starbucks.

They were playing the hard way, too -- cursing, shouting, taunting each other's mamas. Part of me admired these men for their dedication, and another part of me wondered if this wasn't part of a drug rehab program.

A third part of me wanted to join in. I'd probably get smooshed and shoveled aside, but not before I got in a few good snaps: "Yo mama so fat, she wakes up in sections..." "So fat, she eat Wheat Thicks..." "So fat..."

This year I lost a lifelong friend. Kurt Vonnegut. We never actually spoke, but he mentored me between the lines. It was for Vonnegut that I named my column "So It Goes."

I miss Vonnegut's harmoniums, whose purpose in life was to vibrate with anything that beats or pulses. A ticking watch could attract thousands.

Before Vonnegut flew away, my friend Charlie Myers sent me an original Vonnegut painting -- a big yellow asterisk that represents ... um ... the finish line of our digestive track. Vonnegut used it as shorthand for political figures and so forth. I hung it in my bathroom for obvious reasons.

If you read just one book by Vonnegut, don't do "Slaughterhouse Five" (so cliché). Try "The Sirens of Titan," where you will find out about the harmoniums and Transfalmagorians and planets where gifted people have to wear chains to make the others feel better.

For the moment, though, a moment of silence for the master who revealed the lighthearted side of dark humor.

You'd think that after 19 novels, Vonnegut's website would be filled with teary farewells and I-knew-him-when's...

In Vonnegut fashion, the website was reduced to one page, a painting by the man himself...