“It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.” Charles Bukowski
Dark Waters
Category: Charles Bukowski
Fire When Ready
“A spark can set a whole forest on fire. Just a spark. Save it.” Charles Bukowski
Sink Or Swim
“There are too many ways to drown even if you don’t want to drown.” Charles Bukowski
Self-Reflection
“Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?” Charles Bukowski
Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
“Days like this, like your day today. Maybe the rain on the window trying to get through to you. What do you see today? What is it? Where are you? The best days are sometimes the first, sometimes the middle and even sometimes the last.” Charles Bukowski, Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame
Black Hole Mums
“I see a bright portion under the overhead light that shades into darkness and then into darker darkness and I can’t see beyond that.” Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
Depression
“The courage it took to get out of bed each morning to face the same things over and over was enormous.” Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
The Problem with Euphorbia
Euphorbia myrsinites, also known as myrtle Euphorbia or donkeytail spurge, is one of the most useful and highly ornamental plants to grow in the garden.
Now for the bad news: the milky white sap has been known to cause extreme allergic reactions that in some cases can lead to anaphylactic shock, and visits to the emergency room are frequently reported.
Charles Bukowski wrote a book called The People Look Like Flowers At Last (see last post). This one looks like the pretty college girl next door who works as an escort on weekends. Approach both with caution and use protection.
Finish
“We are like roses that have never bothered to bloom when we should have bloomed, and it is as if the sun has become disgusted with waiting.” Charles Bukowski
I am with the roots of flowers
“i am with the roots
of flowers
entwined, entombed
sending up my passionate blossoms
as a flight of rockets
and argument;
wine churls my throat,
above me
feet walk upon my brain, monkies fall from the sky
clutching photographs
of the planets,
but i seek only music
and the leisure
of my pain”
Charles Bukowski, The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems
We’re All in the Same Boat
“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.” Charles Bukowski
The Great Depression Train
One night when we were teenagers my friend Jeff jumped in front of a train because he thought it was the best way to handle things at the time. A group of us had gone to the movies and as usual Jeff was out of control drunk. After another argument with his mother, a recovering alcoholic, he made his way to the tracks and waited.
Somehow he didn’t die but only broke his pelvis, and he continued to drink as heavily as before. He had his problems: two alcoholic parents, one who shot himself playing Russian roulette and a couple of missing fingers from a homemade bomb explosion, but which one caused such deep depression? Maybe all of them or maybe something else.
I lost touch with Jeff in my late twenties and watched other friends attempt to handle their depression in various ways. Most drank and did drugs as I did, and as time went by several ended up dead. After a breakup with his girlfriend my friend Cary tied a bayonet to his steering wheel and drove into a bridge. Others overdosed or shot themselves, and a former boss chose hanging.
Forty years later I still continue to struggle with depression and see many in the same boat. A photographer I used to follow, Don Graham, often wrote about his battle with Bipolar disorder and several months ago took his own life. He was in therapy and on several medications.
Depression is a fight we have with ourselves, completely created by our thoughts and we get stuck there. Antidepressants will only take you so far and often the side effects are unbearable. Therapy may help, but unless they’ve been there themselves it can seem like just words they learned from a course in college.
I think of depression like a train: Sometimes you can see it objectively, and despite all the smoke and noise you can distance yourself from it and get through the day. Other times its headed right for you, and like my friend Jeff, you stand there as it runs you over.
My favorite author, Charles Bukowski wrote: “Nobody can save you but yourself and you’re worth saving. It’s a war not easily won but if anything is worth winning then this is it. Think about it. Think about saving your self.”
