The Captain Is Out to Lunch by Charles Bukowski Page B
Authors: Charles Bukowski
Tags: United States, Fiction, Literary, General, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Criticism, Authors, Business & Economics, Poetry, Diaries, Management
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meditate for decades and it's not going to alter. You can alter yourself into acceptability but maybe that's wrong too. Maybe we think too much. Feel more, think less.
All the cars in that pile-up seemed to be gray. Odd.
I like the way philosophers break down the concepts and theories which have preceded them. It's been going on for centuries. No, that's not the way, they say. This is the way. It goes on and on and seems very sensible, this onwardness. The main problem for the philosophers is that they must humanize their language, make it more accessible, then the thoughts light up better, are more intersting still. I think that they are learning this. Simplicity is the key.
In writing you must slide along. The words can be crippled and choppy but if they slide along then a certain delight lights up everything. Careful writing is deathly writing. I think Sherwood Anderson was one of the best at playing with words as if they were rocks, or bits of food to be eaten. He PAINTED his words on paper. And they were so simple that you felt rushes of light, doors openin, walls glistening. You could see rugs and shoes and fingers. He had the words. Delightful. Yet, they were like bullets too. They could take you right out. Sherwood Anderson knew something, he had the instinct. Hemingway tried too hard. You could feel the had work in his writing. They were hard blocks stuck together. And Anderson could laugh while he was telling you something serious. Hemingway could never laugh. Anybody who writes standing up at 6 a.m. in the morning has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.
Tired tonight. Damn, I don't get enough sleep. I would love to sleep until noon but with the first post at 12:30, add the drive and getting your figures ready, I have to leave here about 11 a.m., before the mailman gets here. And I'm seldom asleep until 2 a.m. or so. Get up a couple of times to piss. One of the cats awakens me at 6 a.m. on the dot, morning after morning, he's got to go out. Then too, the lonelyhearts like to phone before 10 a.m. I don't answer, the machine takes the message. I mean, my sleep is broken. But if this is all I have to bitch about then I'm in grand shape.
No horses for the next 2 days. I won't be up until noon tomorrow and I'l feel like a powerhouse, ten years younger. Hell, that's to laugh – ten years younger would make me 61, you call that a break? Let me cry, let me cry.
It's 1 a.m. Why don't I stop now and get some sleep?
1/18/92 11:59 PM
Well, I move back and forth between the novel and the poem and the racetrack and I'm still alive. There isn't much going on at the track, I'm just struck with humanity and there I am. Then there's the freeway, to get there and back. The freeway always reminds you of what most people are. It's a competitive society. They want you to lose so they can win. It's inbred and much of it comes out on the freeway. The slow drivers want to block you, the fast drivers want to get around you. I hold it at 70 so I pass and am passed. The fast drivers I don't mind. I get out of their way and let them go. It's the slow ones who are the irritant, those who do 55 in the fast lane. And sometimes you can get boxed in. And you see enough of the head and the neck of the driver ahead of you to take a reading. The reading is that this person is asleep at the sould and at the same time embittered, gross, cruel and stupid.
I hear a voice now saying to me, "You are stupid to think like that. You are stupid one.“
There are always those who will defend the subnormals in society because they don't realize it is that they too are subnormal. We have a subnormal society and that's why they act as they do and do to each other what they do. But that's their business and I don't mind it except that I have to live with them.
I recall once having dinner with a group of people. At a nearby table there was another group of people. They talked loudly
All the cars in that pile-up seemed to be gray. Odd.
I like the way philosophers break down the concepts and theories which have preceded them. It's been going on for centuries. No, that's not the way, they say. This is the way. It goes on and on and seems very sensible, this onwardness. The main problem for the philosophers is that they must humanize their language, make it more accessible, then the thoughts light up better, are more intersting still. I think that they are learning this. Simplicity is the key.
In writing you must slide along. The words can be crippled and choppy but if they slide along then a certain delight lights up everything. Careful writing is deathly writing. I think Sherwood Anderson was one of the best at playing with words as if they were rocks, or bits of food to be eaten. He PAINTED his words on paper. And they were so simple that you felt rushes of light, doors openin, walls glistening. You could see rugs and shoes and fingers. He had the words. Delightful. Yet, they were like bullets too. They could take you right out. Sherwood Anderson knew something, he had the instinct. Hemingway tried too hard. You could feel the had work in his writing. They were hard blocks stuck together. And Anderson could laugh while he was telling you something serious. Hemingway could never laugh. Anybody who writes standing up at 6 a.m. in the morning has no sense of humor. He wants to defeat something.
Tired tonight. Damn, I don't get enough sleep. I would love to sleep until noon but with the first post at 12:30, add the drive and getting your figures ready, I have to leave here about 11 a.m., before the mailman gets here. And I'm seldom asleep until 2 a.m. or so. Get up a couple of times to piss. One of the cats awakens me at 6 a.m. on the dot, morning after morning, he's got to go out. Then too, the lonelyhearts like to phone before 10 a.m. I don't answer, the machine takes the message. I mean, my sleep is broken. But if this is all I have to bitch about then I'm in grand shape.
No horses for the next 2 days. I won't be up until noon tomorrow and I'l feel like a powerhouse, ten years younger. Hell, that's to laugh – ten years younger would make me 61, you call that a break? Let me cry, let me cry.
It's 1 a.m. Why don't I stop now and get some sleep?
1/18/92 11:59 PM
Well, I move back and forth between the novel and the poem and the racetrack and I'm still alive. There isn't much going on at the track, I'm just struck with humanity and there I am. Then there's the freeway, to get there and back. The freeway always reminds you of what most people are. It's a competitive society. They want you to lose so they can win. It's inbred and much of it comes out on the freeway. The slow drivers want to block you, the fast drivers want to get around you. I hold it at 70 so I pass and am passed. The fast drivers I don't mind. I get out of their way and let them go. It's the slow ones who are the irritant, those who do 55 in the fast lane. And sometimes you can get boxed in. And you see enough of the head and the neck of the driver ahead of you to take a reading. The reading is that this person is asleep at the sould and at the same time embittered, gross, cruel and stupid.
I hear a voice now saying to me, "You are stupid to think like that. You are stupid one.“
There are always those who will defend the subnormals in society because they don't realize it is that they too are subnormal. We have a subnormal society and that's why they act as they do and do to each other what they do. But that's their business and I don't mind it except that I have to live with them.
I recall once having dinner with a group of people. At a nearby table there was another group of people. They talked loudly
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