the Minutes 83011

She said why don’t you come see me when the sun goes down
It’ll be just like the old days when I used to let you hang around

She’s going out west, rolling on to Tuscon, where we’ll meet in the fall.  I found her and we were happy but now she’s going away.  I feel lucky&blessed to have had her these last few months.  Our mutual trust and respect have been nothing short of a graceful dance.  She’s a good girl and she’s got the Wisdom but I got the Work.  I’ll be hanging back in Hippie Town for the next three weeks cranking out the last three installments of this column.  By the end of the Terrible Summer I’ll be on my way back to her on the Road King.  Until then it’s just you&me, Brother.

Estimates range between 22-40 dead from Tropical Storm Irene’s petulant throes on the east coast last week.  My sister wrote me  from Delaware that her basement was flooded and other than being annoyed her and the kids are OK.  I know Sicko’s power was out in the burbs of Philly b/c it inspired him to write this powerful blog old-school and in longhand.  Tropical Storms are like Hurricanes that you can drive through.  I should know.  I had nothing but Tom Waits and a rail of meth to help me push through Tropical Storm Cindy back in the summer of 05.  It was weeks before the world and certainly NOLA would forget all about Cindy as Katrina asserted herself as the HBIC of Crescent City.
Who was Michelle Bachman kidding  at the Baptist Megaplex in Sarasota, FLA last week?  The congregation?  Baptists don’t kid around with God’s punishments.  For violating the first and second of the 10 Commandments for example, the punishment is genocide.   If God was punishing Congress he’d have to use something other than frak-tremors or some  pussy rain.

Here in Hippie Town on Thursday, after 75 consecutive days of triple-digit temperatures, we were treated to a tenth of an inch of rain.  I was at the pool and there was nothing relaxing or refreshing about it.  The pool developed a greasy sheen that burned my eyes.  I had to take a shower and this made me late for work.  Aho-the Terrible Summer.  What else could it be?

Let’s face it, it’s  been a Terrible Summer for errybody except perhaps the US Congress and Ted Nugent.

Just ask Mrs.Quadaffy or the Dallas Cowboys.  Yep, Mrs.Q’s been discovered seeking refuge in Algeria with her children this morning.  Not that her escape in a convoy of Mercedes limousines could be missed by anyone except the NTC but her and her children were probably the ones wearing haterblockers with gold bouillon strapped to the roof.

If only the Dallas Cowboys could be so lucky.  They weren’t carrying anything except their balls, handed to them by the Minnesota Vikings despite stumbling  into a false dawn of Victory on Mall of America field on Saturday.

This ties them at 2-1 in the pre-Season with my hometown Birds, but-don’t get fooled again.  The last time I put any faith or money on the Philadelphia Eagles was during their first ever Superbowl back in 05 against the lecherous Pats.  Pine Street was blazing with angry fags in loud cars and green balloons and the Birds loss was a bad sign.
The Year of the Cock wasn’t good for anyone.  I do have one fond memory of a fine morning in Pheonix when I got the call.  The Reverend Kevin P.O’Brien called me at my hotel.  The sun was warm and fine, shining down on my Skynyrd morning radio but, looking back,  that’s probably when all this trouble began.

Well I don’t know, I might not speak the language anymore
Too long in the wasteland will close some doors
–Too Long in the Wasteland, James McMurtry

 Maybe I can right some wrongs next time I’m in Arizona.  The old man would have been 60 on Saturday.  I’ll pay homage in the only way I know how.  I’ll be burning through the wasteland on his old bike until I see the first sign for the Land of Enchantment-New Mexico.  Even in exile with her I’ll be inwardly wishing that there were just a few more Trainers in the world and she knows this.  She’s a good girl.

Yep, I’ll be cranking out three more installments of the Minutes here at Bat Manor before I head west.  There’ll be plenty of nightswimming and early morning texts about the strangeness of existence until then, so, send me yr digits if I don’t already have them.  Then Ill be  following her to temple on the Road King.

May you enjoy your ride down the slope of History.
Namaste.

notion struck me last night baby, I believe I take a stroll out west.
David “Honeyboy” Edwards
June 28, 1915 – August 29, 2011
RIP

the Minutes 82311: death&money

I came to collect.  By the end of the Cowboys-Chargers game on Sunday I was the only one in town smiling.  It got tense in BJs.  Disappointment hung in the air.  The sun was setting as the news came on.  Revolutionaries had captured Tripoli and it looked like Quadaffy would fall, fast&easy, nice&sleazy.

The CIA couldn’t have done a better job.  Raven hair in the Dallas jersey lowered the volume and put on some countrified Classic Rock.  I paid my check and walked out into the record breaking heat.
Traffic on Main was murder but I made it to Houston in good time.  I locked up my truck in Westheimer.  I got the key out of the box and let myself in.  I spent the next 17hours by the pool and in her room.  The Mobile Area Media Unit was cranking it out in fine gear but the news coming downwire was strange and made me uneasy. 
“You should just put it down.  For now.”  She said. 
She’s a good girl.  We had melon and mint juleps.  She made coffee and grilled tuna steaks while I smoked a cigar.  The shitty Texas weekend was winding down as the bells of freedom rung in the Other Hemisphere.

“I guess you can take the bike and the title.  We’ll get it all notarized when you get back.”  He yammered to me on Saturday.  He ran his hands down the front of his pants.  They were streaked with paint and oil.  Rather than hitching a trailer and pulling it the hundred-sixty miles back to Austin I decided to have her follow me in the truck and ride on through, me&the King.  It’s what the old man would have done. 
Violence wasn’t needed.  In fact it might have all seemed quite passive to passersby.  I only had to communicate that it wouldn’t matter how he went down but he would be going down, with me or otherwise, should I not collect.  I intimated that his whole whitetrash operation was combustible and that I liked fire.  I spoke to the reptile part of his brain and he listened.

Death&money.  I don’t have anything to say about Libya or a rich shitbag from Texas named Rick Perry.  I’m busy running from death for money.  You know what I did this summer when I got back from Berlin?  I spent my first 6weeks back in this country working for a redneck Senator’s son and all my money went to traffic court and utility bills. 

Things are different now but nothing has changed.  The news and the news media and all your snapped poses and posturing on Facebook have made me weary. 
I burned down 281 to the Pearl of the South and when I got here I just wanted to turn back around.  I would have stayed in Houston longer but I had to get back to town for a “staff meeting” at noon on Tuesday.  The meeting made my eyes hurt and I was left with no choice but to push back deadline for this column.  Death&money.  She was at the apartment making omelets when I got back.  She’s a good girl.  We’ll crank out this week and head on back down.  All this world has made me weary.  See you in Houston punk rocker, if you speak your truth plain and keep the hours of a bat.

#15

The Office of Jim Trainer
Night Shift
Austin, TX

Dave Hagysback, Mako Reles
Lap of Luxury
Hippie Town

8/17/11
1:32am

Greetings-

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?  Tonight on KUT they’re playing all this Native American chant type shit on Under Currents. OK-technically there was this sample of some Indian chants in the last hour but the song McVikar’s playing now sounds like G.Razas’ ancestors doing a Flesh Offering.  Oh good, now he’s playing the Doors, my favorite.  I didn’t drop acid, did you?
Of course not.  We just live here; condemned to suffer these hippie’s sensibilities in the Pearl of the South.
When I saw Autolux at Waterloo last summer I wanted to smash a beer bottle on this feelgoody’s head.  Autolux plays killit music.  It’s not supposed to feel good you Soul Coughing choad.
Anyway I’m on the deep deep night shift.  I’m STANCHIONED in front of my laptop in the War Room listening to this LSD radio b/c I know that it’s more twisted&strange out there than a double-live Doors album.
There’s a fool on every corner when yer trying to get home.-Rosanne Cash
Why can’t we drink forever?-TOOL
Out there on Ben White tonight I was texting this broad and drinking a quart of Old Familiar.  I pulled in behind the 711 at Congress.  I parked and got out.  I locked my car.  Did you ever see the City Market back there?  I’ve seen some shit in my 36 years but this grocery is weird and strange-WRONG.  There were four Mexicans in cowboy hats out front smoking  under the blinking ‘E’.  The parking lot was full and the lights were on but the sign on the door said CLOSED.  What the hell?  How should I know?  I’m just a hapless yanqui living in Paradise.
OK-I’ve snapped off that crank on the radio and I have the sudden urge for a nightswim so I’ll get to the point.  Asian Cruise my brothers.  There is nothing else.  The record-breaking heat is making me jiggy.  I still think about Su Si, out there in the deep, peeing in her arms.  Thanks to psilocybin&Tequila  I will never forget Hagysback’s laugh although I really wish I could.
Their resistance is paper-thin.  Tell Ronnie to get a dinghy if he has to, we need to go up on over the Rise to claim our Crown.  OK-this broad is texting me again.  She wants me to ride out to Breaker to snuggle.  I hear sirens out in the Barrio and I’m two sheets to the wind but I’m tempted.  This is what dry land will do to a man.

I thought I was a big, big man.  Until I stepped out onto flat land.-Swift Ships

Duerme bien.
Momento mori.
yours,
Jim Trainer
The Night Shift
jimtrainer.wordpress.com
jimtrainer.net

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I'VE LAUNCHED AND RELAUNCHED THIS A THOUSAND TIMES, AND I STILL HAVE SOME OF YOUR ADDRESSES, BUT IF YOU SEND ME YOUR ADDRESS I WILL SEND YOU A LETTER. #goforthepost #letterday #goingforthepost

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the Minutes 81611

We are living in Paradise.
I was down in La Grange on Saturday, population 4641.  If you’re ever in Texas be sure to decamp in Houston or Austin.  If you venture out beyond the city limits of either of these two metropoli, you might end up in, well, Texas.  “Texas is the reason” this country rolled back to a debt-ridden, war-mongering Republic.  It was nothing new but W’s conniving mule smile didn’t even try to hide:  him and Cheney and them (including a wussy Dem Congress) Cashed Out Everything except Social Security (although they tried to do that too).  They lied.  They fucked us from the front and they wiped off their pricks with the Fourth Amendment.  It’s your fault.  You and the press never touched the Bush War and Doctrine.  The American people may as well have been looking at those 8 years through an empty toilet paper roll compared to the microscope the objective American press scrutinizes Obama’s term with now.
He inherited it all.  We did too.  We’re left holding that empty toilet paper roll and the shit just keeps coming.

I was drinking Margarita’s in Sealand on Business 77 when a small, ugly and indifferent, Asian-American woman approached me.
“Is everything all right?”
Her hatred was a class act.  She wasn’t simmering but certainly somewhere within her, there in the fascia of her muscles, was a hatred for anything more than 100 miles outside Houston, and certainly me, the Yankee from Austin with his laptop and haterblockers.
“Yes, yes.  I was wondering what the passkey for the internet is.”
“I don’t know,” she intoned, “well my husband does the internet and I don’t know anything about the internet or computers really.”
If you believe this Asian-American woman knows nothing about computers or the internet than perhaps the other realities of La Grange, Texas would be more than copasetic with you.  With its charming 18^th Century store hours and cemeteries on either side of 159 as you enter town-why, you’d be happy as a clam beneath the dumb hot sun and looking forward to the next Bike Rally or Rodeo.

“Well then.  Can I have some more mayonnaise?” I asked.
The people of La Grange aren’t to blame.  Neither the red states nor the blue ones.  That town’s just another sleeping city on the plains.  Maybe they have jobs, maybe they have trucks, maybe they don’t have anything better to do than stare at a Yankee and hope the angry Mexicans at the bar will kick my ass.  Being to all the lower 48 has made me into some kind of reptile.  I’ve seen allot.  Small townery doesn’t faze me and after Indianapolis and Cleveland you’d be hard to kill, too.
History’s a queer thing.  It’s all so clear in hindsight and it’s more remarkable that the U.S. reacted to past horrors at all let alone acted constructively or did something befitting of the Land of the Free.
The unemployment rate in Greece is up 40% from last year and Ireland is following suit.  Hungry people cause World Wars.  It gets worse.  There’s an enemy out there and the only way for him to get to Heaven quick is to die trying to kill you.
There’s a mother travelling across the horn of Africa for 20 days with her children searching for food.  She must leave those children who die on the journey behind, buried in the sands of the desert.  When she gets to camp she won’t be able to immunize her children to the diseases running rampant at camp.  The religious militants there reject and want no part of Western medicine or intervention.
There’s a jackass up there on the podium pandering to the New Dumb.  There are people in sleeping towns in this country who won’t think anything of slipping into some ready-made demographic/voting bloc as long as their hatred has a target and as long as that target is YOU.
Then there’s you and me, Jack.  We’ve let our apathy get the best of us.  It seemed to work in the past.  The world slid further, darkly down, and we didn’t care.

I have 6 more installments of the Minutes until the end of the Terrible Summer.  By the fall I’ll be able to write 800 words in 8 hours and collect my $50 and be on my way.  While working on this column my outrage has become a curious thing.  Neitchze was right.  I took a look into the abyss and it took a look into me.  The apathy is cracking.  It’s giving way to an Outrage that’s addictive and enlightening.  I’ll be rebuilding the temple and I’ll be keeping and eye on you, brother.

if you call me brother now forgive me if I inquire
just according to whose plan?
when it all comes down to dust I will kill you if I must
I will help you if I can.
when it all comes down to dust I will help you if I must
I will kill you if I can.-L.Cohen

We are living in Paradise.  We all have to die.  Welcome to the New Century.

just like Papa

well, the car died
just as we pulled into the spot.
we went out
and someone took our photo.
we a took cab back to her place
and when we were lying down, sleeping
she asked
“what do you want from me?”
I took a cab home from her place
and the next day at 3 in the afternoon
a friend of mine and me
we got the car started.
I’d been on the phone with AAA for three hours
and I spent one hundred dollars renewing my membership
but it was a dead battery and AAA was not needed
after all.
after the jump I spent another hundred dollars
on the new battery.
I drove straight to the shop,
bought a 6 pack, and had a beer drank
by the time I got home.
peace doesn’t come easy sometimes
and sometimes peace never comes
even when met with no real adversity.

I called the night supervisor
told him I was having car trouble and I
would need the night off.

 

---

Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void, progenitor of stand-up tragedy™. Jim Trainer publishes a collection of poetry every year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.

Papa, along with 6 other poems and an essay written in tribute to Charles Bukowski, are available in the latest issue of The Schuylkill Valley Journal.

the minutes 8911

I am finding it increasingly difficult to cull even some disgust at the current state of affairs in this country.  Is it shock or just a nervous, uneasy feeling in the bowels and in fact the apprehension of nothing but shit to come?

“In this case the hostage was the American people, and I was not willing to see them get harmed,”-President Barack Obama, November 2010
Obama lost the audacity of hope back in November of last year when he effectively eliminated $238 billion dollars in revenue by extending Bush-era tax breaks for the top 2% of earners making over $250,000 a year.
In all truth the die was cast two years before that when the 2^nd, 6^th and 19^th biggest contributors to Obama’s Presidential campaign were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase&Co. and Morgan Stanley respectively. 

His statement to  the press yesterday touched on the “the worst recession of our lifetimes” and the potential loss of one million jobs or less than one half percent of growth to our jacked-up economy if Congress can’t get it together.
He also had some words about the 30 Americans shot down in Afghanistan over the weekend. 
To put all this in perspective, take a look at the salaries of Navy Seals and you’ll see what the Center for Economic and Policy Research was talking about in May:
“This means that they[Wall Street] make almost twice as much in a day as a Navy Seal earns in a year.”

I don’t know where, why, or what woodwork these Rightwing nutters are coming out of but it’s clear they want to roll this country back to the good old days before FDR. 
They harken back to Reagan who not only waged a War on Drugs, but a War On the Poor, the Mentally Unstable, and the Unionized Working Class on the dark day of August 5th, 1981. 
I can’t take it anymore.  It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stomach the way this wretched New Century is running down.  I’ll put it to you country simple, in language that even Michelle Bachman can understand:  if you live in a town in New Hampshire or South Carolina and Rick Perry comes a knockin you must run that maggot down.

“But the trouble is, they’re so mobile.  You clear them out and they pop up somewhere else.”-Police Inspector in Catford England, yesterday
Look to London if you need inspiration.  The news coming down wire of the 3 day outrage of rioting and looting on the streets of London underscores the most important issue of our time.  That issue is Net Neutrality.  Just ask Penny Red. She was one of the few sympathetic voices on the rioters in Lewisham, Croydon, Peckham and at Chalk Farm just down the road from her apartment where she wrote yesterday.

There’s a torch burning.  We either pick it up or cough up the 125 grand we’ll need to buy our citizenship and begin a new life on some dirty beach in the Caribbean.  Good luck brother.  The State ain’t gonna let you go that easy.  The United States of America will probably stick you with 10 years of back taxes before it recognizes your expatriation, whether you’re behind this trillion-dollar Christian jihad or not.

I don’t know but I been told
hard to run with the weight of gold.-The Greatful Dead

See you on the island, punkrocker.

the Minutes 8211

Why’s it take a funeral boy, to bring you back to town?
The Funeral Turnpike Troubadours

My old shields of Apathy and Anger are failing me so I rely on the old familiars to get me through.  I suffer rueful mornings hungover with a smoker’s cough and a wasted life behind me.  At least that’s how it feels anyway.  We’re ratcheted in the torpid and heinous mechanizations of the New Century and all I can do is drink a 12pack and smoke Norwegian Shag?  My father was right.

I’m not even close to fully comprehending the soon (any minute now really) to be resolved financial crisis.  The Wisdom tells me that it’s all dog&pony.  Obama will take it weakly, butt hurt and crestfallen among big sharp grins from the Suits with Red ties.  Somewhere in America an under/overqualified non-unionized employee feels justified and the hatred for the working poor by the willfully ignorant will be perfect.

Taking a look around the block at the world outside America can only reassure all the Key Players that the U.S. Economy is still the only game in town, except for maybe the Sleeping Dragon of China.  What was written will be done, especially if it’s written on checks made out to the People’s Republic. 

I’m not the first to say that if the U.S. Economy loses its AAA rating then surely what will come next will be the scrambling and posturing of investors declaring that those ratings don’t matter anyway.  Welcome to the Greek Century brother.  Salud.  Kiss your working wage and pension goodbye. 

Some paranoid jackboot posted on my Facebook last week:  “The Dumb want to have their way in this Country. If they do get their way let ’em have it. Knowing you were right won’t make a damn when the Chinese own your children and the Airways are clogged with annihilation.”
It may not be the End Times but the coming Age of Nutter’s Rule.  Violence, retribution and willfull ignorance are an understandable, if insane, response to insanity.  Let’s go crazy, let’s get nuts. 

Just ask   Private First Class Naser Jason Abdo.  Former pacifist-posterboy for a peaceful Islam went from being a hero on ABC news to being arrested in Killeen, TX with 6 pounds of smokeless explosives and a 9mm back in his rented room on Wednesday.  The party he was planning wasn’t the American kind.  He was going extremist, except that he atypically planned to leave no survivors as grim momentoes behind.  He would finish the wounded off with the 9. 

And so I ask you, who but the insane&me could go on living, chasing this silly rock n roll/Bukowski dream when a man like Abdo is sitting in a hotel room a few towns away and a nutter like Joseph Steck flies a plane into a federal building a few blocks from my apartment?  You’ve heard about Drop&Roll, JAPS and Hitler, the Communist Threat and TERRORISM?  Well all those old scares and paranoias our parents suffered are nothing compared to the coming Age of Nutter’s Rule. 

Look on the brightside, we remembered when rock and roll was born last week.  Yep, on July 27, 1955 Maybelline dropped on America like a race riot and all the man had to do was mix a little country with a little blues.  Chuck Berry was a change agent and Elvis was the Man’s response. 
Not Elvis the preVietnam-babyboomer- protoNick Cave from Mississippi, but Elvis the product.  The Elvis you find at a Flying J in the middle of a winter night with a spilled tankfull of RV urine soaking you through.  Yeah, right, that Elvis.  What do you want from me?  It’s the minutes, the news.  You want a real rockstar, look up Lydon, Johnny.

And listen to my homeboy Matt Reilly why don’t ya?  The Philadelphia ex-Pat was killin it, filling in on KUT last week.  John Aeli coming back from vacation can only mean Death in the morning and another reason to sleep late.

Matt the Electrician really delivers with Friends from his Accidental Thief album.      How rarely can an artist convey real joy?  Pure, unadulterated, and original, un-clichéd happiness?  How rare a cheery tune in a dead dark world.  You go homeboy, just-wow.

If there’s anything good about 30 days in a row of triple-digit temperatures it’s that it’s not for the Weak.  Singer Caleb Followill couldn’t take the Texas heat and ended up walking offstage in Dallas on Friday.  His brother and bandmate in Kings of Leon tweeted that “There are problems in our band bigger than not drinking enough Gatorade.”, like sucking, for example. 

The employees at a Virginia [IKEA] plant voted overwhelmingly to unionize on Wednesday.  This could be the only last little bit of good news to come across my desk last week and certain to make Billy Bragg happy.  He was on Democracy Now on Thursday, teaching this “old faithless dog”(me) some new tricks.  These two news items brightened an otherwise bleak&painful 27th week of the 11^th year of the New Century. 

See you on the streets punkrocker, keep cool and please PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HANDLE BATS.

As for me, I hope they never see, D.B.Cooper again.
–Todd Snider