Quoting Favorites III (or: on Bukowski)

I've just finished reading Hollywood. As a friend of mine well put it: we never forget our first Bukowski. Indeed.

People tend to put him and beatnicks Kerouac and Ginsberg in the same basket. Nu-uh. Good old Charlie's got nothing to do with them beats. Even though they're all marginalized, flipping the bird to society as a whole, Bukowski, he's a gang all by himself. Alcoholic, misanthropist, chauvinist, politically incorrect and an awesome writer, the dirty old man. Above all, he despised the human race, because he saw it for what it really is: a huge pathetic lot.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning.

(Mockingbird Wish Me Luck, "Those Sons of Bitches")

The only ones he might have had sympathy for were the so-called low lives, the rejected children of America:

They buy my books - the defeated, the demented and the damned - and I am proud of it.

(in an interview to High Times http://hightimes.com/entertainment/ht_admin/499)

Once you feel the discomfort, once you fall, there's no way back up. You're defeated. You're damned. You know there's nowhere to go back to, because it's all the same and it's all a big blur. That's where your backbone, your moxie, swoops in:

Moxie means carrying on when everything feels terrible. It means carrying on when everything seems so terrible there is no use to go on, and you don't go to a god, you don't go to a church. You face the wall and just work it out alone.
(ibidem)

You work it out alone, just trying to get to the other side of that bridge. And if you wanna get to the other side, if you wanna carry on, whatever you do, don't think. One simple, basic rule.

Not that everybody feels the need of it, of course.

THE ALIENS
from The Last Night Of The Earth Poems
by Bukowski

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.

you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.

but I am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there

and I am
here.

I envy and despise the aliens.