"Чарльз Буковски. Дневник последних лет жизни (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

I should cut my toenails. My feet have been hurting me for a couple of
weeks. I know it's the toenails yet I can't find time to cut them. I am
always fighting for the minute, I have time for nothing. Of course, if I
could stay away from the racetrack I would have plenty of time. But my whole
life has been a matter of fighting for one simple hour to do what I want to
do. There was always something getting in the way of my getting to myself.
I should make a giant effort to cut my toenails tonight. Yes, I know
there are people dying of cancer, there are people sleeping in the streets
in cardboard boxes and I babble about cutting my toenails. Still, I am
probably closer to reality than some slug who watches 162 baseball games a
year. I've been in my hell, I'm still in my hell, don't feel superior. The
fact that I am alive and 71 years old and babbling about my toenails, that's
miracle enough for me.
I've been reading the philosophers. They are really strange, funny wild
guys, gamblers. Descartes came along and saind, there fellows have been
talking pure crap. He said that mathematics was model for absolute self-
evident truth. Mechanism. Then Hume came along with his attack on the
validity of scientific causal knowledge. And then came Kierkegaard: "I stick
my finger into existence -- it smells of nothing. Where am I?" And then
along came Sartre who claimed that existence was absurd. I love there boys.
They rock the world. Didn't they headaches thinking that way? Didn't a rush
of blackness roar between their teeth? When you take men like these and
stack them againts the men I see walking along the street or eating in cafes
or appearing at tv screen the difference is so great that something wrenches
inside of me, kicking me in the gut.
I probably won't do the toenails tonight. I'm not crazy but I'm not
sane either. No, maybe I'm crazy. Anyway, today, when daylight comes and 2
p.m. arrives it ill be the first race of the last day of racing at Del Mar.
I played every day, every race. I think I'll sleep now, my razor nails
slashing at the good sheets. Good night.

9/12/91 11:19 PM
No horses today. I feel strangely normal. I know why Hemingway needed
the bullfights, it framed the picture for him, it reminded him of where it
was and what it was. Sometimes we forget, paying gas bills, getting oil
changes, etc. Most people are not ready for death, theirs or anybody else's.
It shocks them, terrifies them. It's like a great surprise. Hell, it should
never be. I carry death in my left pocket. Sometimes I take it out and talk
to it: "Hello, baby, how you doing? When you coming for me? I'll be ready."
There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn
about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives
people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own
lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They
concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their
mindes are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow
country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others
think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they
talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and
they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. Thare's nothing left to
die.