Life is a poem, and then you die. Well, that line sounded a lot more profound when it was in my head than it does when it appears in pixels. I’m no poet, although there was a time when I expressed my teenage angst in words that rhyme. Kinda like that. I even posted some of my work from those long-ago days here. There’s a reason I became a mailman rather than a writer.

The Only Way

Perhaps the best way
Is your way
Maybe the best belief
Is not to believe
Maybe the only answer
Is no answer
And maybe the only time
Is this time…
And yet,
Why can’t our love
Be the only love?

Alone

Alone in my fantasies
Alone with my dreams
But when I wake with the dawning
One sullen fact remains
That I am alone in my love for you—
The sun doesn’t shine, it rains.

See what I mean? The scary thing (besides the bad poetry) is that all these years later I am still more or less living those sentiments. Talk about being a slow learner!

But this post is about a real honest-to-goodness poet I truly admire–Charles Bukowski. Perhaps I’m a selfish reader of poetry, but my favorites are the ones whose words resonate with the thoughts and emotions I have experienced. I grew up around poetry; some of my earliest memories are of my father reading poems out loud to us kids. Over the years I’ve collected dozens of books by the likes of Sara Teasdale, e e cummings, James Kavanaugh, and various anthologies.

And nope, I’ve never owned a book of Bukowski poems. I actually discovered him relatively late in life. In fact, as I was preparing this post I saw where I had written about reading him for the first time back in November 2005. That post included a link to a Bukowski biography that is also quite interesting. I love the fact that he too is a former postal worker.

Convinced, then, almost from the outset of the hopelessness of humanity and lasting friendship, he largely rejected the goals after which most strive. Instead, he found solace in alcohol. “Getting drunk was good,” Bukowski says in Ham on Rye. “I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn’t become obvious yourself” (189). Drinking and remaining “unobvious” thus became Bukowski’s vocation, until, that is, he started writing seriously around 1960. Then drinking, remaining “unobvious,” and writing were his vocations, and remain so to this day. Necessitated by the fact that none of his vocations paid enough for him to survive, he worked as dishwasher, truckdriver and loader, mailman, guard, gas station attendant, stock boy, warehouseman, shipping clerk, post office clerk, parking lot attendant, Red Cross orderly, and elevator operator, among other things (Contemporary Authors 109).

Heh, I guess the drinking part is something else we have in common. But that’s obvious, right?

So yesterday’s rain kept me confined to the house and passing away the hours on the internet. Which led me to discover this article about a new documentary called You Never Had It: An Evening With Charles Bukowski.

The paradox of Bukowski was that he was a poet who wrote about drinking, screwing, the track, despair and fighting, but had a persona that was gentle, mirthful and self-deprecating. It’s easy to imagine his voice, with its gentle lisp, used today for guided meditation audio. When Bukowski talks about “drinking and fucking and drinking and fucking” it’s with a shy smile and playful eyes that won’t always connect with the interviewer. It’s telling that Bukowski, the author of books like Love is a Dog from Hell, Women and Post Office, loved classical music, particularly Beethoven. Despite the dipsomania, he spoke with great precision.

Is it any wonder I like this guy?

So I was inspired to spend some time reading Bukowski poems yesterday. I didn’t like everything I came across, but this one stood out for some reason.

“Alone With Everybody”

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

Powerful stuff, at least to my troubled mind.

My favorite Bukowski poem remains “The Laughing Heart“. I’ve shared it here several times, but the first time was the night I discovered it: Christmas Eve 2015. And what made it especially special was the way I found it:

Jee Yeun and I had recently split up and I was very bitter and cynical about love. I was lamenting to a bar friend about the forlorn state of my psyche, when this stranger walks up to me and says “I’m sorry to eavesdrop, but don’t ever give up!”  Then she asked if I’d ever read “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski. Now, I’m a sucker for poetry and have read some of Bukowski’s stuff, but never this particular poem.  So I grabbed my phone and pulled it up for a quick read. Well, that hit the spot.  And I was very moved by the random act of kindness of the person who reached out and shared it.

And it is still raining.

I don’t believe in censorship, even when it is self-censoring. Recently I have done some posts about certain aspects and goings-on in my life that are more sensitive than usual. And I woke up at 3:00 a.m. this morning and some voice in my head was telling me that was a mistake.

But what to do about it? In over 15 years of blogging I’ve only deleted published posts once before. That was when I got called out at work for some content that was job-related and deemed inappropriate. I didn’t like doing it then but I wasn’t willing to give up my sweet salary over some little-read post. This time the issue that was troubling my mind was the possibility of my inadvertently causing trouble in the life of someone I care about. I still didn’t want to delete those posts so I did a quick Google search to learn how to password protect posts in WordPress. It was easier than I imagined to change the privacy setting. And that’s what I did for those five or six posts I thought might prove problematic.

Did I overreact? Perhaps. But I recalled some random guy recently commenting on something I wrote in 2005. And I got an email from someone this week saying he had found my blog while doing a search on Google about the quarantine requirements in Olongapo. A few months back a guy approached me in a bar saying he had found my blog doing some random search. Then he proceeded to lambast me for continuing to hike during the lockdown because “it made all foreigners look bad”. Anyway, the point is I tend to blog as if no one is going to read what I write. I do have some friends that I know read the blog and everyone else who does are random strangers anyway. But if one of those random strangers happened to know the person I was talking about or knew that person’s friends or decided to share some of what I wrote with them it might make a mess of things in ways that I would not want to be responsible for. Hence, the password protection for those posts.

I do not intend to make this a regular practice. I will perhaps be a bit more discrete about what I write and better consider the implications of words that may cause collateral damage to innocent bystanders. And any of you who are a regular reader/commenter here can send me a message and I’ll provide you the passwords for those posts. Fair enough? Sorry for the inconvenience.

In other news, I found this photo on Facebook rather titillating:

I’m not sure what kind of fruit or plant this might be, but damn, I want a taste:

And I will close with this:

Things will be back to normal around here tomorrow, including some photos from today’s very pleasant mountaintop hike. Stick around!

Ah, the adventures that come with being a blogger. I think it would be fair to call LTG a niche blog. In fact, these days I think of it almost like a diary that has been left outside for the world to see. And if my stat counter is to be believed, I average around 175 people dropping by for a read every day. A few of you even leave comments which are also much appreciated.

A while back I did a post about some victim of a bear attack. It included some graphic photos, including this one:

When I say I posted this a while back, I’m talking more than 15 years ago, in February 2005. That was just three months into my blogging career, such as it is. I certainly had no recollection of the post but was surprised to see that someone had recently commented on it:

Bullshit. I call bullshit. That first pic is a forced perspective. Something hunters and fisherman do (look it up). And the pic of the so called remains were taken with a newer HD camera, where’s as the first 2 pics were taken with something from the late 90’s / early 2000’s. The storey is bullshit, and the pics are in no way related to each other. Your an idiot to believe this work of fiction.

Thank you for the feedback, Fukh Hoffman. Maybe I’m an idiot but comments are always welcome, even if they are impolite and 15 years late. For what it’s worth, I did update the post in question noting that the story has been shown to be false. Oh, and it’s “you’re an idiot” not your.

It does just go to show that what you post on a blog is pretty much forever. I’m sure I’ve said lots of things that would get me canceled back home in the USA. Not that I care.

One of my most prolific commenters, Kevin Kim, mentioned the full moon picture I posted yesterday. Here it is again:

I had also taken a shot of the moon in full zoom mode with my phone. It came out like this:

And while we are on the topic of blogging and bloggers, one of my regular reads, Althouse, had a link to the love story between Jonas Salk and French artist Françoise Gilot:

“When Jonas proposed, she had replied, ‘A relationship would be all right, but I don’t want to get married…. Because I don’t want to live with anybody more than six months a year. That’s it. I need my own time to myself, plus I have my children.’ Jonas handed her a piece of paper. ‘Write down everything that you don’t want,’ he directed. ‘I’ll give you an hour.’ Françoise proceeded to write down those elements that would make the marriage unsuitable for her. Jonas read it over. ‘Very good. It fits my life perfectly.’ ‘But we don’t know each other,’ she cautioned, ‘and it may be disastrous because you’re a scientist, and our lives are very far apart.’ ‘No,’ Jonas countered, in what seemed more like a business transaction than a romantic moment, ‘even if we’re not so happy, at least we’ll be like a citadel; we’ll be a fortress for each other.’ Françoise thought about it. Both felt exhausted by the world and sought a refuge…. Though many could not fathom their marital arrangement, Salk and Gilot’s relationship matured as they grew to know each other better. ‘We found new discoveries all the time,’ Gilot recalled. And Salk maintained, ‘I have achieved in terms of personal relationships as much with Françoise as I could possibly fantasize.’  When asked in an interview how she had ended up with two of history’s most powerful men, Gilot replied: ‘Lions mate with lions.'”

Wow. Not really sure why, but that really resonated with me. I’ve been fucking up my love life for decades now. Maybe I just haven’t found a lion yet. Although come to think of it, one of my ex’s did say that I was a “lyin’ bastard!” Yeah, I’m the common denominator in all those failed relationships. Guilty as charged.

Speaking of the kind of women I seem to attract, Mary hasn’t thrown in the towel yet. She’s changing her tactics though. She continues to harass and borderline stalk me and last night I told her I was seeing someone else now and that I wanted to remain faithful. Here is what she had to say in a message this morning:

Baby, do you want me to be your friend with benefits? If you want I will see you because I like having sex with you. Is that okay with you? No money involved, just sex only.

I told her again I don’t want to cheat and will see how my new relationship works out.

But wow, it’s really something to have a 21-year-old woman practically begging for sex from a 65-year-old grandfather. Of course, I’m not stupid enough to believe that is her endgame. I guess this could be like a test to see just how stupid I might truly be.

In somewhat related news, I found this joke to be kinda funny:

How about one more?

Sometimes when I reflect on all the beer I drink, I feel ashamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn’t drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. I think, “It is better to drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver

It’s the least I can do!

Can’t wait to read the comments on this post 15 years from now!