Sour Mood

I'm cranky.  I didn't sleep well last night.  I made poor nutritional choices today (pie and cookies for lunch).  I worked hard in the yard and Griswolding my house and then cutting some branches off a tree at Mom and Dad's.

I put up the Christmas tree.  I hate that tree.  It's a cheap Wal-mart tree.  It sheds.  We used to get a real tree, but we stopped getting them because they shed.  Now I have an artificial tree that sheds.  I put on the lights.

The kids were supposed to hang ornaments.  They were goofing around, trying to juggle them.  They kept getting distracted.  I had to force them off their computers to take part.  Then the dog took a crap in the living room behind the couch.  At that point, I lost it.  Then my wife banished me up here.

She knows me.

She knows I'm tired.  She knows I've had too much sugar.  She knows the kids are being especially annoying.

Do other people get like this?  I see happy pictures on Facebook, and happy descriptions of trimming the tree.  I think I like literature with a darker tint because it helps me realize that yes, this does happen to other people.

The good news is that I will snap out of this.  I will be happier tomorrow, after a good night's sleep, after this sugar processes through my system.

When I'm in this kind of mood, Bukowski it probably best for me.  There was a guy who understood how the world could crap down the back of your neck sometimes.  He could see that, as much as we wish for the opposite to be true, Norman Rockwell moments are rare and brief.

This was the guy who wrote:

"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?" 

I can completely identify with this idea.

He said much more.  I think I enjoyed Bukowski more when I was younger, when I needed the reassurance more that the world can be that way.  And that it was okay.  That it could be that way, but that it wasn't important.  There is an Eastern philosophy feel to his work.  He was in the world, very much in the world physically, but somehow he managed to keep himself at a certain level of remove from the world intellectually.  He was certainly an active participant emotionally as well, but had an awareness that kept him at a level of sanity, even at his most insane.  He was able to reflect.

The quote of his that most perfectly expresses this duality of intellect and emotion:

 "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."

I feel better.  Thank you, Hank.  His friends called him Hank, not Charles, which is the name he wrote under.  Thanks, Hank, for reminding me that even though I'm not perfect, no one is, or should wish to be.  We all have our moments.  And we all live through them.  Maybe my wife will let me come back downstairs now.