Post No. 987: A Good Day to Read Bukowski

 “Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy -- all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

The sun has burned the marine layer off and it’s lovely and bright and warm, and old Neil Young is playing the Bowl down the street. Should be good. Loud, probably. Neil’s always had things to say and a compelling way of saying them. He’s got quiet songs and rocking songs. 

I saw a fair number of tourists on State Street when I was out earlier. Saw a wedding at the Courthouse, Mexican family, heavy young women in tight dresses, coiffed, glammed up head-to-toe for the occasion, men and boys in dark suits, baggy trousers, new shoes. Someone’s big day. The lawn in and around the Sunken Garden is covered with beach towels, blankets of many colors, folding chairs, for the movie that begins when darkness falls. Friday night, SB. 

The mean world is at bay, for the moment, so why not enjoy it to the full? Because it doesn’t sit right, the complete, random dumb luck of being born here, not there, on this side of the line, not that side, on this continent, rather than someplace much meaner and harder than anything I’ve been forced to experience. Lucky, that’s all. In no way better or more deserving, just lucky. And because I have no illusions of permanent security of any kind. Circumstances can change quickly. Health. Money. Housing. Job. Family. 

That’s why it’s a good day to read Bukowski, because he had a take on life, and luck played a significant part in his outlook. Luck with women, luck with wine and booze, luck at the racetrack, luck with the word. Roll of the dice. Snake-eyes, double 6’s. Have gratitude because it won’t last, nothing does. Nothing can, except the earth, and that is uncertain as of this week, when the hottest surface temperatures in recorded history were written into the books. 

Consequences are felt, lives disrupted, the poor and less fortunate, the less lucky, feel the effects first and hardest. How it goes, right? Every time and place, under every social structure, bishop or king, queen or lord, mayor or general, chief or tsar. Some survive the consequences of greed and ego and fear, wars and pogroms and massacres and floods and earthquakes. Luck holds, they have the resources to sidestep pain and loss. Others die or get dispossessed or flee. 

We’re on a planet that’s spinning and we trick ourselves into thinking we’re in complete control. 

Bukowski knew that in America fear is piled atop fear. He wasn’t unaware of law and politics and racism and injustice but never paid it more attention than he thought it deserved. He knew politicians lied, priests buggered young boys, poor people were routinely exploited, women were raped, many of his fellow white people were racist; he’d been on the seamy and ugly side of the street, worked for years in soul-grinding jobs. He knew that in America a man as malignant and awful as Donald Trump would never be assassinated. He saw the knife’s edge and wondered why others couldn’t. 

Bukowski was appreciative but never expectant. 

How deep into the catalog will Neil Young go? Man made some great songs. Nostalgia time for some in the crowd. “I remember…” The old person’s opener. 

How to describe it, gratitude laced with melancholy? Bukowski called that a gin & tonic. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 27

“They never pay the slaves enough to get free.” Charles Bukowski

How many are still waiting on that $1200 check?

The one-time check

How long did the corporate honchos wait for their money?

I bet no CEO had to navigate a jammed website. 

One America for the rich, another for the working class, the poor, 

The expendable. 

It’s a story as old as the world, ruler and ruled

Master and slave,

Chosen few and condemned many. 

The American Dream is as hollow as a chocolate Easter bunny.  

If dark-skinned men in camouflage vests, AR-15’s

Slung over their shoulders, holstered sidearms, stormed a legislative

Body anywhere in America,

The state would shoot them dead. The media would call them

Rioters,

thugs,

A threat to public safety.  

We’re born into this, Bukowski said, no choice over where or when

Or to who,

But all leaving by the same exit, 

ticket punched in advance. 

A beautiful spring day in a pandemic,

Hummingbirds and Monarch butterflies, a sleek crow

Sitting on the back fence; lavender in bloom, Mexican

Sage, crimson roses, yellow snapdragon. 

Losing track of time, of days, yesterday is today, and today is tomorrow, 

Covid-19 still holds the winning cards, the biggest pile of chips, momentum

And mojo.

Mask, gloves, hand sanitizer, X marks the spot where you stand

Wait your turn, speak through Plexiglass. 

There’s still meat on the rack, eggs in the dairy, apples in the bin,

Plenty of beer and booze, luck still holding. 

This is our Banana Republic, love it or leave it. 

The rat and the worm, the crow and the 

Cockroach, 

The morgue is bursting its seams, 

and the furnace

Is booked solid. 

The master stands on the veranda

Surveys his fields, glances at the sun peeking over the horizon,

Looks at the people he owns, coughs, spits, and says, quietly,

“Get to it. They’ll be no slacking today.”

Bukowski Pissed Here

“Because a man is born with a particular knack for gathering in vast aggregates of money and power for himself, he may not on that account be the wisest leader to follow nor the best fitted to propound on a sane philosophy of life.” James Truslow Adams

My son sends me a photograph of a sign he saw in the men’s room of Cole’s an LA eatery famous for its French-dip sandwich: Charles Bukowski Pissed Here. Old Hank pissed in plenty of bars and restaurants in LA in his day, but if Buk rose from the dead and strolled around LA today he might not recognize his old haunts. A lot of the bars he drank in are gone, as are the factories where he toiled at meaningless jobs. In Buk’s heyday LA was still King of Aerospace, and workers machined parts and assembled fuselages and tested engines. A man could work at McDonnell-Douglas or Hughes Aircraft and make a living wage; he was likely a union member with health benefits and a pension. 

Buk’s LA is mostly a memory just as the Santa Barbara I knew as a boy is mostly a memory. The physical beauty of SB hangs on, but it’s harder and harder to ignore the angst of wage earners over rents and college tuition and medical care, the ranks of unhoused people, and creeping gentrification. Amazon, the behemoth that has done more to kill the State Street retail core than anyone else, will soon occupy a large building on State Street. Irony, I suppose. Seeing the Amazon logo is going to piss me off every time I walk by. Retail cleansing. It’s not that different from a hedge fund buying thousands of single-family homes on the cheap, forcing the owners into foreclosure, and then renting the homes out. Extraction is the name of the game. 

Will the economy belly-flop before the 2020 election? A serious global downturn might be the dagger in Trump’s shriveled heart, and the only thing that can keep him from a second term. His B-team of looters and grifters hasn’t strengthened the economy for anyone except the already wealthy, but then, that was predictable. When the next crash hits the Fed and the rest of the world’s central bankers will have few cards to play. I suspect it will be very ugly for many people, myself included. I don’t own any property or a stock portfolio or a sack of gold bars. I was a working-class kid and I’m a working-class adult.  

Like Henry Miller, Hank Bukowski figured out very early in life that the whole American set-up was a big con, a system of exploitation owned and operated by the wealthy and moneyed interests for their benefit. The rich always climb on the bent backs of the poor. Miller called America “the air-conditioned nightmare.” Then, like now, it was a country of crass commercialism and spiritual emptiness. I think Bukowski saw it as a madhouse, full of dull-eyed, soul-dead people prepared to follow the next snake-oil salesman to come along. Donald Trump in the White House would not surprise Bukowski in the least. Buk watched a number of regimes come and go, Truman, Eisenhower,  JFK, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton. What was the real difference between them? Bukowski would remember that at least until the Carter Administration, the Democrats supported organized labor and needed labor’s backing to retain power. But after Carter the connection between the Democratic Party and labor was ever more tenuous. The Dems began sucking up to banks and insurance companies for campaign dollars. Money started to tilt the playing field. The rich declared war on the spirit of the New Deal and the Democrats helped them wage it. 

The game is fixed, the dice loaded, the house always wins. Figure the game out and a pair of muscle-bound bouncers with thick necks toss you out on the sidewalk. The attention span of the average American is short and Fox News spreads misinformation 24 hours a day. We are lost in a digital wilderness. 

I imagine tracking Henry Miller down to a cliff near his house at Big Sur. I hand him the latest iPhone, demonstrate what he can do with it, and watch as he turns it over in his hands. He stares off at the blue sky. Is he day-dreaming of his days in Paris, living on his wits and guile, hell-bent on becoming an artist and escaping the bonds of convention? He was always more of a sage than a pornographer. Henry wanted to discern the meaning of life, past lives, future lives, all life, every sense awake. I can visit the great museums of the world on this? He asks. I nod. Find photographs of ancient Greece? Yes. Pornography? Yes. Henry smiles at me then tosses the phone over the cliff. 

Donald Trump: “There should be no public impeachment hearings. No private hearings, either. There should be no hearings because it’s all a hoax. My call with the President of Ukraine was perfect, perfecto, no quid pro quo, no collusion. The Bidens should be investigated, they’re crooked. What about Hillary’s emails? All those disappeared emails? The Democrats should investigate that, not me. I can’t be investigated, I have unlimited immunity, perfect immunity, it says so in the Constitution…”

What to do but uncork another bottle of wine and raise a glass to those who refuse to be bought, bribed, fooled, fucked with, deceived or defeated. 

A Bottomless Bout of Vertigo

“This is one of those nights where there is nothing. Imagine being always like this. Scooped-out. Listless. No light. No dance. Not even any disgust.” Charles Bukowski

It’s hard to keep one’s wits in the looney bin that is America in the time of Trump. Truth is optional, public relations and perception are everything, and every damn day is like suffering a bottomless bout of vertigo.

The detestable Mike Pence, our wax figure veep and one of the preeminent ass-lickers in recent American history, compares Trump, an immoral, ignorant, racist blowhard, to Martin Luther King, Jr. Contemptible. Trump and Pence aren’t fit to clean Dr. King’s toilet.

The Los Angeles public teachers strike is over, but it appears that many rank-and-file teachers are none too pleased with their union leaders and Democratic Party pols. While the teachers will receive some salary increases, they didn’t do as well on reducing class sizes, adding nurses and librarians, or getting binding agreement to slow the expansion of charter schools. One wonders how much time the leaders of the UTLA spent breaking bread with LAUSD officials and local Democratic politicians during the six day strike. Doesn’t smell right.

Despite the rather anticlimactic outcome of the LA strike it does appear that working people are finally regaining consciousness, and not just in the US. The Yellow Vest protesters in France, the thousands of workers in India who rose up to express their collective displeasure with Modi’s policies, made the billionaires meeting in Davos set down their champagne glasses and plates of caviar and pay attention. In the neoliberal world order, workers are supposed to remain silent. This is why the action in India received barely a mention in the US corporate media. The proletariat can’t be allowed to get ideas, can they? Ideas are dangerous things, more dangerous than an unarmed migrant from Guatemala. Average workers might wake from their slumber and realize that much of their suffering isn’t of their own making, that they have been made to suffer by design, which in turn might compel them to turn their ire on the oligarchs as the peasants once went after feudal lords.

Torches and pitchforks on a moonless night.

Despite claims of total victory by Trump and Pence, the ISIS faction in Syria isn’t dead just yet. It’s damn hard to annihilate a tactic…

I don’t know what to make of those Catholic high school kids who taunted a native American man armed only with a drum and a traditional song. Some call them little angels, others call them sniveling, entitled devils, like Brett Kavanaugh. The only thing I know for sure is that any person who dons a MAGA hat deserves an ass-kicking. That hat stands for one thing and one thing only: intolerance.

The partial shutdown of the American government drags on. Trump tossed out some tired, worn, and ridiculous ideas as concessions, but these were never to be taken seriously. Trump’s approval rating is in the crapper and there are signs that his base of support among a minority of Americans is starting to fray. Trump, the great negotiator, is still trying to find a way out of his corner without alienating the wingnuts who cheer for him at his rallies.

Where did the $5.7 billion figure Trump is demanding for his vanity wall even come from? This question was posed by the media watch group FAIR, and it’s a good one. What would $5.7 buy US taxpayers? (Or it is Mexicans?) Who came up with this number, what rational analysis is it based on? Oh shit, I forgot that this entire Wall project has no basis in rationality.  

Finally, a tip of the cap to Mariano Rivera, the newest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, elected unanimously. Rivera had nerves of steel and a devastating 95 mph cut fastball that was nearly unhittable. The man is a champion, the greatest closer of all time.