Sun, Oct 07, 2001 10:45PM -0600

More Bukowski quotes:

"YOU'RE AFRAID OF HER, YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO, HOW TO ACT, MAN OF THE WORLD, YOU ARE AFRAID, YOU DON'T KNOW THE WORDS..." -- from "A Rain of Women"

"I hate seconds but when firsts haven't been for a time and you are supposed to be a great Artist and an understander of Life, seconds just HAVE to do." -- from "I Shot a Man in Reno"

"if you don't have much soul left and you know it, you still got soul." -- from "A Dollar and 20 Cents"

"listen, do you ever walk around not quite knowing what you are doing?" "most of the time, baby." -- from "Night Streets of Madness"

Today:

So maybe the world is ending. The world as we know it, at least.

But I hung out for a little while in Wicker Park today, at a cafe on Milwaukee Avenue, where you can almost smell the upcoming gentrification. Melrose Avenue before it became ultra-trendy. Old Pasadena before they kicked out the bums.

The typical artsy-fartsy crowd was there--on the surface, the scene doesn't look like it's changed, even though I've been out of the loop for years now. There was something surreal about it though, something not-quite-real, but maybe that's most of our Orwellian existence these days, and when did I become so cynical, when did I refuse to accept things at the surface, when did I start assuming that the surface was a bald-faced lie? When did I start assuming that the core was the antithesis of the surface, and anything that looked good on the outside just had to be rotten on the inside?

But enough philosophy.

I was I were an artist. The words refuse to come.

What the hell am I doing with my life?