Factotum

by Charles Bukowski

That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter. The old story of good and evil. But none of the bus drivers ever dumped us. They were thinking instead of car payments, baseball scores, haircuts, vacations, enemas, family visits. There wasn’t a real man in the whole shitload. I always got to work sick but safe. Which demonstrates why Schumann was more relative than Shostakovich…

“Every man is a poet,” I said.