I thought to drink in excess would make me a better something
That's a great way to put it. I had already realized that booze could grease the wheels, but after reading Bukowski, I thought I could opt out of just about everything but booze and the written word. I didn't go to school, I drank myself silly, I wrote jack shit. I told myself I was just too young to be good, anyway. That someday I'd write great poetry about how I used to write shitty poetry. I told myself that depression was a great experience. I did things I was ashamed of. I probably would have done the same without having read Bukowski, but without the added embarrassment of having to admit that I mis-used Buk's work to justify it all. I tried.
After a particular blackout wherein I thoroughly humiliated myself, I quit drinking. I began to write again after a couple of months, just for myself, just to get it out. Now I drank coffee when I wrote, without thoughts of immortality or audience or of myself as a writer. Now it was just a hobby, and I wasn't trying to be anything but a decent person--someone who could live life without being on the edge of a deep dark hole. I wrote more and more, I started reading at open mics, started to find my voice, quite different from Buk's. THEN I realized what his work was really about.
I started drinking again a year later, off and on but mostly on. But I never looked to anyone else's work or life to model my own after, I never romanticized booze or shitty behavior or paralyzing depression again. I learned that shame has a purpose besides hilighting incidents to one day write about. Ten years later I'm still learning these lessons.
So I guess the answer is yes, in the end Bukowski's work had an impact on my personal life, after I realized that his work was about himself, not me, and that if it 'meant' anything, it was that I needed to be true to myself, if I could just figure out how.
