https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8_RjcO6q5x8
I had a friend at one point who was a very bitter person and he had a bunch of problems and some of them were self-inflicted and some of them were fate I suppose and He had he had become very very destructive murderously destructive Genocidally destructive I would say you could see it in his dreams and and he lived with me for a while and I Knew him very well he was a friend of mine from the time I was 12 until the time he committed suicide when he was about 40 and When he lived with me I was trying to help him get on his feet Which was why he had come to live with me because he thought maybe I could help him get up on his feet And he could only take Relatively low-level jobs, you know like he had some mechanical ability didn’t he didn’t get educated Although he’s a very very smart person. He probably had an IQ of about 135 or something like that He’s very smart and so he was bitter too because he hadn’t educated himself to the level that his edge You know his intellect would have demanded so he had to take jobs that were beneath him intellectually and he had a really he had That real intellectual arrogance, you know because he was smart and really smart people often Come to believe that only smart matters And if they’re smart and all that and all that matters is smart and then the world isn’t sort of laying itself at their feet Then they’ve been terribly betrayed and and then they cling to their Intelligence which is more like a talent or a gift like it’s a like it’s an idol You know a false idol Which is exactly what it is and a very dangerous one and get cynical about The stupidity of the world and the fact that their talents weren’t properly recognized And that’s just not that helpful you know because smart is a good thing But I’ll tell you if you don’t use it properly it will devour you just like all arbitrarily assigned talent right so you might have a talent, but it’s your friend if you Use it properly, and if you misuse it it will be your enemy and maybe that’s how God keeps the cosmic scales adjusted But anyhow my friend was a very smart person although not as smart as he thought he was unfortunately and and But he hadn’t done What would have been necessary with that intelligence to make it manifest itself properly in the world and that also embittered him because he also knew that There was more that he could have done if he would have done it and perhaps more that he could still do what I was Suggesting to him while he was living with us because he was you know Two levels from homeless by that point Was that he should find a job that he could find Working in him in a garage working in a shop something like that because he had some mechanical ability and that he should He should separate himself from the arrogance that made him presume that such a job would be beneath him Because at that point no job was beneath him and but more importantly it’s not so obvious that jobs are beneath people you know because even if you’re a even if you imagine you have a job as a checkout person in a in a Grocery store you know as a fairly unskilled job you can be in some miserable resentful horrid bastard doing that job boy You know you can come in there just exuding resentment bitterness and making mistakes and Making sure that every customer that passes by you has a slightly worse day than they need to right and and you know pilfering time and perhaps pilfering goods and being resentful about the people who Who gave you the position because they’re above you in the dominance hierarchy and talking you know bad things Gossiping behind the back of your co-workers. It’s like you can take your menial position Self described and turn that into a very nice little slice of hell That’s for sure and you know you go into places like that. I always think of the archetypal diner in that way You know you guys have been in this diner. There’s a really good opposite diner, and there’s a great video on YouTube It’s Tom Waits reading reading a poem by Bukowski and I think it’s called Nirvana And it’s about a good diner that he happened to visit Bukowski happened to visit when he was on a bus when he was a When he was a kid a diner where everything was going well, and you could listen to that. It’s great. I think it’s great Not much chance completely cut loose from purpose He was a young man riding a bus through North Carolina on the way to somewhere And it began to snow The bus stopped a little cafe in the hills and the passengers entered And he said at the counter with the others and he ordered food arrived And the meal was particularly good and the coffee The waitress was unlike the women he’d known She was unaffected There was a natural humor which came from her The fry cook said crazy things and the dishwasher and back laughed a good clean pleasant laugh The young man watched the snow through the window And wanted to stay in that cafe forever The curious feeling swam through him that everything was beautiful there, and it would always stay beautiful there And then the bus driver told the passengers that it was time to board The young man thought I’ll just stay here I’ll just stay here But then he rose and he followed the others onto the bus He found his seat and he looked at the cafe through the window Then the bus moved off down the curve downward out of the hills And the young man looked straight forward And he heard the other passengers speaking of other things where they were reading or trying to sleep And they hadn’t noticed the magic And the young man put his head to one side closed his eyes and pretended to sleep It was nothing else to do Just listen to the sound of the engine the sound of the tires In the snow This is the opposite diner I’m thinking about so you’ll go into a diner right it’s seven o’clock in the morning and you order some bacon and eggs and some toast and then you look around in the diner and you think It was like 1975 when the windows were last washed and there’s this kind of thick coating of who gives a damn grease on the on the wall You know and and the floor too has got that sort of stickiness that you really have to work at to develop over years You know and the waitress is she’s not happy to be there and the guy behind the counter isn’t happy that that happens to Be the waitress that he’s working with and then you know you walk down the stairs Maybe to the washroom and that’s its own little trip and so you come back and you order your damn eggs and you order your toast and you order your bacon and then it comes and like the eggs are Too cooked on the bottom so they’re kind of brown and then they’re kind of raw on top and and they’re cold in the middle Which is you really have to work to cook an egg like that man But you can master that with like ten years of bitterness you teach you how to cook an egg like that And then the toast here’s what you do with the toast right you put you take you you take the white bread You know the pre sliced stuff that no one should ever eat Then you put that in the toaster and you overcook it and then you wait and then you pop it out of the toaster and Then because it’s overcooked you scrape it off And you knock off the crumbs so it doesn’t look too burnt And then you wait till it’s cold and then you put cold margarine on it because if you put cold margarine First of all not butter But if you put cold margarine on you can also kind of tear holes in it so that then it has Lumps of margarine in it and it’s really dry except where it’s too greasy So that’s like its own little work of art man, and then you put that on the side with the with the With the eggs, and then you have the potatoes, and this is how you cook the potatoes properly You know so they’re leftover potatoes And you keep dumping new leftover potatoes into the old leftover potatoes over weeks And so some of the potatoes have they’re no longer potatoes right they’ve half returned to Mother Earth Then you flap them on the grill and you sort of I don’t know you burn them a bit. I guess and then you’ve slapped them on the plate and Jesus you don’t want to eat those man That’s for sure and that’s the point and then You have the bacon and you want to make sure you buy the lowest possible quality bacon That’s that’s how you start and then you throw it on the grill And you don’t your grill has to be overheated to do this you have to cook the bacon so that it’s raw in Places and burnt in other places and it has that delightful Pitch-like odor that only really cheap badly cooked bacon can provide or maybe you use those little breakfast sausages that No one in their bloody right mind would let within 15 feet of anything living you know And then you serve that right and you serve it with the kind of orange juice that is only orange in color And and with coffee that’s oh What would you say it was started too early in the morning? That’s the first thing Bad quality coffee started too early in the morning Got cold once or twice and has been reheated and then you serve that with whitener It’s like here is your breakfast. It’s like no man. That’s not breakfast. That’s hell You know And and you created it And then what you do if you have a diner like that is because you have a miserable life if you have a diner like That and you’ve really worked on achieving that is every night you go home And you curse your wife and you curse your kids and you fucking well curse God to for Producing a universe where a diner like yours is allowed to exist and that’s your bloody life