Women
by Charles Bukowski

Still using Vi to create these essays today. I'm getting the hang of it. I didn't start this one from scratch though; I just edited the last one down to the fundamentals and here I am. Isn't that fascinating? Wow. I should start a blog.

If a religious expert ever needed proof that a godless man is an unhappy one, he/she would need to look no further than Charles Bukowski. His lifestyle of alcohol, women, and gambling seems like a fantasy for every testosterone-addled male ever to walk the face of the earth. But he would have been the first to admit that his soul was dead. That poor, awful wretch of a man was miserable to the end. Anybody wanting to emulate his lifestyle is deluded and superficial.

It's interesting to read Bukowski because he was so honest about all this. And I love how anti-social he was. And his idea of good music was Mozart, Brahms, and the Bee.

His seedy, poor Los Angeles is a thing of ugly beauty too. Pretty much the opposite of the cosmopolitan plasticity of "L.A." that you see on television all the time. I respect that. I still wouldn't want to live there, but I respect it more now. The Clint Eastwood flicks "Any Which Way But Loose" and "Any Which Way You Can" show the same Los Angeles. I don't know if that place still exists now, thirty years after those movies and after Women was written. I suppose it's Gangland now.

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