“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
From my Online Journal – November 13, 2001
despite the spitting rain the traffic flies, I fly down the onramp and merge, merge with the flow, become one with the nighttime red twin corpuscles of tail lights, screaming on slotted concrete, screaming tires under gangsigned overpasses, I’m grinning to an oldies station – Good Luvin’ pumping out loud, glad to get home on time for once. But a sudden sea of brighter red brakelights and it all falls apart, slows to a crawl, slows more to a stop, I watch the concrete bridge piers creep by inch by inch only inches outside my window and fantasize leaving something there, I’d have the time, cute girl in a red sportscar – ponytail, giant smoking bus, hugely fat guy crammed in a white Honda with his seat leaning back and tattered Old Glory plastic pole hooked to his window, grocery truck with the word FISH on the back, one lane moves a little then another, slow slow, slower, line of cars give up, bail out, creep up the steep shoulder to the frontage, all the SUV’s pull this off, but where will they go? Finally around a bend the flashing red and blue lights, line of crimson flames and wax coated sticks of flares in the road, everyone crams together into one lane, comes a time when you have to simply not look and move, then a diorama of towtrucks pulling piles of twisted metal onto flat trailers, Ambulance with open doors, groups of people standing, someone covered with a blanket, it is human to look for a few seconds though I understand how that look gets multiplied for the thousands waiting, then free, open, time to accelerate, get home, get home, get home |
And today’s flash fiction:
Spines and Tiny Hearts, by Rupert Dastur
from Reflex Fiction
Bill Chance 