I lay on the floor and looked up those beautiful legs. ‘Baby,’ I said, ‘I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.’
She looked down at me. ‘Get up off the floor you damn fool and get me a drink.’
I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.
evilgirl333x2 says:
this is totally why 8/10 times i just send my roommate out on booze runs for me. haha.
I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.
“I drive around the streets
an inch away from weeping,
ashamed of my sentimentality and
possible love.”
“and when love came to us twice
and lied to us twice
we decided to never love again
that was fair
fair to us
and fair to love itself.we ask for no mercy or no
miracles;
we are strong enough to live
and to die and to
kill flies,attend the boxing matches, go to the racetrack,
live on luck and skill,
get alone, get alone often,
and if you can’t sleep alone
be careful of the words you speak in your sleep;
and
ask for no mercy
no miracles;and don’t forget:
time is meant to be wasted,
love fails
and death is useless.”
I was naturally a loner, content just to live with a woman, eat with her, sleep with her, walk down the street with her. I didn’t want conversation, or to go anywhere except the racetrack or the boxing matches. I didn’t understand t.v. I felt foolish paying money to go into a movie theatre and sit with other people to share their emotions. Parties sickened me. I hated the game-playing, the dirty play, the flirting, the amateur drunks, the bores.
evilgirl333x2 says:
i swear Bukowski could have been my brother from another mother… we have the same fucking personality damn near.
When Ginsburg is at the top of his game you might as well put down your toys and listen.
I feel like it’s something like tossing meatless bones instead of biscuits to the hungered and trapped. I don’t feel a damn thing holy or brave about it. There’s only one thing to do for men in jail: let ‘em out, there’s only one thing to do for men at war: stop the war.
“Lighting new cigarettes,
pouring more
drinks.It has been a beautiful
fight.Still
is.”
I thought about breakups, how difficult they were, but then usually it was only after you broke up with one woman that you met another. As a writer, I had to taste women in order to really know them, to get inside of them. I could invent men in my mind because I was one, but women, for me, were almost impossible to fictionalize without first knowing them. So I explored them as best I could and I found human beings inside. The writing would be forgotten. The writing would become much less than the episode itself until the episode ended. The writing was only the residue. A man didn’t need to have a woman in order to feel as real as he could feel, but it was good if he knew a few. Then when the affair went wrong, he’d feel what it was like to be truly lonely and crazed, and thus know what he must face, finally, when his own end came.
I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee…”; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking, talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes, the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3 AM; being told you snore, hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce, but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends, your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side, and her doing the same; sleeping together…
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the outwardly beautiful and inwardly cold were necessary. The kinder ones fucked better, really, and after you were around them a while they seemed beautiful because they were.
And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless. Everything else just kept picking and picking, hacking away. And nothing was interesting, nothing. The people were restrictive and careful, all alike. And I’ve got to live with these fuckers for the rest of my life, I thought. God, they all had assholes and sexual organs and their mouths and their armpits. They shit and they chattered and they were dull as horse dung. The girls looked good from a distance, the sun shining through their dresses, their hair. But get up close and listen to their minds running out of their mouths, you felt like digging in under a hill and hiding out with a tommy-gun. I would certainly never be able to be happy, to get married, I could never have children. Hell, I couldn’t even get a job as a dishwasher.
Cows in Art Class
good weather
is like
good women—
it doesn’t always happen
and when it does
it doesn’t
always last.
man is
more stable:
if he’s bad
there’s more chance
he’ll stay that way,
or if he’s good
he might hang
on,
but a woman
is changed
by
children
age
diet
conversation
sex
the moon
the absence or
presence of sun
or good times.
a woman must be nursed
into subsistence
by love
here a man can become
stronger
by being hated.
I am drinking tonight in Spangler’s Bar
and I remember the cows
I once painted in Art class
and they looked good
they looked better than anything
in here. I am drinking in Spangler’s Bar
wondering which to love and which
to hate, but the rules are gone:
I love and hate only
myself—
they stand outside me
like an orange dropped from the table
and rolling away; it’s what I’ve got to
decide:
kill myself or
love myself?
which is the treason?
where’s the information
coming from?
books … like broken glass:
I w’dn’t wipe my ass with ‘em
yet, it’s getting
darker, see?
(we drink here and speak to
each other and
seem knowing.)
buy the cow with the biggest
tits
buy the cow with the biggest
rump.
present arms.
the bartender slides me a beer
it runs down the bar
like an Olympic sprinter
and the pair of pliers that is my hand
stops it, lifts it,
golden piss of dull temptation,
I drink and
stand there
the weather bad for cows
but my brush is ready
to stroke up
the green grass straw eye
sadness takes me all over
and I drink the beer straight down
order a shot
fast
to give me the guts and the love to
go
on.
~Charles Bukowski
Bukowski~
