Gramps being himself at his daughter's wedding, 1965.
My Grandfather died two months after Bukowski in 1994. I was 24 years old, drunk, living and (sometimes) working in San Francisco.
Both men lived raucous, unhealthy lives in their younger days and I was doing my part to carry on that grand tradition, one whiskey sour at a time. When they passed I was shaken up pretty good, a large chink in the armor of my self-diagnosed invincibility. How could I carry on drinking myself into oblivion if there was indeed, an actual oblivion? These two men I looked up to both left this world just as I was starting to think that I too could live as wet and decadent an existence and come out on the other end unscathed. No one ever does and I no longer think I will either, at least not for these few nights in the November cold.
Bukowski's "Bluebird" as read by Harry Dean Stanton from the film Born Into This.
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