A HOLIDAY GREETING FROM THE BUKOWSKIS

By

Tyler Smith

Dear Friends & Family,

We hope this letter finds you all healthy and happy in this, a particularly splendid holiday season! Charles is working hard at the post office—he's his usual pessimistic self (zing!), but I have to say I see a promotion in his future (knock on wood!). Everything is great here in Los Angeles—we even got a new puppy! Charles wants to call him "Fyodor," but I like "Mittens." It's awfully hot here, but

sorry, everybody. it seems that uppity cunt bitch is trying to pull a fast one on me. i always say, never trust a whore who's still there in the morning. that's a truism. like pain and acne vulgaris and all the times my father would lash me with a razor strop for spilling soup or walking too fast or talking back to him. i'd go to my room and jack off again and again until my dick would break, and then i'd go down to the bar and suck down whatever they had laying around in the half-empties. alcohol is the only thing worth fighting for. no woman, no man, no grinding, mawkish texts penned by cowards, no fire trucks, no heart, no stinking, fetid hearth, especially now that it's that time of year again. when the racks and wheels break a man's back, and send him out on empty streets, broken, defeated, bloody and alone. yesterday i crapped out my pancreas—we're not sure what to do with it, so we've hung it from a smashed-up lantern like a stocking. it's that kind of human ingenuity that keeps us from total madness—the ingenuity of the rational being. but what's rational? the sky is on fire halfway around the world, men and women screaming at each other like mothers on the morning of a war and in the end, we just want the wine. I want to drink the blood of Christ and his 5 holy, bursting wounds worthy of a special cult for they suffered abject pain for our salvation. OUR? shiiiiiit. show me a saved man and I'll show you a withered coward who I could take down with one good one right to the jaw. i still have fight in me! i will shake the hands of the bold centurions who strung him up and spit in the face of the morning star—i really don't care. call his name in sanguine, insidious night tremors. did I ever tell you about the time I jacked-off a dog? That is salvation, friends and family, that is love. pure love—the love of a cunt, nix the all-corrupting false love of the thorn-crowned savior, the monkeyshined playgroup all covered in their own, steaming waste—affected aesthetes the whole wretched, pus-filled lot of them. christmas is a fucked-out whore.

Oh, there goes old Charles! I run to the store for a birth control test kit and he just runs rabid! Always the jokester. All the best to you are yours this holiday season. Let's put the Christ back in Christmas this year, shall we?

--The Bukowskis

P.S. I think we're having another child. I just finished seven bottles of wine and I'm considering eating a pile of my own shit.