That’s a Bukowski’s quote. I was struggling to get up this morning, really fed up with everything and seriously thinking about pulling a Steven Slater. I was listening to the radio and the host said that today was Bukowski’s birthday. He’s my favourite writer and for some reason thinking about his stories of misery and failure made me feel better — I guess we all feel better to hear that we might not be doing as bad as a lot of other people out there… Anyway, it gave me the push to function today.
I went to work thinking about the one million different things I needed to do and wondering how I could possibly manage. The moment I sat at my desk I realised that everything was so fucking complicated and was not up to me. I have no control over anything and this would be confirmed a couple of hours later. I had arranged with one of the teachers that he would teach this week’s 3-day immersion. I had nobody else to do it — except myself — and my boss knew about it. Done deal. I sent the schedule to all the teachers involved and a few minutes later, in comes the teacher I had already arranged the classes with. He tells me he might have to teach a guy at PUC at 7:30am guess when? Tuesdays and Thursdays, the very days I had told my boss I would need him for immersion. The cute part is that hadn’t he come to talk to me about it, there wouldn’t be anybody tomorrow to teach. So, who’s fucking filling in? MOI! As always! Who has the class right after lunch? Moi! Who will have the last class of the day? Moi! So, I’ll basically have to stay the whole fucking day there because those pieces of shit didn’t have the courtesy to let me know what had been decided. Last Friday.
In the meantime I have assessments to write, interviews to do, phone classes to teach and e-mails tasks to correct. And schedules to plan. As lessons to prepare. Seriously, man… I really don’t need this shit.
So I thought about Bukowski again. Maybe some of his literature would help me out…
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
“Boring damned people. All over the earth. Propagating more boring damned people. What a horror show. The earth swarmed with them.”
“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.”
“It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”