Bukowski

Charles Bukowski was born in 1920, in Andernach, Germany, and died in Los Angeles in 1994. Most of his life unspooled across the raw edges of the American city—the factories, the post offices, the rented rooms with peeling walls and no guarantees. He worked jobs that broke bodies and wrote about the things polite society pretends not to see: violence, failure, addiction, the slow erosion of hope. His books—Post Office, Ham on Rye, the poems—weren’t clean or noble. They crawled through the dirt because that’s where he lived, and that’s where most of us eventually land, stripped of illusions.

But what made Bukowski more than just another drunk at the typewriter was that recursive drift—the way every story, every failure, spun back on itself, feeding the system. His life wasn’t a straight line; it was a closed loop of entropy, always decaying, always reconstituting. The bars, the women, the jobs, the words—none of them resolved, they just rotated, transferring the same broken energy through different forms. His writing wasn’t escape, it was circulation—proof that even in collapse, systems conserve momentum. And underneath all the filth and humour was that simple truth of communication: everything breaks down, everything feeds back, and in that breakdown, meaning transmits itself again.