Holy Nothingness: Bukowski, 2nd Repeat.

You go places, you wonder why. You go places, you hope you make it back. You see terrible eyes, hear the babbling of the crowd, shudder at their gnawing little niceties and boring scraps of nothingness, you wonder why you leave home at all.

You see terrible truths, they don't interest you but they ingest you all the same and when you look at your face in somebody else's mirror in somebody else's home you know they have you too. You have an unclean feeling, it eats at you inside and out in dull whispers. You show up at a departure terminal with every edge drooping and look like every other person there and realise that you are on keel; that this is what they call living, and that you don't stand a chance.

You take your flight toward your home and sit with a hollow head and an unread newspaper on your knee. Your mind is awash with uncomfortable new truths that you did not ask to receive; you try to dispatch them to the backwoods of your mind, to regard them as a giant nowhere, to forget you ever saw and felt them.

Your eyes in the airplane bathroom mirror are touched with a wash of watercolour horror, the kind that causes a wearing away of the parts if you let it gnaw. You step down out of the plane onto a rain-slicked tarmac and tasks like negotiating your way into a toilet cubicle all hung about with luggage and feeding notes into a parking pay station tighten up your loose edges and help you to hold against the tide, help you to hold.


You feel appalled, you are appalled. Obviously there has never been a better time for some Bukowski.

"And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The colour leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to these conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same thing that they did?"

You fell out with your fucking brother. You saw it develop into nightmare proportions. You don't think about making it back, you don't want to wonder if you will. You just need to make it home. You just need holy nothingness.