forgive me for not answering sooner. I have been in a real fucked-up state. still am. health gone again. dizzy spells. fever. hours, nights, days, years of DEPRESSION. dark gauze stuff. no sense. just a haning [sic] hanging there. I make up words. why not? I am fucked. tried work tonight, the spells came over me, worked 3 hours, could go on longer no longer aye, grabbed side of case to keep from falling. and all around me, those FACES (faces? feces!) looking. no air. I left. they have been counseling me that I miss too many days. I get warnings, warnings. they think that I am faking it. the doctor thinks that I am faking it. “there’s nothing wrong with you, Bukowski! next patient, send in the next patient, please nurse.” I walk out and make it down the steps and the whole area of the boulevard is like a roller coaster. I can’t see. everything is sunlight. then shade, like dropping right into hell and being kissed by a smelly face like a toaster. like that. not exactly. something. I guess a man has to go to hell 90 times to see heaven once. for me, they can forget heaven. and hell too.

o, shit, it’s hot, the fever, the heat. I have this fan on. no good. I am afraid to drink. and the refrigerator is frozen solid into a block of ice. I have the door open and the ice won’t melt. I touch the ice and it isn’t even cold. it’s like marble, like porcelain. the radio will barely play. some kind of opera scratching. somebody is in agony. I smile just a little. The Comedy of Agony.

meanwhile, I have not written, have not answered letters, have not written poems. [* * *]

John [Martin] probably will do my book of new poems—if I am here—next Spring. I think Webb and I have fallen out. I wrote a column for OPEN CITY PRESS about my visit to Tucson and I think he saw it. I no longer hear. that’s o.k. I don’t think it was a dirty column. only factual. I have been doing a weekly column for Open City and if you want to see some, let me know and I’ll ship you a few. they let me write anything I wish. might stop doing the damn things soon. poems first, or living first, hell yes. [* * *] applied some months back for a grant from the Humanities Foundation. submitted what I have done of my novel, The Way We Dead Love. say they, I will hear in October. I asked for a year’s worth of money—$6,500 to live on while I go the damn thing. it’s true, I probably won’t get it, but what hell of a hell of a shot of life that would be; it would add 20 years to my life!