Goodbye, Blue Monday!

Dwayne was silent for a while. And then he told her haltingly about a trip he had made to the headquarters of the Pontiac Division of General Motors at Pontiac, Michigan, only three months after his wife ate Drano.

“We were given a tour of all the research facilities”, he said. The thing that impressed him most, he said, was a series of laboratories and out-of-doors test areas where various parts of automobiles and even entire automobiles were destroyed. Pontiac scientists set upholstery on fire, threw gravel at windshields, snapped crankshafts and driveshafts, staged head-on collisions, tore gearshift levers out by the roots, ran engines at high speeds with almost no lubrication, opened and closed glove compartment doors a hundred times a minute for days, cooled dashboard clocks to within a few degrees of absolute zero, and so on.

“Everything you’re not supposed to do to a car, they did to a car,” Dwayne said to Francine. “And I’ll never forget the sign on the front door of the building where all that torture went on.” Here was the sign Dwayne described to Francine:

"I saw that sign," said Dwayne, "and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking."

-Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)
Novelista norteamericano. En Breakfast of Champions (1973).