Dedicated to Henry Charles Bukowski
Bukowski quotes on life, death, love, writing....
did you ever consider that lsd and color tv arrived for our consumption about the same time? here comes all this explorative color pounding, and what do we do? we outlaw one and fuck up the other. t.v., of course, is useless in present hands; there’s not much of a hell of an argument here. and I read where in a recent raid it was alleged that an agent caught a container of acid in the face, hurled by alleged manufacturer of a hallucinogenic drug. this is also kind of a waste. there are some basic grounds for outlawing lsd, dmt, stp – it can take a man permanently out of his mind – but so can picking beets, or turning bolts for GM, or washing dishes or teaching English I at one of the local universities. if we outlawed everything that drove men mad, the whole social structure would drop out – marriage, the war, bus service, slaughterhouses, beekeeping, surgery, anything you can name. anything can drive men mad because society is built on false stilts. until we knock the whole bottom out and rebuild, the madhouses will remain overlooked. and cuts in madhouse budgets by our good governor are taken by me to indirectly imply that those driven mad by society are not fit to be supported and cured by society, especially in an inflationary and tax-mad age. such money could be better used to build roads or to be sprinkled ever-so-lightly upon the Negro to keep him from burning down our cities. and I have a splendid thought: why not assassinate the insane? think of the money we could save. even a madman eats too much and needs a place to sleep, and the bastards are disgusting – the way they scream and smear their shit on the walls, all that. all we’d need is a small medical board to make the decisions and a couple of good-looking nurses (male or female) to keep the psychiatrists’ extracurricular sexual activities satisfied.
Charles Bukowski
what i’m reading right now.
no faces
no faces at all
laughing at nothing
let me tell you
i have drunk in skidrow rooms with imbecile winos
whose cause was better
whose eyes still held some light whose voices retained some sensibility
and when the morning came
we were sick but not ill
poor but not deluded
and we stretched in our beds
and rose in the late afternoon
like millionaires"
often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation; just as at times they will get half drunk and clean up their kitchens. but soon again all falls into disorder and they are in darkness again, in need of BABO, pills, prayer, sex, luck and salvation.
the man with the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak, however. beware of him. his kitchen-state is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order. if you listen to him for ten minutes you will know that anything he says in a lifetime will be essentially meaningless and always dull. he is a cement man. there are more cement men than other kinds of men. so if you are looking for a living man, first check his kitchen and save yourself time.
"“it’s darker. people can’t see me.”
“why don’t you want people to see you?”
“because if they do I might get caught and put in jail.”
“what’s jail?”
“everything’s jail."
(Source: amazon.com)
“I felt like crying but nothing came out. it was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. but I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”
— Charles Bukowski (Tales of Ordinary Madness)
