Michael Chenchard > Recent Status Updates

“It wasn’t so much that I was TRYING to be a writer, it was more like doing something that felt good to do.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
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“Alcohol gives you the release of the dream without the deadness of drugs. You can come back down.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“this
       being drunk at the typer beats being with any woman
       I’ve ever seen or known or heard about”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

my vanishing act is so good.

“ That’s the sign of a good whiskey drinker anyway—drinking it by yourself shows a proper reverence for it. The stuff even makes the lampshades look different.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you up against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day.

“in the winter, it’s there. best with drinking, though, to wait until about just before sunset and then start in, slowly, with a bit of classical music going. it’s a good writing time—after about an hour of drinking. the cigar. the feeling of peace, even though you know it’s temporary, so even in feelings of peace you can say war-like things, let it go. allow yourself to enjoy yourself.”

“and when the morning came
       we were sick but not ill,
       poor but not deluded,
       and we stretched in our beds and rose
       in the late afternoons
       like millionaires.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“I’d rather be rich, for it seems that the artist is always sitting on the doorsteps of the rich.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“Harvey, the rich one, finally, was kindest of all. Maybe because he could afford to be kind? Then I remembered something out of my readings, something from the ancient Chinese:
“Would you rather be rich or an artist?”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“I’m drinking alone. can after can laced with a half pint or pint. and I stretch wall to wall in the light, I feel as if I were filled with meat and oranges and burning suns, and the radio plays and I hit the typer maybe and look down at the torn and ink-stained oilcloth on the kitchen table”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“I think the best years are from 30 to 40; you are definitely out of the childhood thing, know more what you don’t want, and usually have the health and strength to go with it. Of course, there’s something wrong with all of us & if you pour alcohol over it you get rid of it faster.”

Excerpt From
On Drinking
Charles Bukowski
This material may be protected by copyright.

“People often say they stopped reading a book as a way of criticizing it: “I started it, but I put it down.”
“I put even books I like down,” I say, in direct criticism of myself.
“But the books I love most I’d never dare finish,” I think, in oblique praise of myself.”

PRIDE

“Today I sat in the shallow sea trying to pet the foam of the waves, as if it were a dog.
The foam approached, I reached out, and it ran away every time with such determination that it disappeared, as if it were a cat.
For this I loved the foam, and I reached toward it with ever greater obstination.”

Dog Person

“Because all narratives are endless, that makes the initiating of narratives far more important than the resolution of narratives.
DALLAS WIEBE”

Excerpt From
Cartoons
Kit Schluter
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“No, you fool!” I cried. “Because your foot makes me feel something. And I can’t say the same about many things anymore. How jaded I’ve become! Ever since childhood, I’ve been going along having these things we call experiences—each of which acts, at first, like a key to the next one that comes along and resembles it at all, and, later, like a blind that lies over it. ”

That’s to say, if I haven’t already experienced something in itself, I’ve surely experienced something like it, and the similarity sits there like a lead blanket between the X-ray of my perception and whatever’s going on around me. I’m numb … completely numb! … Am I making any sense?”

umbrella is not bad

No matter how hard the boy knocked and used his voice to tell his mom that he loved her, he just couldn’t wake her up.
When at last she awoke and got out of the bath, her fingers were all wrinkly and the boy was old and had a family of his own back in the country where he lived.”

“Now, when the boy finally got to his mom’s house she was in the bathtub with the door closed and the whole house smelled like a bubble bath. When he called out to her, she asked him to wait outside the door so she could finish her soak, but the water was so warm and relaxing that she fell right asleep. And she stayed there sleeping in the bathtub for many months, and then years, and even decades.