[Taking a writing & research break to step beyond the walls of the house for the first time in 3 days to walk to Lombardy Market for a Crispin in a can, which I drank on the way home. Shout-out to Wildfox for the sick t-shirt. The road is home.]
Life, en iphone, for the last couple of weeks. As per usual, I’ve found new and brilliant ways to blot everything out in favor of work assignments. I’m only getting worse at this (or better at it?) which is worrisome.
I finished my second Bukowski book, Women, after reading Post Office about a month ago by the pool in Key West, laughing viciously to myself in a shady corner while commercial jets blared along new flights paths overhead. His was a new face I wanted to stare into for a long time—an appreciation for unpolished things, places and people I’ve only recently acquired, and it feels like freedom.
[I found the truth on a small burlap jewelry bag.]
Reading two books after only reading books for research for a year or so was like hooking my big toe in the loop of an anchor and letting it sink me down into cool, dark depths for awhile.
Mostly it was nice to get inside someone else’s head. You have to want to be there.
When I read books as a teenager, I never absorbed them. I maybe pulled threads of ideas out—dirty passages or shocking language—but I had to draw them through my mood, first. Like threading a needle. And I sort of helplessly read all these things without feeling anything. I was feeling too much on my own.
I went deep with a documentary on his life once I finished, and dove around looking for quotes for awhile.
People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
[Last week I took my first lunch break in over 6 months, biking to Carytown to pick up some food for Eli, during which I spotted this gem.]
[Working from home, I do get distracted, just not by normal things. Here’s my equivalent of a desktop alert reminder of a 3PM meeting in the conference room.]
[More bike ride finds.]
[Woodrow. An old nickname of mine from high school.]
Something about Bukowski, though, I found easy to grab on to. I wanted to hug him and just smell the rank breath and lean against the Volks and read how he’d sum me up in one sentence. “All that flank…”
I wanted him to un-die, and not so he could whip up more quotes for wannabe hippies to post on the ‘gram, but so he could rip apart the world I’m living in—the world I’m looking at, and boil it all down.
Somewhere between buying new ceiling fans and adjusting your new hat during a memorial service for a friend’s wife, you want to slap yourself in the face and be real for a minute. I’ve heard it was his “truth in writing” and his “honest words,” but I just liked the self-deprecation coupled with irresistibility. Maybe it’s the charm of slapping a degenerate face on beautiful work. Like dumping a Budweiser on a topiary and slurring, “Thirsty? Yeh thirsty, guy?”
Disarming beauty, so we’re not afraid to touch it while we still can.
[Clearly overjoyed about my new hat, I lost all standards of dignity and took a bathroom nostril selfie at a bar. Hey; there was air conditioning in there. Rag & Bone floppy brim fedora.]
He was a relief. Ugly is a relief. Appreciating something by busting it all apart is a relief. Imperfect is a relief. Failure is a relief.
Cutting yourself some slack is a relief.
-C.
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