"Some people never go crazy... what truly horrible lives they must lead" - Charles Bukowski. A man, love him or hate him, truly embracing the chaos. I've never reached this point to the depths that I may have hoped but I've worked at it for decades. As a suffering young man I was caught in a narrow perspective driven by negative emotion. Simply reading, from someone as undeniably tortured as Bukowski, that there was another way to look at it changed everything for me. The dark contrasts the light and insanity has its own aesthetic. Granted it's not a philosophy for everyone, but it's kept me waking up with hope for the chaos that a new day will bring lol

This question and it's answer turned out to be more interesting than I initially thought. The answer was a no-brainer for me. I've held on to that quote as a sort of linguistic totem for about 35 years. It springs to mind any time things start to get to me. However, I don't think that I ever reflected on exactly how much significance the work of Bukowski had on my life, or at least the reinforcement of the ideas I already shared with him did. After I posted that response I went and read his poem "The Tragedy of the Leaves". Why I chose to do that I don't know because I could have recited it to you word for word all these years later. In reading it I was transported back to the parking lot of my high school where I was about to board the bus at the end of the day. A particularly punk-rock friend of mine slapped a book into my hand telling me "You have to check this dude out, he's wild!". I got on the bus and opened to the first page where this short poem peered back at me. In about two dozen lines it described a world of ultimate disappointment, where death is inevitable and hope is the enemy. There I sat with my long hair, jean jacket and black sabbath blasting in my ears thinking "here is somebody that gets it!". Validation! Another human that says piss on the world and purely romanticizes a life of the mind and ideas. This made sense to me and the rest of the world didn't. Society on the whole made no sense to me.. none of it. Just a bunch of ants carrying out rites and rituals. Fast forward... I made it work for me for a time. I'm smart and a persuasive communicator so I was able to get by without having to give in too much. However, I built my entire existence on shunning the world and generally had a crash and burn attitude. I had a lot of fun for sure but now, at 50, for the first time in my life I'm actually concerned about the future. On my own I could have cared less but after meeting my wife it all changed around. The problem is that I don't know how to reintegrate. I certainly don't have the angst I did as a teenager but somehow these values of "not giving in" persists. That somehow doing something for profit or "marketing" any skill I have is some kind of death. It stops me before I start. How do you change something, a value, that feels burned into you DNA?