well, I am feeling a little better now. I guess it’s the sound of the typer. it’s the sound in my blood. what a way to get hooked! “Doctor, sir, I am sick. please let me type.” [* * *]

Blazek moved from Illinois to San Francisco in 1967 and en route stopped to meet Bukowski. The mutual readjustment of mental images produced by their exchange of letters was apparently disillusioning for both correspondents: afterwards, “there was no lasting warmth between the two men,” reports Neeli Cherkovski (Hank).

[To Douglas Blazek]

September 5, 1967

ah shit, what a birthday caaard! I am taken. great, old man. thanks.

I suppose the days of long letters, the long-letter days are quits between us, but they did their work; both reading them and writing them was beef and roses and wine and clean socks, good things.

Landlord and landlady standing out there, gibbering gibbering gibbering, I can’t think. the fuckers stand around and shoot mouth night and day.

dogs barking through the gibbering. why don’t they go in the back? they live in the back. everybody gotta stand around Bukowski’s window, make his nuts jump and whirl in agony, ah. reminds me, book coming out, working now, Black Sparrow Press, At Terror Street and Agony Way. that’s where I live. a friend, a kind of friend I have in the hills says the title is corny. well, it’s corny if it’s not happening to you but if it’s happening to you, then it’s not corny. too many people are afraid to say the obvious, or they have to be just a bit cute and in the shadows, playing it out. see Creeley’s latest title: Words. now there’s a man who has never considered a butcher knife. well, for all that, editor asked me if I would do 50 original colored drawings for 50 editions plus 5 inch tape for some of the editions, and I said yes, and so my ass still up in work, not just the common drag work that kills, but working with the minutes I have left when I am not at the track when I am not drunk when I am not playing with Marina when I am not sick when I am not crazy, anyhow have done 12 drawings so far and that’s part of the way there. anyhow, he pays pretty fair royalties, and Evergreen took one of my poems, so maybe I will not be swept under the rug—$28 drunken phone bill, gas, lights, car breakdown, dentist bill, doctor bill for sickness of the 3 of us—hell, you know the act. it’s like a war. you sit in a room and outside there—there are all these factors working gearing sharpening to chop you down. all god’s children got troubles, what? I can’t even renew my driver’s license. can’t read god damned book, dull, may need glasses. mental block. all god’s children…my hemorrhoids are back. coming back. coming back. all that operation. finger up the bloody ass. hems coming back. must get off the beer for a couple of months, if I can. also same old dizzy spells, fits of depression, missed days at work, broke, clothes shot, same old shoes…. everything crazy and lumbersome and getting worse. shit, shit. then I go into work, make it, the LONG LONG LONG HOURS, people just sitting there WORKING, pissing their life-hours away and not feeling a thing, even feeling comfortable. oh, captain, let’s blow my fucking brains out and be done with it. [* * *]