This is the one that made me think Bukowski wasn't just another pretentious scruffy looking poet-writer. And the impression it made on me was inestimable. It was the same reaction I had when I read those other `notes' from that other 'sky, the man himself, Fyodor Dostoevsky.It was a shock to know that there were other people in the world who had thoughts like mine... that life was mixed, nothing was cut and dried, muddled, beauty was touched with horror, love was tainted with hate and other passions that would sometimes lead to actual murder and that it wasn't that bull shown in the movies, society wasn't as rational and good as I was told, that there was always something awful under the surface of things, that God could be dead, that I was full of contradictions and instincts which had the power to overtake me -and perhaps the whole of humanity was afflicted with the same inconsistent nature, that there seem to be no meaning to life (with or without religion) and the universe was a blind absurdity, everything shocked me, and on and on... but in the center of all this was the fact that I was living, that I had the ability to feel and the power to say no.The world seen through Bukowski's eyes is a terrible and beautiful place at the same time. The whores, the drinking binges, the alley fights and the insanity of the man of the streets is a life lived at its most direct and extreme. It is life uncluttered by the niceties and civilities of the numbed life most of us, under the confines of comfy blankets, PC's, cell phones, the latest fashions, million channel TV, etc., lead. It is a life I myself experienced for twenty five years, and at times it is still a preferable life to me than the desensitizing one I may live today. So in a sense Bukowski `celebrates' life and not wholly -wholly- leaves us a portrait of self destruction and nihilism. This is a POSSIBLE life, he seems to say to me, this is a life I've lived and lived it the way I wanted -at least the way I saw fit for a man in my position: ugly, poor, abused, disenfranchised. And I agree.