Charles Bukowski : He Was a Fat, Old Man!

 Charles Bukowski once said 'The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over The Hills'....well, it's bloody lucky he never tried his hand at this Pop-Slopping mallarkey otherwise he might have said 'The Days Shuffle Past Like A Geriatric Tortoise with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease'!! Nowhere near as poetic or snappy, I'll be the first to admit, but more accurate!

The S t O n e D H o L y B L O g g e r must admit to feeling a close affinity to Charles Bukowski seeing as he too spent years buried in the Dead Letter Office swimming with intellectual minnows whilst punching 300 letters every five minutes into the Inward Primary Sortation frame! He too has frittered away years at low skill jobs taking shit from Soul Sucking Jerks just so he could, at the drop-of-a-hat, when dim lights, thick smoke & loud, loud music and fawning femme-types came knocking, tell the aforementioned jerk to 'Take this Job & Shove It!'  He has also cracked open many a fine bottled ale and enjoyed ham on rye!

Bukowski, in case you didn't know, was the beer-bellied, ugly son-of-a-bitch who, in the guise of his alter-ego, Henry Chinaski, chronicled the lives of the barflies n gadflies, down & outs n roustabouts, soaks n jokes, derelicts n drifters who live out their lives of emasculated n disenfranchised desperation, drug addled ordinariness and kerbside glory at the dog-eared corners and singed edges of Society.  His is the voice of the gutterpup snarling at the hand that feigns or deigns to feed it! And the City of Lost Angels didn't skimp on dredging up the muck to keep his typewriter busy, being, as it is, a huge, sprawling mash-up of sexual & social inadequacies and corruptions!

Bukowski was also the man who, after a troubled youth scarred by chronic acne and years of neglect and disregard from the literary establishment, seized the day when renown and notoriety and post pubescent college girls came calling! Nonchalantly swigging beer and reciting poetry as the giggling coquettes fluttered round his filthy flame like fireflies, with their pert little ricecakes jiggling and wafting their honeymuff pheromones! Perchance, readers, there's hope yet for a one man Pop Slop Flophouse like the
s T O n e d h O L y b L o G G e r!!    A man can dream, can he not?!?! There was a time, it may interest you to know, when first I ventured down the perilous & unfrequented path of the STONED HOLY ROLLER, a time when Punk Rock Immortality awaited me as surely as night follws day, that I fancied myself quite the libertine and entertained such notions as voluptuary excess and sensual abandonment......but oh, such comfortless nights lay ahead!

But back to Bukowski ; Once, when asked as to his modus operandi regarding writing, he replied 'Don't Try! That's very important : not to try, not for cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait and if nothing happens, you wait some more.' The phrase appears on the stone which marks the spot where Mr. Bukowski is currently to be found in Green Hills Memorial Park, Los Angeles County, U.S.A. This once seemed like good advice to the S T o N e d h o L Y B L o g g e R.......but I've grown quite weary of waiting now for something or anything to actually happen after these long years, so Mr. Charles Bukowski can take his advice and shove it!!

And anyway, what gave this beer-bellied git the right to be so dyspeptic anywayz? He lived his life in L. A after all. Spending yir hours looking at horses (the ones that run round race tracks that is, rather than thems that speed away over hills!!) and in bars in chrome shiny, kick a buck, big breasted, speakeasy, 4-lane freeway America doesn't seem to be that bad a deal, does it?!!  I mean, 329 days of fukkin sunshine a year, for fuk's sake!! Imagine how miserable he woulda been had he been borned  in Scotchland!!

Still, be grateful he wasn't....otherwise nobody would've heard of him! And I don't care if he was an alcoholic bum running with the lowlifes because inside a warm, human heart was beating!.....and if yir passing Green Hills Memorial Park why not crack open a tin and pour the contents on the sod that covers him...it's what he woulda wanted, ahm sure!! Maybe that's the time also to recall these words "We're All Going To Die, All Of Us, What a Circus! That alone should Make Us Love Each Other but It Doesn't. We Are Terrorized & Flattened by Trivialities, We Are Eaten Up By Nothing!"

Seize the Day, Pop-Pickers....Seize the Day!!

.......maybe some day soon I should take my own advice!!