Northshore Notes: Number Two On Her Love List

     You don't see Bukowski quoted much anymore. Well, I don't anyway. Maybe he's read aloud and recited, name-checked and referred to, all the time, in that loud, boisterous discussion about drink and writing and hotel rooms and failed dreams going on somewhere else, among people I never met, just out of earshot. Anyway, I was glad Caren brings him up today.

By Caren Jeskey

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
                                                        — Charles Bukowski

     Alternating, as I do, between experiencing life as a highly intellectualized (often paralyzingly so) artist (with debilitating anxiety at times, causing stage fright that didn't let me stay on any stages when I had the chance), a rigidly righteous intellectual, an unrealistically idealistic creative, and who knows what else, I wish Bukowski were here for a conversation on the topic. And not on Zoom. A face to face talk, with tone, inflection, and body language. The whole bit.
     I’m longing for dinner parties of yore. When we still carried flip phones, or no phones at all, and paid attention to each other for endless hours. Our brains grew, and we laughed. We kissed hello and goodbye on the lips.
     If I’d met Bukowski would he have been drunk? “My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.” Or sardonically spot-on? “People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.” Or perhaps a sage for these times? "The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence."
     Doing a shallow dive into Bukowski this week was prompted by responses to my blog post last week. I wrote about some tough stuff, revealing dark corners of my inner landscape. Some readers and friends responded “I get it. Thanks for saying what I was feeling.” Others replied as though it was a cry for help. A family member even asked if I’ve talked to my therapist. 

     (I am doing okay. Better than okay, probably. But thanks dear readers, for reading at all).
     I found myself wondering if people would give me advice were I a man? I wondered who’d have had the chutzpah to tell Bukowski what to do? After spending way too much time thinking about gender inequity and starting to bristle and being mansplained about, I snapped out of it. I realized “Oh. I can just read some Bukowski.”
     His screenplay "Bar Fly" left one of the deepest impressions a movie has ever made in my life, and further solidified my cinephile ways. I saw the movie when I was 18. Formative years. It made me want more grit. More reality. By that time I had already spent too much time bellied up to dirty bars with sticky floors. (My friend had been dating a 44 year old bartender for years by then).
     I had planned to tell a story today about what a misogynistic, tragic fellow Bukowski was. But I can’t, since now that I’ve looked back at his words I realize I’ve been thinking about him all wrong. Or partly wrong. I attended an eye opening talk this week about implicit bias, led by Sterling Haukom Anderson. She helped us see our biases more clearly. She touched upon the “horns effect,” which occurs “when we see one bad thing about a person and let it cloud our opinions of their other attributes.” I do this more than I realized, now that I look at it. This may seem obvious, but I think it's good to remember that our unconscious biases are doing push-ups in our minds even if we don't know they're there. We learned that "automatic decision-making is an unconscious 'danger detector,'" from Joseph LeDoux's work, Professor of Neural Science, Psychology, Psychiatry, and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University. Not a dumb guy.
     I realize that there’s a lot going on in the world, and I do pay attention. But I also realize that the only path to contentment is to have less discord, not more, within ourselves and with others. To learn from others rather than categorizing them. (To be fair, it will be next to impossible for me to learn anything from this crackpot for example but I guess I’ll have to challenge myself to try).
     For today I’ll stay away from upsetting news — life is so damn short and I want to feel more joy dag gummit! — and hold onto a simple truth from a healthier part of my mind. Here it is. This week a child told me she thinks her mother loves her the most out of anyone in the world. She said, “then, I think it’s you.”

     “The hope is a touch of graceful humor, no matter what's occurring. The ability to laugh, the ability to see the ridiculous, the ability not to tense up too much, when things become impossible, just to face them anyhow.”                                                                                                               — Charles Bukowski