Angkor Days

Charles Bukowski. You will probably get sick of me talking about him; fine with me.   There is a raw beauty to his work—a brutal honesty. There are too many favourites.   Get your hands on two of his collected works, The Last Night on Earth Poems and Love is a Dog From Hell.   We are sitting in our local coffee shop. I am supposed to be doing a Uni assignment. Shell shows me this. It is from the 2009 book of poems, The Continual Condition.   No one seems to know when it was written. Charles died in 1994, so it is at least 30 years old.   Bukowski was a prophet.

The social media algorithm believes I need to see body transformations. I am bombarded with images of men losing weight and getting shredded. These miraculous diets and training programs not only build muscle and drop weight but also provide a tan, strip body hair, and allow for a manly beard.   Impressive program.   When I gained weight, I hated my body. It disgusted me. My solution? Pretend not to care and just keep eating.   It might have been the Cherokee or the Lenape people, but the war of two wolves in everybody rings true. The one you feed is the one that grows. I wonder if I have three wolves. My third wolf is hunger. It ate the other two wolves, which is all I have left to feed.   It is always hungry.   I worked hard to lose weight. The damage was done. Something in my brain changed. I can't turn it around.   I am still dissatisfied with my body. All I see is inadequacy. Shortcomings. I feel small, no matter how big I am.   "When we don't know who to hate, we hat