BuKaufman

It's been over two weeks, and I don't think anything means any more than it did the last time I wrote.

My last line has come to fruition, and I no longer work at the Center, which is truly more of a blessing than a curse, as much as it feels like I'm trying to convince myself of that rather than simply stating it as fact. I will say that the Mrs. has been a tremendous help in pulling me out of my odiferous funk, and I will say that, as good a job as it was, it can easily be replaced with something that doesn't suck my soul out of my navel quite as effectively as sitting there, day after day, surrounded by illiterate and violent degenerates does. Or did. Or will, for that matter.

Last night was the fourth annual Sundown Film Festival, a yearly marathon screening of three select horror films I choose and show in an attempt to edify, to coagulate, but probably mostly to congregate, to gather and to revel. It was fantastic. I dressed as a squid, my costume self-made, my pinkness saturating. The Mrs. was my cat. Not a cat, my cat. I could have eaten her alive and, later, in a strictly non-sexual context, I think I tried to. It was a great, great day.

I finished reading Ham on Rye today, in lieu of fighting practice or, indeed, showering and rising as the rest of the world did, and instead surrendered myself to the self-imposed imprisonment Bukowski himself so relished in the novel, and the slight embarrassment of receiving "Kitten" Blanchard having just gotten out of bed and still wearing the bottom half of my costume, the effect of so much pink only accentuated by a white t-shirt bearing the standard "Barefoot in the Park." Proud as I am of that thespic triumph, I was a touch out of sort.

I wish I had known The Buke. I would have liked to have known him, even in passing. Maybe I want not so much Bukowski himself, but someone like him, that I might know someone that I feel so very much like, social paraih-isms and all. Not even someone I'm really going to get along with, someone I'd like, for I doubt very much that anyone, let alone myself, could get along with the Buke in any traditional or long-lasting sense, but just to know someone that, even through such anger and dejected, badly-placed hatred, I felt was so much like me, at least in all the ways that matter. God forbid I have to spend any time with someone who's like me. The Mrs. is nothing like me at all. We have a ton in common, and we think alike, and we get along fantastically, but this is all because we compliment each other, we are two halves of one larger peice. Thank God she's not like me, for my sake as well as hers.

I wonder, reading what Bukowski writes, when anything is going to mean as much to me as everything seems to mean to him. He throws away a medal he won on a fluke, and it's a metaphor for the man's fucking life. Me, things die, people die. Things change and, cripplingly, stay the same in turns. I scar and burn and war and rage, and the next day I just don't want to know about it anymore. I feel, and have felt, that I'm waiting for something to happen, that the world will turn, that I'm waiting for my bottle to open. I know, one day, for better or worse, it's going to. In the meantime, building up to that, there's nothing. There's waiting for that, there's erecting an existence to support that catalyst that will, eventually, get here. And all along, there's the quiet, nagging, horrifying thought that either it's never coming or, worse, it's already happened. I didn't miss it, I just didn't notice it, and I'm waiting and preparing for something that I should instead be doing and enacting and mixing in with the rest of everything that I am. In the meantime, I'm dying, the world is crashing in on itself, and one day it will be over.

One way or another.

The sun tossed yellow everywhere and I cut through it, a crazy knife on wheels.