How it all came to be


Sometimes, we all wish to go back in time and relive certain moments. I yearn to experience the rush and thrill of my younger days, even though they weren’t necessarily the best days of my life. I’m not interested in returning to that time because it has been difficult, but instead, revisiting how I saw the world then, the places I frequented, the people I used to know, and all the things I did or didn’t do. I want to understand how I managed to get through that difficult period in my life while searching for who I am. I want to experience those sparks of hope that ignited me back when I struggled mentally and professionally. I long to regain my beginner’s mindset in my mid-late twenties and see the world with fresh eyes once again.

I discovered something new about myself back then in 2016. 2017 continued in the spirit of an inspired writer who didn’t write much, but there was so much inspiration in me that I didn’t know what to do with it. I was overwhelmed by it, in a way. I loved being overwhelmed with all those new experiences and thoughts that occupied my mind. I was an inspired young writer then; I wrote a little at the time, mostly poetry. I wrote it on my phone often, as it came to me while smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. I felt great, cool, and one of a kind, seeing myself as a poet. Nothing of this sort had ever happened to me before. The list of poems grew over time. My reading list grew over time. I wanted to be like Charles Bukowski, my writing hero. That depraved old man inspired my young confused mind so much that after reading just a few of his poems, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I looked around at things, people, and events around me, and poetry lines were composed inside my head. Some of them I captured, and many of them were lost somewhere deep inside my mind and down the history lane. What I got then was something I couldn’t even imagine doing before. I, a nobody, a confused dumb kid, could become a writer and a poet. That felt really novel and fucking great. That was a pivotal point in my life, one of the few that laid the ground for my writing for years. 

I remember how and when I wrote my first poetry. I was on my bed in my mom’s house, in my room, with my MacBook Pro laptop. It was a lame and pretentious poem, but it was the first one, and many more followed shortly after. You can’t be judging that shit too hard. It gave me something to work with and to work for and eventually launched me as a writer. Everything great once started as nothing, many times as a mistake, and many times as an accident. This was one of the most remarkable accidents that ever happened to me. Still, I haven’t recovered. I like it this way. I want to write. Writing helped me over the years while dealing with life and its pitfalls. Jobs failed me, and I failed jobs; relationships failed me, and I failed relationships; people, in general, failed me and failed many people in my life, but I’ve learned my lessons, and I continued to write throughout all that time. Writing became my own very effective therapy. I woke up early in the morning, pulled out my laptop, and started to write. I often did not know what I would write about, but somehow ideas came, words formed, words turned into sentences, and sentences turned into pages of written material. Somehow I ended up with over two hundred poems and a handful of prose material, and I had to do something about it. And I did. 

I revisited all the poems I ever wrote and collected them into my first poetry collection, “My Poems My Soul.” I came up with the name based on a poem with the same title. It sounded very poetic to me. It sounded like something Bukowski would have written or named one of his poems. I wasn’t trying to imitate Bukowski or copy his style, but so much of his influence poured out of me and into my writing that I couldn’t help it. I heard Bukowski’s voice in my head as I was writing my poems. It felt unusual. I felt like Bukowski a lot of times. I was reading his poetry and listening to his novels and short stories on Audible, fueling my creative mind and soul. Little did I know then that all that fascination would result in me publishing my own books years later. I self-published “My Poems My Soul” in 2020 during the pandemic. My second collection of mostly short stories and some new poems, called “Nicetown,” came out in late 2022. Today I am a real writer, not just some wannabe romantic with a temporary inspiration, but an actual published writer with a good amount of my work in the literary world. I also created a blog where my original writing experiments were posted. That blog helped me stay in shape and continue my regular writing routine. I knew I did that primarily for myself, and if other people find that interesting, that would be even better. But it all was done for a selfish me to keep me at work, keep me writing, writing, and posting regularly. This is why I stayed more productive over the last three-four years. This is how “Nicetown” book came up to be. This was a collection of all that blog writing, primarily short stories and some better poems I published since I created my blog in late October 2019. 

Getting one thing started randomly on my bed with my laptop eventually launched me to become who I am today. I am not famous but rather very much infamous. Fame is great, but I the lack of it doesn’t bother me much. I haven’t achieved any accomplishments or recognition, my books don’t sell, and nobody but a handful of people in my circle know that I write. But that is ok. I have patience. I still think that the best is yet to come. I have yet to publish something that would eventually resonate with the general public and get my name out there. I am not an attention whore, but let’s face it, all writers are and want to be one and are continuously searching for and hoping for all the attention they can get. Most writers are egoistic, self-centered, and self-indulging assholes; all that writing is not there for no reason. We all want to be famous, great, and beloved, and we all want people to admire us, praise our books, recite our words, make movies based on our books, give us prizes, kiss our assess, and make us invincible and untouchable and superior in that fashion. 

I don’t know what I want to do next in my life, hanging here, staying on the edge of the cliff, at the crossroads, or whatever the fuck I am today. I know one thing for sure, I will continue to write, even if that is just for myself, even if nobody in the world will ever see or read anything I wrote. I remember how excited and obsessed I was with the Californication show, watching it for the first time back in 2016. Based on the image of my beloved Charles Bukowski, the main character, Hank Moody, was a great visual of a modern writer with some complicated behavior and dealing with his struggles, but mainly inspiring me even more to write. I saw a writer who wasn’t a fucking bore. Hank Moody was a real man, a great writer, and he hated all that fame shit and the consequences of it, which continued to follow him throughout the show. That show was so great, funny, witty, and personal to me that even today, in 2023, I am still watching it on repeat, getting entertained, getting a good laugh, and learning something new each time. It is still, in many ways, a highly relatable show in both the writing and social world we live in today. 

I discovered that show when I was going through the worse times in my life, mentally and professionally. I found my great escape in that show. It was not just entertaining but also a great escape from the brutal reality I was living in. It felt like the stars aligned for me back then in 2016, and everything I got my hands on, watched, listened to, or read let me into this new life, a life of a writer, the unlimited, crazy world of literature with all its complications and struggles. I can’t remember another time when all the puzzle pieces fell together for me and showed me a new life, a new perspective, and a world I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful to destiny, whoever it is, and a stupid random accident or sequence of events that got me writing. I am happy where I am and looking forward to a better future. The longer I stayed in this writing world, the more great things happened for me, the more I could do and create and write, and this new universe kept building up and around me. I am happy in this place. The real writing will stay. Real writing will live forever.

Another Saturday night rant

I sit here at the famous hotel, top floor, overlooking Venice Beach, California. The balcony window is open, and the ocean breeze is coming inside. I can feel it, smell it, and I can breathe again fully I always wanted to be here. I always wanted to be in the City of Angels, create here, live here, and be part of it all. The smell of the beach and the ocean is always refreshing and alive. It makes me want to just be there, just lay there, watch, and breathe. It makes my soul tick. It brings in the Lada Del Ray melancholy with it. I can imagine Lana sitting next to me smoking cigarettes and singing sad songs. There are lights from the street reflected on the walls, and the noise of the boulevard below is heard. Cars are going back and forth at the night, the people roaming around the City that never sleeps. It is a dark and warm night tonight, and I always have my Red Hot Chili Peppers music on. They are California to me in sound. The fake beautiful people and the palms are California to me in actuality. Spiritually, I think it is a place for the lost to be found, find whatever is missing, create something new, grow, and achieve. It is the mecca for so many lost souls, many of whom really found themselves there. The first that comes to mind are all those actors who came over with nothing, and the minute they scored a successful movie, the big payday came around and then some more and they are never the same. This is a life that I believe too many are wishing for, but it is not an easy life to have, live, and maintain. It is a complicated and challenging task. Honestly, with all the time trying to become somebody else for money, one eventually becomes another version of themselves for life. People lose their own entity over time, and they just play the Hollywood game for the rest of their lives. They want to be part of it, be invited to the parties, get roles in the movies, get offers, make money, and spend money while selling their soul. That dirty fake acting soul is worth not more than any other man’s soul even less famous. Almost always thinking of California, I can imagine rich fucking movie stars with tons of money, huge houses, big fancy cars, and busty women with a shit ton of plastic surgeries. When I think about California, I think about John Fante, who came out there when it was fucking dark, and it was nothing around. When the wind would blow a ton of fucking desert sand into your room along with an ocean breeze. I imagine Fante sitting in that dirty, cheap hotel room on Bunker Hill, hungry, poor, with no money or prospects, but typing with a cheap fucking typewriter. Writing meant a different thing to him than it is now to 99.9% of douchebags with a laptop, just like myself, who blog or who are self-made-stupid-ass-fucking-reporters, etc. This used to be a place of nothing but the fucking desert. Many new-coming lunatics come over here to find and build their new life and build their American dream. Fante sat there in that chair hungry and desperate, writing letters to his mother in Colorado, asking for a few dollars so he could pay the rent or send the story out or buy himself something to eat. At the same time, he worked on his American dream. There was so much passion this guy had, and like so many others who came to California for the same reason, to make it out here. In life, it always takes too much of your soul, best years, and best health before you can actually achieve something. Before you can truly say, ok, I am fucking feeling pretty good about myself and my accomplishments today. Today’s idea of getting there and becoming the next best fucking actor or actress is very much a delusional thought process. Fante had to eat shit all his life to at least partially make it work for him, even if it meant writing movie scripts full-time instead of books. John Fante’s books will always be in my home library. I will cherish them always, remembering him as a writer who wrote so simply, so early on, with so much passion and authentic and true feelings that went almost unnoticed until his death. Charles Bukowski is my association with California in a poetic way. Charles Bukowski is the reason I write. Charles Bukowski is the reason I know who John Fante was. Nobody in the whole fucking California is more famous for his raw, authentic, graphic, and very realistic poetry of the time and place than Bukowski. People worldwide learn about California, skid raw, horse racing, drinking, and drunken shenanigans from reading Bukowski’s poetry and prose. His writing throughout his entire life was full of it. The never-ending drinking and drama with the women in question were the two major topics across his career and life that always played a key role everywhere Bukowski went. He wasn’t afraid to stay fucking hungry, drunk, jobless, hopeless. Still, with all that passion for writing and all that passion for becoming a famous writer, he kept writing and creating and eventually did become successful. Success felt like a tremendous reward to Bukowski even in the later years of his life. The man who had been one inch away from skid raw now had a wife, house, a new car, a movie based on his life, a bunch of new books, a great bottle of wine for dinner, and everything else the dirty old man can wish for. It wasn’t a shot or easy way out for him, but he still somehow did it. He made his American dream come true. The dozens of his books on my bookshelves represent my love and admiration for his writing. Drunk Bukowski roaming from bar to bar, from a hotel room to a hotel room, from one shitty job to another, trying to find the right place, trying to find the good life, the peace of mind, the right woman while always getting involved in some weird shit which came up with his poems or part of his prose. There was so much Bukowski in California that I don’t think it is possible to ever take him out of there. I am not even going to bring up the music bands taking their origins from California. It will take the whole fucking night and probably many books, not just a few pages to cover everything. California had it all and had it all great, too good. I am not sure that the good is still there, it could be, but we maybe don’t see or don’t know much about it. The good could’ve left that place a long time ago, as so many people did recently when the poor and the homeless started to run the town. The life changed, the dream was crushed for so many, and so many plans were deemed to never come true or be born in the first place. It is sad to see the beach with primarily lonely or homeless people. It is hard to see people angry at each other and only being pleased when they need to impress somebody to make their next move, get the part, win the role, the contract, you fucking name it. It is said to see the place of so many dreams coming true and so much talent and creativity going to hell faster than hell itself. California, where everything began for America, is now a place of survival for the fake egoistic people. On the other hand, a movement of homeless and poor, an invasion of the overpriced properties with those who didn’t make it or didn’t want to make anything… Everything so glamorous and lavish becomes sad, grey, and doomed. It does feel like I don’t have a partner and my only friend is in the City I live in, the City of Angeles, lonely and as fucked up as I am, and together we cry. Red Hot Chili Peppers got it all right in those lyrics. They are so California. There are a lot of illusions and bullshit in and about California for so many people. But there always is a real side to each story. The real side to the story is that not everything that glitters is gold. Not everything that has been portrayed to be so great and beautiful actually is so. The real side also is that I have never been to California, and there is no hotel, no ocean, and no breeze where I am hailing from. It is actually cold, dark, and gloomy in the suburbs of the East Coast. But that was my dream though for quite a while. I always wanted to come to California. I always wanted to californicate, whatever that means. I am writing about my dream and how I imagine and associate my California life. What would I feel like? What would I do there? I would’ve wanted to come over and be like Fante, a man without a dime behind his soul but so much to say through my writing. Still, there is a small room for rent, and there is a typewriter or a laptop these days. I sit and write like crazy for days and nights, and then I try to sell it somewhere so I can continue to do what I love and live off of my passion, my writing. There is a laptop that never goes to sleep, busy processing words. Like myself, there are cigarette butts all over the table and a half-empty bottle of whiskey. I am typing away, writing my thoughts and words as they all come to me. I create the writing that also creates something else for somebody. It creates a new made-up world that everyone can wander in and be part of. Welcome to my shindig, folks. This is the cycle that never ends. This is the life I wanted to have but no longer can. This would’ve been the story of the next greatest American novelist, poet, and writer, John Loraine, ladies and gentlemen. It feels great. It almost feels real for a moment. I can imagine myself living there, in the City of Angeles, and being part of that mess. The place is hardly changing a person. In most cases, the person changes depending on their surroundings, just like all those successful actors in Hollywood. They will never be the same regular folks they once were before they came over there. Maybe I will never be the same once I am relocated to California? Perhaps I would be stuck there and not be able to write anything? What if that City eats me alive and I am forever lost in its gloom? What if the writing does not require one to move anywhere? Why would you go anywhere else as long as you can get a quiet place to sit down and write? There are so many hours in the day, so many words to write, and so many writers and books to read. I think it is just the right time to sit down and write whatever you feel like and think about and whatever comes through. Bukowski once wrote, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” Amen.