I had a physics professor who talked about “Finnegan’s Wake,” and the difficulty of translating intentionally nonsensical passages into other languages. He was comparing language to DNA. I was identifying styles of domestic architecture, I was shrinking in the drier, I was behaving like a wave and a particle, I was regenerating limbs, I was reapplying lipstick, I was there, using you as human pantyhose, and then gone, climbing out the window while you slept to buy chips from a gas station. I was realizing that the only nonsense translatable into any language is I was there and then I was gone.
henrycharlesbukowski: Love of my life
I’m great at being an imaginary friend, but terrible at sexual torture. I can’t beat people with belts without hitting them in the balls, even if they’re women. I’m so insecure about it I have enrolled in Imaginary Friend Grad School. I stay up all night on adderall, turning invisible and putting ketchup in grownups’ coffee. If I see people being beaten with belts on TV, I turn it off and continue researching renters’ insurance. I still don’t know what it is. This would all be fine if I wasn’t so old. I’ve been researching renters’ insurance for hundreds of years.
The reason you’re always married is your shirts are boring. If you buy some brightly colored shirts, your life will be like that movie about the couple who enjoy asphyxiating each other with plastic bags. They sit down Christmas Morning on a discarded couch to open a package of bags and the couch comes alive and screws both of them. I’m not saying you’ll have a religious experience, but you can take control of your life. You don’t have to wake up every morning to the same totally comprehensible scenario, you can wake up to a scenario that’s comprehensible but impossible because that couch has been taken to the dump.
I used to watch each dandelion in the traffic island flower and go to seed, waiting to send the seeds sailing with a hard breath, or reduce them to flashes of yellow with a lighter. They say there’s a David Bowie inside each of us, just waiting to burst out, but how will I know? Even the swarms of bees seemed special the first time—afterwards I lay on my couch, feeling like a piece of warm, thick glass. A bee flew out of my collar and I thought of how they totally covered that station wagon, and then my head. It all blurs together now—the traffic islands, the dandelions, the swarms. Everything is bursting out of my chest, and some of it might be David Bowie, but certainly not all.