Anchor’s Up for National Poetry Month

If I told you what I was doing today
would you shut up and get out of my way?
-Joe Jackson

Trainer here. Disrupting my twice-weekly publishing schedule to let you know that April is National Poetry Month.
As such I’ve started writing poetry again. And as such I’ll be posting friends&compatriots’ work on Going For The Throat all month long.
The final stages of editing on the film of the Philly reading are underway. Be great to share a clip or two with you this month as well, good&cherished Reader.
I’ll be reading tomorrow night at Bedpost Quickies;a 6-minute prose piece called You’d Be Alone Here, Too.
At once I feel so overwhelmed and unprepared. Foolish for blowing it out last night, biting back the tears with a Bloody and a 6-pack of Lonestar.
But today it’s like I suddenly woke up in Paradise and all of my dreams have come true. The greater vision I am channeling now begs these changes to be made. But the workload demands that I ain’t got time to change, that I do it and do it now.

Send me your poems:
Editor, Going For The Throat
jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com

T.S. Eliot was right.

I MATADOR, I ACROBAT

I suggest my meaning without metaphor, and slay you by the passing of my hand.

Writing about writing can be a real drag. But not for me. Poets hate other poets and writers are like any other clique-self congratulatory and useless. Time spent in a writer’s group is time better spent writing.

In some hot strike of luck or grand stroke of genius(madness), the act of writing has provided me with more inspiration than I could ever use. Writing about writing. Yep.
I’ve outsmarted the once crowned&ever hated writer’s block. Heh I put that bad bitch down and took it out like last year’s trash.

Writing about writing can cast me as acrobat, deadbeat romantic, matador, hack journalist, and dayworker. And if you follow, writing about writing is like holding a mirror up to a mirror. There are infinite mes spreading out into the horizon, with just as many typewriters and mugs of steaming black Italian espresso.
I’ve long since lost count of the amount of poems, blogs, letters and short stories that begin: “Here I sit…”.

As far as this blog is concerned, I tire of applying the multiple layers of metaphor it takes for me to present my truth publicly. I’ve really been working at it too, tweaking the details and minutae of my daily life so that I can speak it to you true&plain but also-I have been wearing a disguise on here, writing not from where it’s at but where I would like it to be.

In the years before my death I was an antichrist
-KJH

It pains me to have put so much time and effort into Creative Nonfiction and casting the “collision of the kings and queens” in a heroic light, only to be reproached by a reader about what on here is “true”. Not to mention that my writing is my refuge and more important to me than eating. It’s beyond reproach, Brothers&Sisters. No explanation is needed and none will be offered.
Anchor’s Up. Spring is here and the truth lies somewhere between these digital diatribes and the remote seaside bungalow I write from on the great white machine. Aho I have started writing Fiction in earnest on the IBM Selectric II. Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction-these terms are just genres really. I’ve always looked at writing like performing, which would explain my preponderance with writing about writing. Genres are great, a framework for you to weave your own truth to, sometimes in the words of another, and from way on down the line. That’s how they speak through us. So, I’ve been writing Fiction on the great white machine. And I’ve been telling you the truth on here for years.

But I’d be kidding myself if I failed to realize that the truth is stranger than fiction. And there is no greater Truth than the lie we constantly tell, to ourselves and to each other. And the audience for this blog is somehow so much greater with the loss of 1 reader.
She’s still in the stands. Cheering the entrance of the young matador as I stoically take my final bow.

It goes on, as the late great critic and American Sage Kurt Vonnegut has written. And on and on. Beams out from my perch, where I sit golem like on the roof cranking out these missives for you. I get 50 readers on the reg and I make my petition for truth.
But as acrobat, I swing wide and loftily grab that thing, my heart moving forward into the highest point of its arc. I thread my body through and am suddenly on the other side.

Viva la ficción.

War&Mouthpiece: Punk Rock, Poetry&Peace

Pre-gaming on the roof. Where else? Construction bols downstairs raising the foundation of the mansion. There’s a high snap in the air and what could it be but Spring, here at the end of blustery bastard March? Yesterday during therapy I had a gorgeous and buxom vision. I had to tell him to wait and put the phone down. I waved to her, at first. Then I said ‘hi’ in a high-pitched voice that made me feel like a teenager.

Besides this wash of a cold, wet wind this morning and the excitement that sailor weather always brings, I’m in a good mood. I got word this morning that my copy of No Slam Dancing, No Stage Diving, No Spikes An Oral History of the Legendary City Gardenshas shipped and is on its way to the mansion. It’d be most auspicious if it indeed arrived today as writer Amy Yates Weulfing will be on the Daily Show With John Stewart tonight. Oh yeah, it’ll be her and former Austinite and punk-rock freakazoid Gibby Haynes.
Aho. In my line of work today is what you call a Hot One-there’s work to be done and not enough hours in the day to get to it all, nor enough drugs to help, nor any other life for me, Brothers&Sisters. This is the shit. Real media, real time. Transmission Aho.
Yep most days the mid-line, as you’ve heard me write before. Although far from ideal, assuredly better than the days you see me on here dippin’ into the codeine blue. Melancholy shits of days when I give up with a Bloody before noon and hang a sign on the office door that reads NO NEWS TODAY. FUCK RIGHT OFF. Let’s face it, shit can get grim.
But days like today are why I got into this business. More than enough news that means something to me&my People, and from my vantage point right here on the front-lines.
Ok the plane is still missing. And Russia’s committed the finest land grab since Iraq I. And Obama’s butthurt and righteous and here comes the fucking freedom talk; rhetoric clogging up liberal media outlets like CNN when I go downstairs in the mansion to smoke out my boss.
World Events bum me out, or rather-the reportage of World Events really gets me down. Good thing we have Peace Correspondent Brother Don Bajema on the masthead here at GFtT. He’ll be weighing in on all this WWIII beeswax.
My political stance is a re-immersion into art. Museums, books, theaters, music-back into the physical world of exertion and challenge.
-Brother Don Bajema
Peace Correspondent, GFtT
Leave it to the pros, Brother. Eat the Rich and Fuck The Rest.

Oh, and all you poets out there-I want to hear from you. April is National Poetry Month and if I have my way there’ll be 30 new poems up on GFtT by May 1. Be some fine ammo in the stockpile and right on time as I plan to be gone by then, off and down the good red road to Olema, Shephardstown and Hostile City. I KNOW YOU HAVE A POEM. So tell the world. Make ’em know! And send it off to:

the Editor, GFtT
jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com

TUNE IN TONIGHT TO
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR AMY YATES WEULFING (NO SLAM DANCING, NO STAGE DIVING, NO SPIKES)&GIBBY HAYNES (BUTTHOLE SURFERS)!
on Comedy Central (check your local listings for times)

AND SEND US YR POEM FOR NATIONAL POETRY MONTH.
c/o
the Editor, GFtT
jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com

Spring has sprung. It’s sailor weather.

c’mon baby eat the rich
put the bite on the son-of-a-bitch
-Motorhead

Yrs,
the Iconoclast

Workingman’s Blues#3: Capitalism, pure and simple

2011 was a breakout year. I devoted all of my money and most of my time to being a writer. I wrote. I drank. And I spent allot of time in the pool at Oak Run in the pre-dawn hours with a little firefly of a girl who shall not be named. She got hitched and moved to South Carolina that fall and they closed the pool. I was sitting on 4 short stories and a stack of poetry. I had $200 to my name but very little to show for being a writer or a musician. $40 more than what I moved to town with 2 years before but worse-my despair was choking me of all my inspiration. There are many pitstops on the road to living your dreams. They look just like roadblocks though, and it can leave you rueing the words of your Father, questioning your very worth and asking yourself
Who am I to live my dreams?
The pool was closed. I was out of money. I failed.

Then something remarkable happened. Well, two things actually, and they both involved conversations with a firebrand, redheaded hippie-chick from Washington named Gioconda Parker. She’d go on to become a Guru for me and a dear and cherished friend for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet…

The following is an excerpt from my interview for an Events Bartending position up in Hill Country. You can live your dreams. You’ve got to learn to lie a little on your way there, though-something I never really got the hang of. This is for all you dreamers out there; and for all you dreamless corpses smugly conducting interviews in climate-controlled offices without ever knowing what it’s like to starve to death.

“I know you’re a musician so, hypothetically, what if you were offered a really big gig on a night when you were booked to work with us? What would you do?”
“Hmm. Let’s see…I of course would have to decline on the gig and come work for you and the company. It being that you’re paid $35 for every hour I work for the client and I only see $12 of that, it would pain me for you and the company to miss out on the $23 an hour you usually make off me for doing nothing while I hump trash cans and cinder blocks from the wet bar and am being talked down to by your sawed-off team leader at some filthy rich wedding in the bitter cold sticks of Bumblefuck, TX without a staff meal or gas money.”
“Sounds great, James.”
“Good Juan, I’m glad you approve. It’s capitalism, pure and simple.”

westbound

this town took a hit but it ain’t no reason to cry
I’ve been crying since October anyway and Spring
has come to hit it-the blues-Spring has come to
shake it out and crown you with a bright-hot sun mane
the streets’ll be opening for summer soon
after all the kids have gone home
there’ll be a long song now
into the deep June jungle nights
there’ll be more options to get lost in
and the bluebonnets petals’ll fly like
billowing flags of victory

I could dive another season down
it’s sailor weather
I could rear down and wait it out
and hold onto punctured balloon-girl dreams
or I could tell pain some things:
we stood it up and stood it down
we paced and beat our blues
but now that Southern’s left town
I’ll have to find a new use

the grim total of your life,
the times you’ve laughed so hard with friends
in the bottles that never end,
and the times you’ve checked death
made sure she was there
before you went out and tore down
the fewer nights of your 30s

it all makes a little less sense now
that Southern’s left town
rip out the sheet and start again, sailor
Paradise is a little smaller now.

The Trouble With Jimbo

The following post was originally intended to be published on my Birthday last week. I was hungover that day though, and wasn’t feeling it; so I wrote something else instead. I copped out on the real real. Took a dip into fantasy land. Poesy, as Papa would call it. Refuge, as it has become for me. My writing has become a pill I can swallow with cold mint mate in the once ever-crowned hateful afternoon. I can tie my pain to anchors and set sail. Aho I have rivalled the blues and outlived the old myth. Oh I’ll just let the 38 year-old me tell you all about it.

The Trouble With Jimbo
March 5, 2014, 6:42 PM

well I hope you don’t see me
in my ragged company
well you know I could never be alone
-Keith Richards

The truth about Jimbo is that I could never relax. Tonight’s a good example. It’s windy and warm. “Tits weather”, as my Yellow Lark would say. But she’s not here now. It’s just me and these fucking swarms of grackle, crowning the dusk and yelling at the sky. I’m drinking a Michelada cuz I’m bored and I’m bored cuz I can’t relax. It’s got me quoting the Rolling Stones for cry eye!
I mean, seriously? On the roof of the Last Confederate Governor of the U.S.’ old place, in the Live Music Captial of the World, heading out on the road in late Spring, one book in the can and another on the way-but crunching down ruefully on another triple 5 cuz I can’t relax?
I’ve known the blues, Brothers&Sisters. And I’ve known trouble. Believe me. But blues and trouble would be a fucking carnival compared to this ease and this comfort, this feeling my power fully and resting in it, my Truth.

The final and lasting danger is this contentment.

What kind of life have I lived if, even after all my dreams have come true, I rue the small moments and hate the “area of pause” and and basically not enjoy this exquisite boredom that would have been celebrated all those lean and gnarly, starving years before?

No solution, no problem.
-Melvis Lara

It ain’t easy takin’ it easy. Especially when I consider the scope of this vision and the weight of this dream I’m dreaming now. Welly well well. What do we have here but a rare and reflective moment of honesty from the writer?

Indeed as I buckle under this boredom and life has suddenly become too good for me it is this vulnerability, now revealed, that has made me feel brave enough to share this truth with you:

All those years, when you saw me sidelining it with a smoke and hater blockers on, when I was looking so cool and young and angry, way out on the far reaches of the roiling crowd? When I couldn’t tolerate phoniness and I thought it my foolish duty to shut it down always and in all ways? I was just coping, Brothers&Sisters. Walking sideways and seeking refuge from the fucking barrage of sights and sounds and yes, it was mostly pain. I couldn’t bare to see you suffer Brother. So I looked away. I tell you true in this rare moment of honesty-I am sorry. So sorry. Sorry I had to turn away from your pain and for foolishly thinking that it was any different from my own. Life was what I missed when I turned away, adolescently, in the hateful dusk, streaked in sweat and lust. And in the painful mornings, when I mistakingly confused life with a sentence and-while I’m being honest-death could not come fast enough.

What a fool I have been. So selfish and misguided and young. So unnecessarily sensitive. Even as I sit here this evening, with the blue dusk all around and the grackle suddenly silent, I know. I know what I’ve been sent here for. And it is at once so supremely selfish but not selfish at all. I’m here to celebrate and I mean that in the most authentic and all-encompassing way. I am here to celebrate your hunger and your pain. Your triumph and your victory. Your mourning-yes, we know this. I have sat in vigil but forgot who lit the candle. I want to remember and I want to remember that it was you. Yes you. As much as you’ve read I’ve rued you. Hated you. Felt held but never coveted by you. And as much as I’ve suffered hearing how intense I am, how I’m so deeply emotional (as if that could ever be anything to be ashamed of). I’m here to tell you that I could never handle my own intensity. But all that’s about to change. I’ve spent decades putting out fires foolishly thinking that the flame would ever go out. And foraging and ferreting my light as if I could ever run out of fuel.

The truth about Jimbo is I’ve been trying to change for awhile now and perhaps it high time to give a little credit where credit is due, do like the Yogis do, and start where I am, but also-walk through the fucking door.

There isn’t much time to be bored, tell you the truth. The world needs saving now and in this regard, my Irish/Italian-American Karma is about as useful as a pack a day habit. It really is that simple, People. I’m tired of living a lie but also I know what is true.
Beat down, fucked and fucking and any and all alcoholic writers whose life&work I will always cherish, all that ain’t me. I’m basically speaking through you (thanks) and trying to convince myself, in writing first (where else?), that what’s ahead could never be any worse than what I have already endured. Twenty years on the outside is long enough. I want you to have my heart. I know it’s in here somewhere. Enough the demolition and enough the clearing out. Enough the War Time. This has been Grim Jim’s Last Ride.
There is a great and grave suffering in the world. But all is as it should be. And can we avoid catastrophe? Can we stop hoarding all our love, and step out bravely from in between the memory of pain and pleasure and truly reveal our heart to the world? I don’t know. But here’s to trying and another 40 years.

You have my heart. Don’t waste it. Don’t be like Jimbo. Go forth. Love each other. Don’t be bored. Read my blog.

Nights now fallen. I’ve voiced my regrets. And that’s all I can do. I’ll make my ablutions and lay down to sleep. And I will rise into that Great Eastern Sun with this vow redbouled. I will give my heart to you.

Still in Love

Lovers leave their traces like jets across the sky
They find in others’ faces, lines they recognize
My keepsakes have there places
At the back of a drawer
Or slipped between pages and stuck on a shelf

But I’m still in love
I’m still in love
I’m still in love
With nothing but myself

Yeah, sometimes I remember
The way they signed their names
And always in December, I feel some kind of shame
The heart, it stays so tender
I reminisce like a hangman wishing his prisoners well

But I’m still in love
I’m still in love
I’m still in love
With nothing but myself

And I know their mothers’ ages
And I know all the stories so well
And I know I’ll see their faces
in Hell
So wipe away their traces
Blow the dust off of the shelf

Because I’m still in love
I’m still in love
I’m still in love
With nothing but myself

lyrics by Justin Currie

Workingman’s Blues#2: Peach, Plum, Pear

The only lasting and final danger is this contentment. When I got this Caregiver gig I was pulling 12hour shifts on deathwatch-hospice care. I had just finished a stint as a temp at the University COOP and I totalled my car on the onramp to Ben White one rainy night. Apparently I owed $1,641 in overpayment of Unemployment Compensation to the state. I was somehow lower on the food chain than I was 3 years before when I moved down to Austin with $160 and 2 guitars. Well certainly lower on the food chain emotionally, if this was all I had to show for being a writer.

Then in what seemed like a stroke of lightning I got published. A poem of mine appeared in Divergent Magazine that hateful fucking winter. Then I got this job.

At 1 and 3/4 years this gig has eclipsed the longest job I ever had. That would be as a busboy at that bougie place on the row, from 2004-2005. This is beautiful writer Natalie Wilson’s (nee Kelly) recollection of meeting me, in that place and at that time. I have quite a different memory of the first time we met, however. Mine involves allot more light and, forgive me- it’s hard to piece together fully my recollection of the first time I ever saw one of the most gorgeous women I will ever see in my life.
Her memory isn’t too far off. I guess there was some darkness involved, bourbon and some hatred but, as the following passage will attest, back then she couldn’t tell the object of my hatred. Then again neither could I.

Am I so dear?
Do I run rare?
You’ve changed, some.
-Joanna Newsom

On a typical night in a different life, I climb the stairs from the basement of the cafe. Waiting at the top of the stairs is a room full of fresh-off-the-clock servers, cooks and bartenders fulfilling an unspoken three drink minimum after a long night in the dining mines. I always show up just in time- right before the paying customers leave, giving the green light for employees to infiltrate one of the more creepy dining rooms I’ve ever occupied. Once the dining room customers are gone, the bartender’s hand gets heavy- giving employees no reason to leave.

The room is small but it seats many. Old paintings of dogs hang on wall paper that could be 100 years old. Around antique tables, employees convene to discuss the events of the evening. Cooks grumbling about special requests, servers trying not to insinuate race was a factor when complaining about a the 10% tip and bartenders feeling happy and drunk. Eventually people disappear for several moments to the gender neutral bathrooms in the basement. Behind those doors, little straws transport cocaine of questionable quality from Point A (the back of the toilet seat) to Point B (up the nose). While a mural of a bulldog taking a shit observes their actions, they check their appearances in the mirrors as a wave of energy takes over.

The room becomes smaller when the heads are filled with cocaine. Conversation is intense, loud and not about anything even remotely important. A dozen people sit chain smoking, leaving half extinguished butts to smolder like incense. I can no longer follow conversation and the whole scene is giving me a touch of anxiety. So up into my head I go on an journey of quiet observation.

I half wonder if the man walking into the room is a figment of my imagination. His entrance goes unacknowledged as he quietly sits in the chair next to the door. The white noise of coke head conversation rages on without missing a beat. He crosses his legs and lights a cigarette. The cloud lingers as if there’s no circulation in the air around him giving the appearance of a protective bubble. His glass is small but full and it won’t last long at all. I don’t know who this man is with his tenebrous demeanor but I do know that he just might loathe everyone in the room.

In such a small room, a tall man can seem like a giant. I observe him as he monitors the booming conversation. He does not involve himself in any of the discussions. But the subtle changes in the expression on his face communicate enough: He is not amused.

I continue to observe in anticipation of a break in the cloud. A smirk, a forced smile or a sarcastic remark. Maybe a one syllable “ha” at the cook’s description of his oversized testicles. But he remains in his cloud clearly desiring to be someplace else.

White is the New Black

80 miles per hour in a car2go can feel like you’re fucking flying. I had an hour left on my break and needed to get to Duncan Munoz Office Machines and back to the mansion by 3:45pm. I passed the Missouri Pacific as I got onto the onramp for North Loop 1 and said hello to the train. My lovely friend. A Lincoln town car started crawling up my ass. I looked at her in the rearview. She was mean&miserable and trying to hitch a ride to my comet. Too fucking bad. Sorry sister ’cause I fucking smoked her. I passed Steck, Research Boulevard, Braker Lane-boom.

“How ya doin eh?” I grabbed Steve’s hand and shook it proudly. “Here she is.”
“Well.” I sat down. First and foremost I was impressed with just the size of her. And the way her keys sat snuggly in all that armor. She was like a white tank and I when I fired her up she hummed warmly in the dull white sunshine of the shop.
$222 later, and Steve sagely offering I “carry her like a book eh.” I was in the car and she was beside me. I thought about putting her on the floor of the car but changed my mind at the intersection. She’d ride upfront with me.
I cranked it down Braker and tore down to MoPac under that brave Texas sun.

I’m 39 today. And I have all the presents&gifts I could ever want or need. These years at the end of the road here are a boon. Gravy, as ol Raymond Carver would say. And I couldn’t be happier or want more. That is, I could not want so much impossibly more-from myself.

There’s a 1br house in Point Reyes with its doors swinging wide. And she’s on the porch swing smoking a triple 5, watching the tides roll in and the tides roll out. She was my mystery. She was my Lotus. She was my sexual communion and my release from the brutal streets of Philly. But now she is alone. Swinging in the salty air with a wry look of displeasure on her beautiful dark Asian face; but coy in the corners of her smile because she knows she’s not alone.

Indeed. We still walk together, you&I. You thought it was just that afternoon, around 2pm, as the waves rolled in and we talked. We really talked. The truth is that we are still having that conversation. And we’re still walking down the beach, at 2pm again, and that you are in my heart. And that we have truly lived, you&I, if we have been etched upon each other’s hearts, and if we have really experienced each other in this version of death we call life.
Aho and so I find forgiveness here, on my 39th Birthday and in the middle of Piscean torpor days. And the key is as simple as your smile. The sun. A fine compact car blazing like a rocket down the high avenues of Paradise. 5 minutes left on break. Parking. Getting out. Climbing the stairs. Carrying you “like a book eh.” And putting you DOWN. Finally.

Whew. What a relief, eh? No more tinkering twinkling songs of rue on a manual President XII Tower. No more shanty-night poetry, bent over the barrel and coughing it up on a black&tan Meteor Adler. Woody’s machine killed facists.

This machine remembers you.

And openly I pledged my heart to the grave and suffering land, and often in the consecrated night, I promised to love her faithfully until death, unafraid, with her heavy burden of fatality, and never to despise a single one of her enigmas. Thus did I join myself to her with a mortal cord.
-Holderlin, The Death of Empedocles

Grim Jim’s Last Ride

I shoulda known. I’d had more fun in 3 hours with them than I’d had the whole Fall. What a bleak time, the Fall. Bitter yellow months chomping fistfuls of black time and smoking triple 5s. Not the best basis for comparison perhaps, but this night was special.

We were at Gusto, 48th&Burnet in Hippie Town. We decided to get another bottle of wine. We drank that one much quicker and then dinner was over. We were having tea up in the high rooms when Rach asked me to go out with her for some cold beers in the midnight w/Southern et al. We trekked over to Gourmand’s and waded through the thick bario night to get there. Once out front, some dipshit was drunk and Alex and another broad discussed how he had just texted her looking for a hookup but-aho, here was out front the bar, shithoused and stupid and talking to her. We went in. I ordered a water and stood there at the end of the bar with my hood up, glowering. I observed the crowd dynamic and theatrics sullenly. Then I ordered a beer. I shoulda known. Years of alcohol abuse have rendered me curiously sensitive to the stuff. That’s the thing about alcoholism. You’d think with your increased tolerance you’d be able to handle it better. The truth is you handle drunkenness the same way every time. That is to say, you don’t handle it at all. That’s what being drunk is. But with the increased amount of time and larger quantities it takes to get there, you’ve got more time to think about it and reason it out. But even the most seasoned alcoholic like me will find his senses muted, his sensibilities non-existent and a burning desire for confrontation, or at least something to grab hold of to stop the Ferris wheel from a-spinning.
I’ll spare you the details of what happened next and just get right to the point. After 2 hours of watching young people stab each other with conversation, rope you into one and suddenly ask you to step outside to smoke about it-I was only getting angrier and angrier. Shit. It’s nobody’s fault. Being angry with the misguided and unkempt and rude-the young-is like expecting to win a bullfight because you’re vegetarian. How’s that for a mixed metaphor? What do you want from me? I was drunk. And after all these years of doing it the hardway my emotional switchboard is all-wet and shorted out. You know what my problem is? Anger. Aho. Been my drug of choice for as long as I can remember, even when I was a straight-edge skinhead. Well I guess I always smoked but anyway, yeah. Fuck it. At least that’s what all systems read when I get shitty. Which I will get. No doubt about it. Alcohol is Jim Trainer’s rainstorm in a bottle. Instant black cloud. Now, get me drunk in a dirty shithole east side with a bunch of folks who don’t know they’re gonna die and it’s a recipe for catastrophe. So anyway. I almost came to fisticuffs with the lesbian who tends bar there and I’m not looking forward to seeing her again. I don’t do well with alpha males. I mean, I get it, you’re a lesbian-but, you’re still a woman, right? The fairer sex? The goddess? I’ve been wearing white tees and jeans longer than you’ve been alive honey. And I wasn’t hitting on your girlfriend. My comments to her were some of the realest conversation I’d had all night. I didn’t realize she was so shithoused but after standing at the end of the bar for 2 hours I shoulda known. When I finally opened my mouth and said what was really on my mind, and in fact it was the only positive sentiment I had come up with all night long and not only that but found the need to communicate it, and then you come up “swoll” as you say, pointing your 20-year-old finger in my face and judge ME? Well. Here’s the thing, honey. Alpha males are a conception of the losers. You know what tough guys do? They throwdown. They don’t talk about it. Would I react that way given a choice today? Probably not.
What would be your answer to that question?
Actually it doesn’t matter because by that point, my friends were thinking that I had an anger problem and I just needed to be dropped off and put to bed and THEY WERE RIGHT. I was up past my bedtime and I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much. You don’t grow up in Hostile City and reach the age of 40 without more than a few forgone conclusions about your own behavior when alcohol takes the place of sleep, let alone in a dirty ill-lighted room full of 20-somethings after midnight on the East Side.
Fuck it. Sorry doll. I am. I think you should take a look at yourself a little more closely but, that’s me. Live your life. I hope that if we do meet again it’s peaceful and we can reach an understanding. But it won’t be after 10pm. And that goes for the lot of yas. It’s the Year of the Pumpkin and March 1st was Piscean Independence Day. No more bullshit for this old soldier. And no more a whole lot of other shit, too.

The final and lasting danger is this contentment. All my heroes are dead. I’m going dark, while simultaneously going suit-and-tie guy with the career. I may write about my life but that doesn’t mean I have to live it all the time. Or live it down. Or give authenticity to my writer’s voice by drinking like Henry Miller and fighting like Papa. What a fool I have been. And I don’t mind apologizing for it, either. If I did I’d still be a fool. 39 will be a banner year. 2014 is the Year of Jim Trainer. The Year of Jenn Spransy. The Year of Maureen Ferguson and the Year of the Pumpkin. No more deep-cuts in the lust-smothered night, no more rueing of the sunlight and no more bitters for the ingenuine. I’ve rivalled the blues, and trouble cain’t touch this. After all these years I’m like a lion tamer, and my patience-once ever lacking-has found a new fount. I know what I’ve come for. I will have no use for my own heart when I’m dead and gone. I ain’t takin’ it wit me. I’ll be leaving it here, with all of you and hopefully years before I check out.

we may have caved to tempests of lust
and hid, shut out behind walls of resentment
-Ring The Bells

Thank you for joining me in this version of death we call life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do.
Signing off, this is the end of our broadcast day. This has been Grim Jim’s Last Ride.