Max Riffner

The Parlor

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War All The Time

On Sunday, most people rest. That sounded good to me after a week and a half of moving. I awoke from a deep sleep a mass of sore muscle. I walked down to our living room, admiring its unusual warmth and coziness for something that technically didn’t exist a day before. Since I didn’t have a Sunday paper, I decided to grab Post Office (Amazon) by Bukowski to read in the morning sunlight of the living room.

It isn’t a long read, but it is definitely one of my absolute favorites. It is one of those books that I read every year. Basic plot: Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s alter-ego) joins the Post Office (society/life’s alter-ego) and rebels against its rigidity and backwards rules while drinking his way through mishaps and misfortune. For anyone who has ever had (or thought they had) a crap job, this book is for you. It is soul-crushing, heartfelt, and even a bit disgusting in parts. There are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, also.

The beautiful thing about Bukowski’s writing is his simple, straightforward storytelling – very much like Hemingway’s to-the-point journalistic style. Unlike Hemingway, Bukowski ditches all the romantic, manly thematic crap and just leaves you with… well, crap. Literally. There are a million descriptions of the most ignored parts of human life in his writing: an old hooker taking a piss and a dump after having sex, staring at a knife and wondering if you could cut your throat with it, popping boils, racial tension, hangovers written with so much detail you’d swear you had one also. He paints himself in an ugly light also, perhaps the ugliest out of all of his characters. His message simply is that you can’t ignore all the pain, ugliness, and misery in the world, because it is part of what makes life so beautiful. Bukowski attempts to find a state of grace through the underbelly of humanity in all of his writing.

As I was reading, I was finding myself reflecting on my life over a period of time (the book takes place over a decade). I thought, hey, new house, good wife, paying job, lawnmower, doing comics… life could be a lot worse. Even if it did get worse, look at Bukowski. He quit writing for years while he worked at the post office. This was his first novel after he quit. You don’t ever have to give up, even if you set your passion aside for a time. Good stuff there.

While I was writing this, I did a bit of digging on Google and found that they have made a movie out of Bukowski’s second book, Factotum (Amazon), starring Matt Dillon as Chinaski (IMDB link). It takes place during World War 2 as Chinaski floats all over the country taking dead-end job after dead-end job, trying to lose himself in work, booze, or women. I hadn’t read it in years, so I thought why not read that too? I’m halfway through it, and it will certainly make an interesting movie. Hopefully that translates into a good movie.

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