A BARSTOOL STEREOTYPE (guest blogger)

Happy New Year to all my 'Basement' buddies... I have a special treat for everyone.This is a guest post from Caleb J Ross, author of the chapbook "Charactered Pieces: stories," as part of his (ridiculously named) Blog Orgy Tour. Visit his website for a full list of blog stops. "Charactered Pieces: stories" is currently available from OW Press or Amazon. For more, check out his web site.__________________________I’ve a secret dream of being a barstool...

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RED FEZ: THE LAST MOMENTS OF PAPA H (poem)

OK. Shameless self-promotion time... My prose poem THE LAST MOMENTS OF PAPA H is now live over at Red Fez, a great online portal. The piece actually started out as a piece of flash fiction at Six Sentences that I eventually went on to rework. Red Fez was founded in 2003 by independent author Leopold McGinnis and concentrates on publishing and promoting non-mainstream, but accessible work by underground and under-recognized artists. The site/zine...

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BUMS CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS (poem & podcast)

Please click play to enjoy an audio reading BUMS CELEBRATE CHRISTMASIn the gutter, you tend tonotice things normalpeople wouldn't dare dream.You notice puddles;And that befriending a hungrypooch can be your biggestmistake or quitefrankly, your only hope;Nerf footballs make theoddest shapes when eachend is chopped off andthey make damn fine pillows;Blended beers from differentbottles don't taste allthat bad once you get usedto the initial warm jolt;If...

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WTF ALERT: DRUNK FOUR YEAR-OLD FOUND WANDERING HIS NEIGHBORHOOD

OK... You can't make this stuff up. Kinda sad. Oddly funny in that demented way... Here's the scoop:April Wright, of Chattanooga, Tenn., is 21 years-old and is divorcing her hubby who's in jail. Her little four-year-old sneaks out of the house in the middle of the night, opens a Bud Light, gets skunk drunk, puts on a dress and steals the neighbors' presents from under their tree."He ran away trying to find his father," she said. "He wanted to get...

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LOTTERY MAN (poem & podcast)

Please click play to enjoy an audio readingLOTTERY MANBack when I worked at the luncheonette,I remember the guy used to comein every day. Sometimes twice.He'd sit at the counter, order his coffee,break out his pad and pencil and beganto jot down numbers. All sortsof fucking numbers.Every page would be dated and undereach day, he would jot down thewinning lottery numbers in pencil.Licking the tip each time before he wrote,he'd mumur to himself, almost...

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OUR KIND OF SOUP...

Dunno where this pic exactly originated online, but I think it might be our kind of place. Right?addthis_url=''; addthis_title=''; addthis_pub='avenutol...

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TWITTERATURE: HAS IT COME TO THIS??

OK... So we're all busy. Most of us can't eke out enough time to write or update our blogs much less READ. Imagine that? Us writers needing more time to READ.In any case, heeding the call of many time-crunched readers (and I assume to the ire of all us scribes), two enterprising University of Chicago students have published "Twitterature: the World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less." It's already been released in England and Australia and...

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MY SEARCH FOR CHILI'S PALMER'S JACKET or THE BADNESS OF MOVIE LEATHER...

Something is seriously wrong. It just dawned on me that this is my second post about a coat in a very short time span. In any case, I wrote this for Playboy Online sometime in the late '90s. Being that it's nowhere to be found on the interweb, I figured I would rework it ever so slightly and give it a decent home here in Bukowski's Basement. OK, so what's it about? My humble search for the perfect leather jacket -- a Chili Palmer leather jacket...

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A LETTER TO MY TEENAGE SELF

So there I was the other day, driving, and I heard on the radio station how Elton John wrote a letter to his teenage self for some UK book. The jock went on a little about it and I thought, "Huh, how interesting... What would I say to my teenaged self given the chance?"After thinking about it a small while. This is what came out:____________________________________________Dear lil' Ant: Your parents are doing a pretty good job so I'm gonna concentrate...

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OVER A HAMBURGER (poem & podcast)

Please click play to enjoy an audio readingOVER A HAMBURGERSo here we were.Again.Staring at each other,this time over a hamburgerduring a late lunch.And I can’t drink thisfucking beer fast enough.I need to get out of this zone.The more she doesn’t sayanything, and stares at me orinto space, the more my head pounds.It throbbed the second we got up,partly because I was dreadingthe day that would be coming.She was still pissed aboutour talk which never...

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I WEAR HIS JACKET (poem & podcast)

Please click play to enjoy an audio reading I WEAR HIS JACKET The military jacket was crumpled in a sloppy ball on the floor of the antique show that some chickadee dragged me to. After hours and hours and rows upon rows of beat-to-shit furniture, hat pins and jewelry boxes, I saw it, this gorgeously authentic army jacket. Laying there, musty and crinkled, I tried it on and it was a perfect fit. This was the real deal, not some knockoff shit direct...

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WTF ALERT: WHO SAYS BOOKS ARE DEAD?

Blockbuster Video is selling books now... I know times are rough for the video retailer but selling books?? And they're not even movie tie-ins ala the Harry Potter or Twilight franchises. Oh well, chalk another one up to us hard-workin' scribes...Thanks to Gizmodo for posting the pic above.addthis_url=''; addthis_title=''; addthis_pub='avenutol...

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