Bukowski Loved to Bet the Horses

An unfinished stream of consciousness from a while back.  A few notes: full moon, freak magnetism at cartoonish level, interrupted by some drunk and tragic asshole.  Come to think of it, when am I not...

Bukowski loved to bet the horses.  Who is this man I put my money on?  All in. No safety net this time. You have to risk something that matters, but I risked it all on this absolute stranger. This stoic half dork, half stone cold fox. Dual natures the both of us. Living in a dream can quickly turn nightmarish. On a dime. I'm not looking for problems keeps echoing in my head. Maybe I am manufacturing them instead. Passive-aggressive is my nature. It satisfies my two halves, simultaneously. Ive always been a gambler at heart, for it is my legacy, but I let it all ride this time. Seventeen red. My whole stack. Everything I have.  I do mean everything both tangible and in. Maybe, I'm the one clawing at the freshly dug Earth. Maybe it's just fear's time to set in. To confuse and upset my happiness. Last week was too trying for the beginning. It threw a monkey wrench in the whole machine. I want to scream or cry or kill or smother myself with a fluffed pillow of my own design. I feel kill-crazy. My hands around a throat. Hands around my throat. Clutching, choking, squeezing the last ounces of life out of me. Do I feel it or am I dead already?  Is this dream really just a novacaine induced coma? Or is this what life tastes like?  What happens to the boy who gets everything he ever wanted? Does he really live happily ever after? Or does he live some illusion, some hologram of happiness? never to see his true reflection again. A delusion. Bukowski was onto something with this red wine drinking, I'll tell you that. I feel more open and ungated than I've ever felt. There are no inhibitions to work around. There are literally no cares to hinder the process. Fuck it. Fuck them if they can't take a joke. Fuck them if they don't understand me or my writing. Or if they can't separate my writer's persona from the real person, if there is a discernment to be had. It remains unclear. It's just a facet of me. The chameleon, the super-empathizer. Highly suggestible to the intense emotional lives of the living. Never quite knowing where the empathy ends and my soul begins. What is the percentage of evil. Is it constant or does it change? Which side will eventually win out?  I fear the nefarious always does. I wrote about past demons of others today, but what of my present demons?  They are not as far away as I would like. But they also keep me sharp like a knife steel. Like pull my emotions taut so they can be plucked and manipulated onto the page and smeared into my waking life. Like dripping, pungent and intense oil pigments on a freshly-stretched piece of gesso-ed linen. The gobs of color cling to the canvas with a tenacious fervor unmatched by any other paint. There is no running. Just streaks of madness across the mind, pressed so hard it leaves indentations on the other side. Can life be the dizzying and frenetic abstract that my mind dictates and the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post drawing of my heart?  More like an oddly colored and slanted post-impressionistic landscape of my soul. I knew the lightning rod of freakishness was at full strength this afternoon, much to my relief, but perhaps to others chagrin. It fuels my writing, my honest, real, but seedy writing, but at what cost? Can the honest writer ever be happy? It doesn't appear to be if past precedent is to be believed. Hemingway, Tennessee, Bukowski, they all suffered, suffered not because of their art, but suffered because their neuroticism allowed them to create art. It is a by-product of madness. A worthwhile symptom of the disease. The only solace. The only solace afforded to the neurotic, hysterical, emotionally blessed/cursed writer. What a fucking night. I'm b