Society is a Wall

“There are enough social commentators with low-level brain power now. Why should I add my high-level snarl?”
- from "The Big Pot Game", in Tales of Ordinary Madness by Charles Bukowski.

Because these are tales of the ordinary, Bukowski only makes it seem easy. Not all storytellers succeed in putting a high entertainment value along with philosophical depth via a distinctive literary style in the triumph of drunks, exhausted workers, slackers, race-horse gamblers, rapists, robbers or so-called "degenrates." There is an effortless, out-of-this-world and unsociable genius this makes this collection distinguish itself. They say it's called "transgressive fiction." It's a compelling fiction that sees society as a wall that we need to leap over. This is how green the grass is on the other side.

He sometimes spoke in the tone of a spiritual incarnate of Carlos Castaneda (Don Juan: A Yaqui Way to Knowledge) and Robert Prisig (Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). I've only read two of his works (The first being Post Office), but my personal take is that while Bukowski's work is not Beat Literature, it beats the hell out of the Beat Literature of Kerouac and Burroughs. And I say that because it has a lot less of a pretentious appeal.

Bukowski had that knowing, that maturity, that freedom in his willingness to be unembarrassed. His is a drunkenness that deserved following. Like his characers,I'd like to see him finally get the Nobel Prize.

The truth that the text reveals is that he got drunk and saw through drunkenness. This is an enlightenment that cannot be blurred by the bevy. What’s between the lines is a counter-punch to alcohol. Each time he gets knocked out, the writing is a beautiful bounce back. The insights remain sharp and relevant up until now.

All the other drunk or high writers never wrote like him because they barely saw through the drunkenness. If anyone else wrote this, it may have just come out as annoying.


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At some point in life drinking has brought me to many low points. My confidence builds, and it oversizes inevitably to arrogance, and it leads me to the eventual regret.

I look at my face and the lines have gone deep. There are wrinkles in my eyebrows and my hair has begun the protracted process of thinning out. While I am growing the ambitious goals of lessening my drinking, I’ve also grown the natural humility after these thirty years, and drinking since my teens. I still drink as though I have not picked up anything after these years, six bottles on an empty stomach, or mixing dark/clear liquor, outpacing myself. And all that arrogant talk.

So maybe I’ll get drink alone, and in secret. Alone do we battle the devils that are bottled up inside us. Alone should we drink.

So from now on.

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And it was true. The workers were hardly human. Their eyes were glazed, stricken, insane. They laughed at anything and mocked each other continually. Their insides were stamped out. They had been murdered.
p.88, The Stupid Christs

We are putting a lot of priests’ robes on some of these revolutionaries and some of them are very sick fellows bothered with acne, deserted from by their wives…
p.131, A Quiet Conversation Piece

’Hell I worked hard all my life!’ (they think this is virtue, but it only proves a man is a damned fool.)
p. 223, The Big Pot Game

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My "best" picks:


Animal Crackers in my Soup
My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage
Would you Suggest Writing as a Career?
The Great Zen Wedding
Rape! Rape!
A Quiet Conversation Piece
The Big Pot Game
Purple As an Iris
A .45 to Pay the Rent

The Good and The Greed

A few months ago in this not-so-quaint global village, the remains of oil-rich Libya’s four-decade ruler is displayed in a grocery’s onion and vegetable compartment. Before his end, he begged mercy for his life, and he was killed with his son (one among many of his family who got killed by NATO airstrikes). Weeks ago, he commanded his loyalists to fight to the death. He was an eccentric fashion icon, and more importantly he overthrew a monarchy in his younger days as a revolutionary.

The wind has blown us to a season of Arab Springs. In the West, there is a new ideological space being created in the Occupy Movements. That space will be there, even if the Corporations try to crush them or respond by censoring social media or the internet.

Our own country, hungry for a share of righteousness, stops our 9-year President and incumbent Congresswoman from leaving the country to face charges of plunder, electoral fraud, extrajudicial killings, among others. She was in a wheelchair, face covered in a surgical mask, her neck & back supported by an iron brace, looking stripped of leftover dignity. She didn’t get to leave in the many flights she booked that day. After bouts of TROs and Warrants, the drama leads to a Hospital Arrest and a new national soap opera begins in the history of a forgetful country. Her mug shots should be in the front pages of dailies as of this writing. She was the same president who succeeded a preceding president who got pardoned on a plunder case.

Tired, middle-class workers like me will open these pages in Starbucks branches that’s peppered all over the city. Every cup of coffee earns a sticker. They are collecting these stickers, spending their hard-earned two grand on coffee to get a journal that’s supposed to represent their prestige. This is under the guise, of course, of making a charitable donation through a very small portion of the earnings. The earnings should have belonged to those who worked for it in the first place: the third-world farmers who grew the beans, the supply-chain laborers who transported it, and the contractual servers who took the orders and put them in red cups.

If you go to the counter clutching a book, the barista will ask you about the book you’re reading. So much goodness turns into so much greed in this little global village. I show the Barista my book. He mispronounces Bukowski. And then upsells for pastry. Somewhere in the world, a low-level manager tasks his team to gather observations and feedback. He draws some charts, writes his analysis and recommendations. Behind that feigned interest in my book was a module, a script that’s supposed to make me feel engaged as a consumer. It’s supposed to make me feel good and return to this store, or any other branch. There’s another manager who oversees this practice as a standard is set to all stores. That is even taken to another level, because satisfaction is not only measured by desire to return to the store, but to have me recommend and promote the store to my friends. Superficial Corporate politeness will eat out what’s left of genuine human interest and sincerity.

There’s good, and there’s greed. I imagine, looking out to the bay, drinking imported Arabica coffee thinking about the world and its leaders and its springs and movements. How peaceful the water can look, as excrement underneath it mixes in and invisibly seeps.