Charles Bukowski has quickly become my favorite writer, he is famous for being an "American Low-Life." His stories are never ones of champions or of overcoming anything monumental. He is happy to live in the gutter and to just get by with enough for a fifth of whiskey for the night, and to bang an occasional floozy.
Post Office was his debut novel and seems to be based in truth covering a good portion of his life although he goes masquerading as Henry Chinaski. He takes us through probably a total of twenty years of his life or so and begins most appropriately with "It began as a mistake." He got a part time job with the postal service to get money over the holidays, and before he knew it, that is all he was equipped to do, so even after he left it for a few years, he came back to it and did a twelve year stint. He went through three or four women he lived with in that time. His first wife left him and he encountered her later in life, just in time to see her wasted to nothing but a mess. He eventually buries her in as he called it, "half a funeral, and a dead wreath."
He was at his best at the racetracks, and seemed to have a knack for picking winners. He wasn't greedy, always happy to make fifty bucks a day, enough to keep him going and enjoy his small salad with a steak.
Work at the post office is what slowly sucked the life out of him. At a certain point, he started having fainting spells or near fainting spells which the doctors could never figure out. He blamed it on the job, where they were expected to work like machines and get written up anytime he acted human. To Chinaski (his name in the story), all supervisors were the same, ball busting and strung tight.
All his women were loose though. He seemed to pick up damaged women, almost as bad as he. It seemed funny how he described it, when his fist lady Betty left him after accusing him of screwing the lady living in front and the whore living in back. After moving to the first place he saw with a sign, he muttered about just losing three women and a dog.
Before going back to the post office he hooked up with a girl from Texas. Her family had money, and he was aware, but he never really cared about that. She insisted they make it on their own, so he begrudgingly applied back with the post office, and eventually she left him for a man who looked better.
This is my first novel of the year, and I am planning on reading at least twelve new books this year. I believe I am getting stupider, spending all my time looking at half naked bimbos on my phone. I used to read while on the throne, either an encyclopedia, newspaper, magazine, or book. Now I like to plan my movements on when I have a good 10-15 girls to check out on Snapchat, I am wasting a great opportunity to enrich myself right there.
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