Charles Bukowski - The Captain Is Out to Lunch

But at the horse races it's hell. I stay isolated. I don't talk to anybody. That helps. Well, the mutuel clerks know me. I've got to go to the windows, use my voice. Over the years, they get to know you. And most of them are fairly decent people. I think that their years of dealing with humanity has given them certain insights. For instance, they know that most of the human race is one large piece of crap. Still, I also keep my distance from the mutuel clerks. By keeping counsel with myself, I get an edge. I could stay home and do this. I could lock the door and fiddle with paints or something. But somehow, I've got to get out, and make sure that almost all humanity is still a large piece of crap. As if they would change! Hey, baby, I've got to be crazy. Yet there is something out there, I mean, I don't think about dying out there, for example, you feel too stupid being out there to be able to think. I've taken a notebook, thought, well, I'll write a few things between races. Impossible. The air is flat and heavy, we are all voluntary members of a concentration camp. When I get home, then I can muse about dying. Just a little. Not too much. I don't worry about dying or feel sorry about dying. It just seems like a lousy job. When? Next Wednesday night? Or when I'm asleep? Or because of the next horrible hangover? Traffic accident? It's a load, it's something that's got to be done. And I'm going out without the God-belief. That'll be good, I can face it head on. It's something you have to do like putting your shoes on in the morning. I think I'm going to miss writing. Writing is better than drinking. And writing while you're drinking, that's always made the walls dance. Maybe there's a hell, what? All the poets will be there reading their works and I will have to listen. I will be drowned in their peening vanity, their overflowing self-esteem. If there is a hell, that will be my hell: poet after poet reading on and on…

Anyway, a particularly bad day. This system that usually worked didn't work. The gods shuffle the deck. Time is mutilated and you are a fool. But time is made to be wasted. What are you going to do about it? You can't always be roaring full steam. You stop and you go. You hit a high and then you fall into a black pit. do you have a cat? Or cats? They sleep, baby. They can sleep 2% hours a day and they look beautiful They know that there's nothing to get excited about. The next meal. And a little something to kill now and then. When I'm being torn by the forces, I just look at one or more of my cats. There are 9 of them. I just look at one of them sleeping or half-sleeping and I relax. Writing is also my cat. Writing lets me face it. It chills me out. For a while anyhow. Then my wires get crossed and I have to do it all over again. I can't understand writers who decide to stop writing. How do they chill out?

Well, the track was dull and deathly out there today but here I am back home and I'll be there tomorrow, most probably. How do I manage it?

Some of it is the power of routine, a power that holds most of us. A place to go, a thing to do. We are trained from th beginning. Move out, get into it. Maybe there's something interesting out there? What an ignorant dream. It's like when I used to pick up women in bars. I'd think, maybe this is the one. Another routine. Yet, even during the sex act, I'd think, this is another routine. I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. I felt ridiculous but I went ahead anyhow. What else could I do? Well, I should have crawled off and said, „Look, baby, we are being very foolish here. We are just tools of nature.“ „What do you mean?“ „I mean, baby, you ever watched two flies fucking or something like that?“ „YOU'RE CRAZY! I'M GETTING OUT OF HERE!“ We can't examine ourselves too closely or we'll stop living, stop doing everything. Like the wise men who just sit on a rock and don't move. I don't know if that's so wise either. They discard the obvious but something makes them discard it. In a sense, they are one-fly-fucking. There's no escape, action or inaction. We just have to write ourselves off as a loss: any move on the on the board leads to checkmate.

So, it was a bad day at the track today, I got a bad taste in the mouth of my soul. But I'll go tomorrow. I'm afraid not to. Because when I get back the words crawling across this computer screen really fascinate my weary ass. I leave it so that I can come back to it. Of course, of course. That's it. Isn't it?

I have probably written more and better in the past 2 years than at any time in my life. It's as if from over 5 decades of doing it, I might have gotten close to really doing it. Yet, in the past 2 months I have begun to feel a weariness. The weariness is mostly physical, yet it's also a touch spiritual. It could be that I am ready to go into decline. It's a horrible thought, of course, The ideal was to continue until the moment of my death, not to fade away. In 1989 I overcame TB. This year it has been an eye operation that has not as yet worked out. And a painful right let, ankle, foot. Small things. Bits of skin cancer. Death nipping at my heels, letting me know. I'm and old fart, that's all. Well, I couldn't drink myself to death. I came close but I didn't. Now I deserve to live with what is left.

So, I haven't written for 3 nights. Should I go mad? Even at my lowest times I can feel the words bubbling inside of me, getting ready. I am not in a contest. I never wanted it, that's all. And I had to get the word down the way I wanted it, that's all. And I had to get the words down or be overcome by something worse than death. Words not as precious things but as necessary things.

Yet when I begin to doubt my ability to work the word I simply read another writer and then I know that I have nothing to worry about. My contest is only with myself: to do it right, with power and force and delight and gamble. Otherwise, forget it.

I have been wise enough to remain isolated. Visitors to this house are rare. My 9 cats run like mad when a human arrives. And my wife, too, is getting to be more and more like me. I don't want this for her. It's natural for me. But for Linda, no. I'm glad when she takes the car and goes off to some gathering. After all, I have my go-damned racetrack. I can always write about the racetrack, that great empty hole of nowhere. I go there to sacrifice myself, to mutilate the hours, to murder them. The hours must be killed. While you are waiting. The perfect hours must be killed. While you are waiting. The perfect hours are the ones at this machine. But you must have impefect hours to get perfect hours. You must kill ten hours to make two hours live. What you must be careful of is not to kill ALL the hours, ALL the years.

You fix yourself up to be a writer by doing the instinctive things which feed you and the word, which protect you against death in life. For each, it changes. Once for me it meant very heavy drinking, drinking to the point of madness. It sharpened the word for me, brought it out. And I needed danger. I needed to put myself into dangerous situations. With men. With women. With automobiles. With gambling. With starvation. With anything. It fed the word. I had decades of that. Now it has changed. What I need now is more subtle, more invisible. It's a feeling in the air. Words spoken, words heard. Things seen. I still need a few drinks. But I am now into nuances and shadows. I am fed words by things that I am hardly aware of. This is good. I write a different kind of crap now. Some have noticed.

„You have broken through,“ is mainly what they tell me.

I am aware of what they sense. I feel it too. The words have gotten simpler yet warmer, darker. I am being fed from new sources. Being near death is energizing. I have all the advantages. I can see and feel things that are hidden from the young. I have gone from the power of youth to the power of age. There will be no decline. Uh uh. Now, pardon me, I must got to be, it's 12:55 a.m. Talking the night off. Have your laugh while you can…