Does Your Grandpa Know Who Justin Bieber Is?

I just started reading the book "Slapstick" by Kurt Vonnegut. I find this book to be quite odd but none the less very interesting. In the book Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11 Swain lives in Manhattan. He does not live in the Manhattan we know today, but in Manhattan in the future, a Manhattan where everyone has names as odd as Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11s. Everything is crushed and destroyed and it seems as though there are very few people beside himself. Wilbur lives in the empire state building with only two other people, his sixteen year old grand-daughter and her husband.

Even though the book is written with humor and lightheartedness, it is actually pretty sad. Everything that once was is gone, almost all traditions from before are gone, and all the people of Dr. Wilbur Daffodil-11's generation are gone. He is nearly all alone in his old age. I find this really sad because living with people who have been alive for about as long as you have is natural, so you can reminisce about old times and just know that those people know just about as much and what you know. Especially in the time where Wilbur lives all of this would be severely needed. His grand-daughter and her husband don't even know how to read.

Being young, I personally could not imagine only living with my parents and people of their generation. They don't understand very much about pop culture and just how people act. They still think that Glee is an emotion, not a hit TV show on Fox. They still think that if you can move around comfortably in jeans it's okay, no, it's not. They don't know what Gangnam Style is... well maybe that one's for the better. Anyway, no one wants to only live with people of different generations whether you're old and don't want to only live with young people or if you are young and don't want to only live with old people.