[* * *] have been down, the old depressive hackdown, plus sickness, mine, Marina’s and so forth, meanwhile working the hateful job, old stuff, but time all sliced to small sections of stumbling into a room and turning on a light and falling down. meanwhile there are a half dozen poems I wrote while drunk that I haven’t yet lifted up off of paper. I mean, all I have to do is type them up but I can’t get to that. no tragedy but a buzz in the dome. and down at work a foreman leans behind me and says, “I want more work out of you, Bukowski, I want some production!” and I am dreaming of the lame bones under earth, the whole earth threaded with the bones of the dead—what a halloween. and then my little girl gets her foot caught in the rear spokes of a bicycle that her mother rides her around in in a little box in back, and I told the woman much earlier, “I hate the god damned bike, it stinks of tragedy I wish you wouldn’t ride her in the thing.” but no, she insists, but when all fucks up she runs to me with the mutilated kid. next it will be the whole stack of them in the middle of the street run over by a Falcon or something. but if you suggest that a woman should not do a certain thing she will insist upon doing it—thinking it proves that she has independence and a soul, but verily all it proves is that she is an asshole. well, let that be. but getting the kid to a doctor did get rid of an almost continuous cold, pen shots and liquid. but like I say.

so now, even as I write this it is time to go back to work. and even at work I am sliced with jackasses. I have a half hour to eat, I get a table by myself—a tough job. and here some nit catches my eye and brings over his tray: “I just hate to see somebody sitting alone,” he smiles. “I really don’t mind at all,” I tell him. “well, I’ll sit down anyhow.” “yes,” I say, “tell me your troubles.” and he does. he tells me he was somewhere or other, babysitting or something, and somebody gave him 2 cans of beer and he got high right away, he fell asleep, and the next day Sunday he slept almost all day, those 2 cans of beer. this was the essence of his conversation. I grunted something and tried to eat during his cold turkey insanity. I finished and excused myself and went outside in the freezing cold in my shirtsleeves and stood out there for 5 minutes and then went inside, back to my foreman.