A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never recover. – Hank
Elisa Leonelli (1981)
Q. You’ve been drinking constantly, California Burgundy and beer, ever since we got here, and in your books, like in your life, you drink all the time. Why all this drinking?
A. Oh, drinking! Listen, I’ve been a poor working stiff all my life, no job or nothing. You know, when you don’t have any money at all, the women aren’t going to bother you, so there’d be moments when you are just looking at four walls, you are wondering how to pay the rent or where your next meal is coming from. When things are very very bad, a drink is the only magic cheap thing left to give you the dream, to make you feel good for a moment.
Now that I am not poor anymore, things haven’t changed, because the human race is no good. In one of my poems I say: Humanity, you’ve never had it from the beginning. It’s just a feeling I have that everything is being wasted. It’s not life, it’s humanity that bothers me. The trees don’t bother me, the cats don’t bother me, the sun doesn’t bother me. It’s humanity that has failed, that bothers me.
Humanity is going to go down the same dumb ignorant path forever. But I’ll get out of it because I’ll kick off and I will be out.
This companionship I’m living with now, they don’t thrill me at all.
Q. It sounds very pessimistic. So if humanity is hopeless what do you hope to accomplish with your writing?
A. I’m not an accomplisher. I’m like a spider spinning my web. It’s all I can do. What we do we do out of a natural instinct. We don’t even know why we are doing it, if we did we couldn’t do it. Striving is destructive. I don’t believe in control, in studying, in learning. I just believe that what occurs occurs, and I go with it.
To sum it all up in two words, “don’t try,” for me that works. I still find a great deal of joy in spite of everything, I don’t know why, but often times I wake up in the morning and I feel damn good. It’s just a feeling inside.
“Find what you love and let it kill you,” that’s what Hank said.
I love life.
https://www.culturalweekly.com/charles-bukowski-its-humanity-that-bothers-me/