he's been careering...

"Mr. Charles Bukowski, America's greatest living poet...the toast of France since he went on their version of the Dick Cavett show drunk, refused to wear translators headphones, asked a literary critic if he could slobber all over he calves on national television, and told the assembled frogmatik culture vultures that they should have dropped a hydrogen bomb on themselves that day in 1961 that Louis-Ferdinand Celine died inasmuch as they had not produced a single writer above Puegeot ad copy since; this man, the author of 33 books...now sat back in his worn swivle chair, relit his stogie, unpopped another colt 45, and surveyed his audience...

'Mr. Bukowski?'

'Yes?'

'Um...we, uh...um...would you suggest writing as a career?'

There's your punch line. Just imagine asking Archie Shepp: 'would you suggest free jazz as a career?' Charles Bukowski worked in the post office, with unpaid overtime, for 14 yrs. straight. Eventually he got desperate enough that one night he stopped off on the way home and bought a fifth of whisky, two six packs of beer, and two packs of cigarettes; as he himself put it later, 'I wanted to be a writer and I was scared.' That night he got dead drunk and wrote 30 pages. The next night he got dead drunk and wrote 40. Most of what he found on the sofa the next morning, a good deal of which you can be sure he had no memory of composing, was not only useable, but good. Literature, even. Many writers try to duplicate experiences like this, since they've bought into the myth that to write well you must be a drunken wretch. I'm glad because most of them are terrible and will wind up on skid row rather than bothering the rest of us in some capacity or another. Bukowski wrote a novel called Post Office in 21 nights. It has been in print for several years and gone through several editions. I've read it five times. It's not one of my favorite works of his. Charles Bukowski does not have a career."

and neither do most of my heroes. (of which bukowski is not necessarily one...maybe when i was a drunken wretch of a college student also nursing the above myth...but you can certainly still substitue les for chuck...and he DIED of all that shit...) is it wrong at "my age" to stil view the entire concept of careerism, the corporate ladder, upward mobility, lateral movement, investing, home and boat ownership...with a (sometimes not so) thinly disguised contempt? should i just grow up, get on with it, start to learn about mortgages and refinancing and iras and tort reform and um, other stuff? should i start giving a toss that i'm wearing dirty jeans and sneakers? should i get a pair of respectible glasses, a "clean" haircut, and stop wearing boots to work? i feel as if i'm drowning in a corporate culture i want nothing to do with...like howard the duck...born into a world i never made...