Foxes In Fiction - 8 / 29 / 91 | Текст песни

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• Foxes In Fiction
• 8 / 29 / 91

8/29/91 10:55 PM
Slow at the track today, my damned life dangling on the hook. I am
there every day. I don't see anybody else out there every day except the
employees. I probably have some malady. Saroyan lost his ass at the track,
Fante at poker, Dostoevsky at the weel. And it's really not a matter of the
money unless you run out of it. I had a gambler friend once who said, "I
don't care if I win or lose, I just want to gamble." I have more respect for
the money. I've had very little of it most of my life. I know what a park
bench is, and the landlord's knock. There are only two things wrong with
money: too much or too little.
I suppose there's always something out there we want to torment
ourselves with. And at the track you get the feel of the other people, the
desperate darkness, and how easy they toss it in and quit. The racetrack
crowd is the world brought down to size, life grinding against death and
losing. Nobody wins finally, we are just seeking a reprieve, a moment out of
the glare. (shit, the lighted end of my cigarette just hit one of my fingers
as I was musing on this purposelessness. That woke me up, brought me out of
this Sartre state!) Hell, we need humor, we need to laugh. I used to laugh
more, I used to do everything more, except write. Now, I am writing and
writing and writing, the older I get the more I write, dancing with death.
Good show. And I think the stuff is all right. One day they'll say,
"Bukowski is dead," and then I will be truly discovered and hung from
stinking bright lampposts. So what? Immortality is the stupid invention of
the living. You see what the racetracks does? It makes the lines roll.
Lightning and luck. The last bluebird singing. Anything I say sounds fine
because I gamble when I write. Too many are too careful. They study, they
teach and they fail. Convention strips them of their fire.
I feel better now, up here on this second floor with the Macintosh. My
pal.
And Mahler is on the radio, he glides with such ease, taking big
chances, one needs that sometimes. Then he sends in the long power rises.
Thank you, Mahler, I borrow from you and can never pay you back.
I smoke too much, I drink too much but I can't write too much, it just
keeps coming and I call for more and it arrives and mixes with Mahler.
Sometimes I deliberately stop myself. I say, wait a moment, go to sleep or
look at your 9 cats or sit with your wife on the couch. You're either at the
track or with the Macintosh. And then I stop, put on the brakes, park the
damned thing. Some people have written that my writing has helped them go
on. It has helped me too. The writing, the roses, the 9 cats.
There's a small balcony here, the door is open and I can see the lights
of the cars on the Harbor Freeway south, they never stop, that roll of
lights, on and on. All those people. What are they doing? What are they
thinking? 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 and
flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.
Keep it going, Mahler! You've made this a wonderous night. Don't stop,
you son-of-a-bitch! Don't stop!