I’m beat, but I think I’m getting close to being able to catch my breath. I’ll stay awake for a little while still, enjoy feeling my heartrate slow a bit and sweat into the night. At least until I see if sleep comes well tonight, or if it’ll be another night like the others- uneven sleep followed by hours of lying awake until I finally steal another hour or so and wake up too late, feeling like the days are running away from me like wild horses over the hills, as Bukowski put it in one of his good poems.

I don’t think much about Bukowski these days, but the titles he came up with for his poetry books tend to be pretty good. Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit… You Get So Alone at Times It Just Makes Sense… What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire… Pretty good stuff, there, even if the words inside of them don’t do a whole lot for me these days. He’s got a couple of good ones, but it’s definitely cooler to be into Bukowski than it is to actually read him. He’d hate that, of course, hate the fact that his legacy is post-adolescents impressing one another with their intensity by talking about how much they love his work. But if he wanted to avoid that fate, hell, I guess he should have written better books.

Whoa! That’s kind of rough, huh? Crankiness abounds, even on a night like tonight where I feel pretty good… Here I am insulting Bukowski and the people who like him, straight out of nowhere. I haven’t looked at a book of his work in years, anyway- I’m just assuming that I probably won’t still like it because my opinion of his prose sure did take a nosedive after I stopped believing that it was all actually true stories. It’s a freeing realization, if you’re a young man who fancies himself a writer and is struggling to put enough words on paper to distance himself from the person who idolized the icons that led him to pick up a pen or a typewriter in the first place. They’re not true stories, no truer than your own- not Bukowski or Kerouac or Hemingway or any of the others. Probably not even Orwell. They just seem true because you want to believe that they are, but if they were really the truth, they wouldn’t have written them down that way- they’d have been even bigger, even more dramatic or grand or whatever it is you like about it. If it went down for Bukowski just like he wrote it down in women, then the book would have been even more over the top, with more trashy sex and soul-crushing realizations that he was an empty man.

But I didn’t get that for a long while, not till after I stopped wishing I could figure out how to live like that, after I stopped trying to sleep with girls because they had the same names as the girls listed at the end of each line in the song “Fuckin’ You Right” from the restless album by Xzibit. Growing up is tricky, a little bit, but ultimately rewarding, even if it means your heroes all die a little bit in your heart.

I’m not really sure how I landed on this tangent, but that’s what happens sometimes when you haven’t had a full night’s sleep in weeks and you’re up at 2am because you are, because being awake feels good when you feel a little bit calmer than you have lately.

I just haven’t been sleeping lately, really. Not since I checked into that research study two weeks ago. My equilibrium’s been out of whack- pharmaceutical research and finishing a novel and out-of-town guests and Kat’s almost done with her classes and we’re moving to a new flat and it’s just hard to get a schedule together. And I’m not crying about it or anything, but it’s made me a bit of a mess. Tonight, though, I don’t mind so much. I’ve got my headphones on and some time to myself- which these days comes in feast-or-famine bursts- so I’ll just let it go for a while, then see what direction it goes when I try to sleep.