Mentalechoes

It was Tuesday night this week when I found myself in town with an hour to kill before a friend turned up who I was going to have dinner with. It was a warm late afternoon, and so I thought I would stroll to the bookstore and get myself something to read to pass the time. I bought two Bukowski novels; Tales of Ordinary Madness, and Hollywood. I was in the mood for something raw, which is why I bought Bukowski.

I went to Dam Square and took a seat outside at the uber touristic EuroPub bar. I ordered myself a large coca cola before realising that it was going to cost 5 euro 50, and took out Tales to read. It wasn’t a novel as I had first thought but a collection of short stories and essays collected over a period of time by Bukowski which illustrate the meaner, seedier side of his and his aquantancies lives.

I love reading Bukowski, he has the ability to make me hate him when I read his books, and yet at the same time, sympathise with how society moulded him to be who he was. The man was such a prick in life, but he was treated like a prick too, and he had a genius for conveying it in his literature that nobody else could. I read the first 8 stories or so; some about criminals who do crime because they have no choice; others about low life scumbags trying to deal with normal society; and a few self loathing peices about his time in prision, and his self destructive abuse of his own body.

Looking up from the book, I thought to myself how little world of madness in those pages had in common with the world I lived in. It seemed very sanatised here in Dam Square, as I sat drinking the worlds most expensive large coke, with nice looking people around me all enjoying the sun. There wasn’t any craziness at all, and for some reason, that made me feel cheated that I had missed out on something. But as you can read between the lines of a page of writing and find a double meaning, you can do the same thing with the world around you.

I started watching the crowd more carefully. A skinhead walked past with a beer in his hand and sneer on his face, he looked high by the red glaze of his eyes and the swagger of his walk; he looked like he was going out to commit a crime. A couple to my left who at first appeared to be in conversation on closer inspection were having a muffled argument. She wouldn’t look him the eye and he kept pulling her face towards him, forcing her to face him as he spoke. I wondered if they were breaking up, or if he had found out she had done something that had hurt him. An older man of about 50 was walking hand in hand with a Thai woman in her early 20’s. He had obviously paid for her hand in marriage - or company - because I had seen couples exactly like this by the hundreds when I was in Bangkok city. Two kids got in a fight by the stone monument, punches started getting thrown, and other people shouted at them that if they didn’t stop it the police were going to get called. They laughed and said bring them on, they would take them too, though they did say this while walking away up the street to the Red Light District.

The ordinary world and the world of madness don’t exist seperately with only a small point of intersection. Instead they are layers of the same space that just have varying degrees of density in different places; some more, some less, but they are always present together everywhere you go. People like Bukowski sought out those places of heavy density where the air sizzled with chaos, madness and corruption. Most people couldn’t exist there on their own for very long, these places chew people up and taint them with a stink that makes them unable to go back to an ordinary world again. That’s why we have seperate social classes inside a single community; the environment moulds you as surely as exposure to the sun will change your skin colour.

Maybe that’s why I just write about experiences I read about someone else in a book; I’m too scared to get burned!

Padwanna!