Hollywood

by Charles Bukowski

“Money is like sex,” I said. “It seems much more important when you don’t have any…”

Of course, what made the whole thing smell was that many of the rich and the famous were actually dumb cunts and bastards. They had simply fallen into a big pay-off somewhere. Or they were enriched by the stupidity of the general public. They usually were talentless, eyeless, soulless, they were walking pieces of dung, but to the public they were god-like, beautiful, and revered. Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste. It finally boiled down to a matter of who got the most votes. In the land of the moles a mole was king. So, who deserved anything? Nobody deserved anything…

Maybe writing was a form of bitching. Some just bitched better than others.

Youth, you son of a bitch, where did you go?

Simplicity is always the secret, to a profound truth, to doing things, to writing, to painting. Life is profound in its simplicity.

But, in another sense, the racetrack is a sickness, a fill-in, a copout, a substitute for something else that should be faced. Yet, we all need to escape. The hours are long and must be filled somehow until our death. And there’s just not enough glory and excitement to go around. Things quickly get drab and deadly. We awaken in the morning, kick our feet out from under the sheets, place them on the floor and think, ah, shit, what now?

I also knocked out a handful of poems. The poem has some value, believe me. It keeps you from going totally mad.

I liked to watch the fights. Somehow it reminded me of writing. You needed the same thing, talent, guts and condition. Only the condition was mental, spiritual. You were never a writer. You had to become a writer each time you sat down to the machine.