There’s a truth about this sort of writing. It is destined for the bargain bin of Amazon self-publishing. Back before we all got injected with 200 ccs of pop psychology, we didn’t know that folks like Bukowski were outliers. Back then, we called ‘em lucky bastards. I guess it’s all a bit same-same but different. After all, luck can rub off on anyone. But in the cold light of statistics, you’re most likely fucked. And by you, I mean me. 

One guy, just one, got to drunkenly deliver packages and lay pipe before making it in the second act of his life. His life was given the greatest gift of all: A story arc. But he’s gone, and he took his world, and most of his audience, with him. Teenagers unboxing junk from China will make more money from YouTube in a day than I’ll make from a lifetime of words. Granted, he’s a million times the writer I’ll ever be. But still. Bukowski didn’t have to compete with Pornhub.

Publishers no longer want prose as purple as a drunk polack’s dick. NO one wants to take any risks. Everything has been work-shopped to death. It’s write by numbers now. It makes sense. The pie is shrinking and someone’s gotta pay the rent. Keep the lights on. Keep the darkness out. This thankless gig is merely an ends to a Hollywood option. Literature nothing more than a self-indulgent sales pitch. And I couldn’t sell viagra at a Bangkok whorehouse if my life depended on it.  

Those are the shakes. I don’t know why I’m still trying. I guess it’s a way of keeping my own cold light of day at bay until I make it until the end of the night.

This curse of being. Trying to be. Be anything. When the universe very clearly is dead set on us being nothing at all. 

The German philosopher Philipp Mainländer once theorized that God realized his existence was a mistake but was too much a coward for out and out suicide, so blew himself up to die out one conscious ember at a time. And here we are, the white hot spangles of dying forever, sublimating all of our fear into Facebook rage. 

Mainländer was a pessimist with a big heart. He likely would have burned Bangkok to the ground, seeing only suffering, and not pleasure in the flesh. For him, sublimity could only be found in death. He likely wouldn’t have read Bukowski. Something tells me his drunken countryman likely had little time for him. 

Better Brahms, Barbera wine and a big wet pussy in his face than embracing the end that was coming anyways.  

I once thought I’d tell my own stories of the down and out Bangkok night. The problem is, I just don’t want to write them. I don’t want to touch all that is gone. Especially since so much of what is gone never was. So much of what was to be was just a dream I failed to will to be.

It’s hard to write something knowing it’s all for nothing. No audience. No connection. No cash. Who knows. Maybe this year just got to me. Watching my own life make like Mainländer’s God and explode.

Not long ago, by which I mean a lifetime ago, I was at a cheap Soi 19 hotel. As my friend’s ex bar girl beau read Buddhist tracts inside their room, we headed to the roof for a modest-view Bacchanal.

Hours later, a lady I then barely knew but would soon grow to love beckoned me over. A motorbike ride over on the other side of midnight and she let me know just what goes on behind closed doors.

She left for work the next morning without waking me, as I slept the sleep of drunks. I finally rose long after the sun in a strange place. It was one of those oddly blissful hangovers, where the aches of the body were salved by the sublime. 

Opening the blinds, I took in the view of Rama IV from high up above. For the first time in a while, I really smiled.

I had a decent job. I had better friends. I was falling in love. Covid was a known-quantity but had yet to blight the world. I was easy like Sunday morning on Saturday still. There was hope for the future and joy for the moment. Like every day before and after, I had my whole life ahead of me. Little did I know my vista was looking out on a mirage. Thank God. Nothing wrong with a sandcastle for a day when seaman’s silence is our fate.

And that’s the one gift of writing, immortalizing that which is fleeting, somehow making the agony make sense. Suddenly the tragedy of the dead beats takes on a comedic quality. All peccadillos pass without slight. Mortal sins are plot devices. 

Terrible people become great characters. Irascible losers enslaved to the author’s hand our closest friends. All is forgiven. Even ourselves, especially those parts of our selves we see in them. 

I never really dreamed of being a real writer. In fact, I would have been happy to make it into the bargain bin. I wanted enough for cheap Hawaiian shirts and inexpensive beer.  I wanted cruise ship crooners belting it out in Bangkok basements in the dead of night. I wanted to create a world where I could be my pretend idea of me. Free from the trailer-littered side of the road to nowhere that shaped my destiny. 

And once upon a Saturday morning or two I got to be that man. I got to be my own ersatz version of Bukowski of make believe.  

I got to live in the world I’m not living in today. The one where I am hopelessly, tragically me.