"Чарльз Буковски. Дневник последних лет жизни (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

The horseplayers are easier for me. The regulars know that I am some
kind of nut and don't wish to speak to them. I am always working on a new
system, often changing the systems in midstream. I am always trying to fit
numbers around actuality, trying to code the madness into a simple number or
a group of numbers. I want to understand life, happenings in life, I read an
article wherein it was stated that for some long period of time now, in
chess, a king, a bishop and a rook were believed to be equal to a king and
two knight. A Los Alamos machine with 65,536 processors was put to work on
the program. The computer solved the problem in 5 hours after considering
100 billion moves by working backwards from the winning position. It was
found that the king, the rook and the bishop could defeat the king and two
knights in 224 moves. This is utterly fascinating to me. It certainly beats
the ponderous, tiddlywinks game of betting the horses.
I believe that I worked too long in my life as a common laborer. I
worked as such until I was 50 years old. Those bastards got me used to going
somewhere every day and staying somewhere for many hours and then returning.
I feel guilty just lolling about. So, I find myself at the track, bored and,
at the same time, going crazy. I reserve the nights for the computer or for
drinking or for both. Some of my readers think I love horses, that the
action excites me, that I am a gung-ho gambler, a real macho big time boy. I
get books in the mail about horses and horse racing and stories about the
track and etc. I don't give a damn about that stuff. I go to the track
almost reluctantly. I am too idiotic to figure out any other place to go.
Where, where during the day? The Hanging Gardens? A motion picture? Hell,
help me, I can't sit around with the ladies and most men my age are dead and
if they aren't dead they should be because they surely seem to be.
I've tried staying away from the track but thein I get very nervous and
depressed and that night there are absolutely no juices to lend the
computer. I guess getting my ass out of here forces me to look at Humanity
and when you look at Humanity you've GOT to react. It's all too much, a
continuous horror show. Yeah, I'm bored out there, I'm terrorized out there
but I'm also, so far, some kind of student. A student of hell.
Who knows? Some day soon I might be bedridden. I'll lay there and paint
on sheets of paper tacked to the wall. I'll paint them with a long brush and
probably even like it.
But right now, it's the faces of the horseplayers, cardboard faces,
horrible, evil, blank, greedy, dying faces, day papers, watching the changes
on the toteboard as they are being ground away to lett and less, as I stand
there with them, as I am one with them. We are sick, the suckerfish of hope.
Our poor clothing, our old cars. We move toward the mirage, our lives wasted
like everyboy else's.

11/3/91 12:48 AM
Stayed home from the track today, have had a sore throat and a pain at
the top of my head, a tittle toward the right side of it. When you get to be
71 you can never tell when your head is going to explode through the
windshield. I still go after a good drunk now and then and smoke far too
many cigarettes. The body get pissed off at me for doing this, but the mind
must be fed too. And the spirit. Drinking feeds my mind and my spirit.
Anyhow, I stayed in from the track, slept until 12:20 p.m.