Charles Bukowski on being alone:

oh, yes

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it’s too late
and there’s nothing worse
than
too late

Some people have a city instead of a life.

How’s that for an opening line? It pulled me right in. Guess what? It gets even better. This is from FULL OF IT – The Birth, Death, and Life of an Underground Newspaper the new novel from friend and writer extraordinaire Tim Hall. Tim is fresh off his appearance at the Omaha Lit Fest. His new book is a good ride. Take it.

I walked up to Central Park to see David Blaine hang upside down.

I saw Street Magic years ago on TV and thought it was a lot of fun. I like that he fucked with the denizens of the Lower East Side, where I happen to be living at the time. They deserved to be fucked with. After that, he performed a series of stunts here in the city that I saw in person. I saw him buried alive for seven days, stand in a block of ice for 63 hours, stand on a 90 foot high pillar for 35 hours, spin in a gyroscope for 16 hours and be submerged in water for seven days.

I didn’t feel a burning desire to see this latest stunt, but I have a collect ‘em all mentality and thought I shouldn’t miss it. It’s like those damn Harry Potter books. You can’t bail out if you’ve read through book IV.

Today in the paper, it was announced that Fox News caught him taking stand-up breaks. WTF! When confronted, Blaine’s reps said he “never intended to stay upside down for 60 consecutive hours.” What a liar. He probably cheated on the other stunts as well. Maybe he should run for office.

Sunday was the second anniversary of the passing of Mrs. Wife’s grandmother. In the morning, the four of us took a drive out to the cemetery to pay our respects. It was simply beautiful out. Blue skies and cool, early fall temps. Cemeteries are peaceful, remarkably well-manicures places. They’d make great open spaces for the public if it weren’t for all the corpses.

We found the tombstone and while Mrs. Wife and 6-Year Old Daughter said a prayer, I had a look around. It’s a Catholic cemetery and as such, all of the names on the tombstones are either Irish or Italian. Really. All of them. My favorite was a heart-shaped tombstone of pink granite with a very Italian name. In addition to the name, they carved a horse and a pair of dice into it. The dice showed 11 and for those of you unfamiliar with craps, 11 is the friendly number. It’s the only number you can throw where nothing bad will happen to you. You’ll never lose money throwing an 11. He was my kind of paisan.

I heard 6-Year Old say, “Is she buried in the ground?” Mrs. Wife said, “Only your body goes into the ground. Your soul goes up to heaven.” I looked at Daughter’s face and she wrestled with this concept. I wrestle with it, too. The Buddhists believe that you are reincarnated over and over again until you obtain Nirvana. Every culture has its own take on what happens after you die.

Do you know what I think? I don’t believe ANYBODY knows what happens after you’re gone. Each culture has its own story to tell. Your personal belief is not rooted in fact but, rather, where you were born how you were raised. Nothing more. I think these stories were made up by man and handed down from generation to generation, just like what Mrs. Wife was doing to Daughter, because mankind is terrified of death and these legends give us comfort and a sense of order. It’s part of the human fabric. But I don’t think anybody knows, really. If everyone adopted this attitude, the religions of the world would crumble.

At the beginning of Act 2 during Friday evening’s performance of A Man for All Seasons, the lights dimmed, the curtain rose and Frank Langella stood on stage with Michael Esper, who plays Sir Thomas More’s son-in-law, William Roper. There was a brief pause and then both actors walked off the stage and the curtain came back down. Odd. An announcement was made over the public address, “Ladies and gentleman, we’ll try that again.” Everyone chuckled. We assumed a prop was missing or someone didn’t hit their mark. Four or five minutes passed, Act 2 began and the play unfolded without further interruption.

When the play concluded and the cast was on stage for their curtain call, Frank Langella held up his hands to silence the audience. He apologized for the false start at the beginning of Act 2. (Nobody cared. An apology wasn’t necessary.) He said that just prior to the curtain being raised when he walked out on stage to take his place, he stumbled and fell backwards and hit his head, hard, against a wooden post in the middle of the set. He felt it was better to walk to the wings and allow his daze to lift than to try and fight through it.

Working without a net. There’s nothing like it.

While waiting for the F train at 34th St. this morning, I saw this written on a steel girder:

A play on words! How fun is that? That little piece of levity is enough to give me a needed smile on the same morning I woke up to find that Benevolent Dictators, Inc. was converted to a holding company last night while I slept.