The Shit

If you want something different to happen, do something different.

-My Zen Master of an ex-girlfriend
They’re out there grinding it out, beeping and drilling and building their towers of greed into the sky.  I had to get up just before starting this to shut the window and put on Rebels, Rogues&Sworn Brothers, at top volume, just to drown the sounds of new Austin out.  I’m on my second large mug of Extra Dark and this post is shaping up to be the kind I loathe.  Who the fuck am I and why should you care about what I’m listening to and what kind of coffee I’m drinking?  I got caught up in a rom com on TV the other night, because I’m a romantic jerkoff, and I realized that nothing will ever be the same.  Know what I mean, Brothers and Sisters?  Never again will an all-white cast living in New York City be acceptable, even for harmless distractions.  It used to just be evil and vapid-you know, pop culture-but now it feels criminal.  The middle class is part of our mythology now.  It only exists up on the screen and in the cellulite.  It ain’t me, Brother, and it certainly ain’t them-the working poor-who I’m one disaster and dental appointment away from at all times and we’re not white or black or Hispanic or Middle Eastern or Sioux but in fact all of them and more.  From now on, there is only us and them.  It’s always been that way but some of you are just waking up now, you didn’t listen to punk rock before it became a fad, or grew up somewhere so incredibly isolated it could’ve been life threatening for you to make a stand.  Make no mistake, we are in The Shit now, and this will be our fight for the rest of our lives.  Or, we could just slide nice and sleazy into the new world order, draw the blinds and turn up the TV.  Apathy has never looked so good and this is where things get sticky for me.
Apathy is a reaction.  It’s a feeling (or lack of), and there are prescribed actions that come in response to it.  Once you’re apathetic, you gotta feed the monkey.  The world only spins darker, you’ll need better drugs, cheaper booze, an extensive supply of British cigarettes.  The problem, good reader, the rub-I ain’t got no monkey.  If I were to be as apathetic as I dream about for these harrowing last gasps of The America, I’d need something to keep it all at bay.  Well, I ain’t got it. Nothing.  I’m straight edge and asexual (most of the time).  There ain’t a lot I go in for.  My point is, as much as I’d love to hide somewhere-I ain’t got nothing to take away the pain, nothing to quell the anger.  I’d be stowed away with it and it would destroy me.  Just like opiates or alcohol or a codependent relationship would, my anger would consume me, chew me, trash me-you bet.  This brings us to point.  I’m sick of here.  It’s fucked here.  I’m hating everyone and everything.  I’m nonplussed and unimpressed.  In the interest of wanting to change my life I offer this overly personal, petty and cringe-worthy post.  Why should you care?  I don’t know.  Why should any of us?

You played yourself to death in me.

–Failure

Ab irato,
Jim Trainer
Going For The Throat
Yellow Lark Press

Come celebrate the release of All in the wind this Sunday at Malvern Books, with readings by local favorites G.F. Harper and Jenna Martin Opperman, also releasing beautiful collections of their own.  As per usual, I’ll be telling a story-about Philly, sobriety and you, My People.  Light refreshments provided.  

Confessions of a Race Traitor

I feel like I’m at a wedding in the suburbs.
-Yours Truly, on the Juan Pelota page as I write this post

I think you work harder if you’re haunted by some small darkness.
–John Darnielle

Faith in humanity is ignorance of humanity.
-John Staples

The bourgeoise had better watch out for me!
–Bad Brains

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Am I right? Also, it pleased me to write the word fuck clear across the screen as a black leather choad laughed a plastic laugh and talked about “projections” and “growth” while sitting next to me in this boutique of a coffee shop. Now they’re playing My Girl. It’s too fucking cozy in here. WAY too many smiles. What the fuck is my problem?  Am I angry? Depressed&Isolated? You bet. But tell me, what’s so good about the world that I should want to be a part of it? The Buddhists will tell you that hiding from the source of your suffering will only make it worse. All I know is, walking around out here on the street I feel like I want to rip peoples faces off, just to see what’s underneath. Know what I mean? In Philly they ask what the fuck are you looking at? In Austin they say How’s your day going? in a perky tone that communicates the very essence of non-comittal interaction. Christ these choads prattle on.

Psychologically, the windows of my well being are clearer than ever. I can see forever on a good day. The bad days still come around and cling, backwaters of anger and paralysis, no cure for but good rock and roll, a bourbon-or hot sex, fully clothed in the afternoon, zipping up and kissing her goodbye. If I hadn’t of broke my edge I might not know that nicotine doesn’t really help, with the anger or anything else. It just feels good, which is hard to argue with, especially as the days darken and the beast slouches toward Bethlehem. I should warn you, this post may be erratic. They’re playing all the hits here and I’m on my third cup of Hairbender. To paraphrase Uncle Hank, what you need never comes fast enough and when it finally arrives you realize you didn’t want it anyway. That’s how it feels, which is everything to a sensitive Pisces like me. I started this graph reporting on recent and sustained periods of clearness-but I couldn’t help myself and land in the black, hemtophagous days, killing and cruel time with the white people and their music in this cafe.

It’s good to be white. There aren’t any heavy ramifications to dumping Universal Healthcare because you don’t like the Muslim Socialist (read:  nigger) who had the balls to change how we treat the poor and mentally ill in this country. What happens in public schools doesn’t matter, and the black vans and helicopters swarming sanctuary cities aren’t coming for your people. I swear I have enough hatred for boonie-dwelling, closeted racist crackers to burn the coast from D.C. to Jacksonville City. The climate change denying is baffling, but I guess if you don’t even notice a 70 degree week in the middle of February than there really is no way me or anyone besides Alex Jones will reach you in your bubble. If you’re wondering about my bubble, I don’t have one. I’ve been apolitical for most of my life and certainly for the life of this blog. I’d like to live my life in peace, and that includes not murdering others to do so. I’m sure this graph has painted me a target for the Nationalists out there, and the New Dumb. Might as well be honest, eh Comrade? I’m sick of the parade, I left the party a long time ago. The Left is fucked and waking up somewhere comfortable and quiet when they finally realize they have more in common with Blacks than they’ve ever shared with the ruling class. There is no doubt that men like Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell will be relegated to the wrong side of History, but where does that leave apathetic and apolitical jerkoffs like me, who’ve done little to none in the 17 years since W. stole the general election and wiretapped every phone, computer and home in The America?

I can’t say I’m much better, except I’ve been too battle weary, worn out by my own abuse, not reaching for a solution or the common good but holding out until the pain passes. I play rock and roll. I write poetry. I left Philly because I was fed up catching attitude everywhere from the public library to the 711-and Austin, the Velvet Rut, as good as its been to me, is looking more and more like an ad for L.L. Bean and the Americana and country music I came here for must compete with programmed beats and neon trash they pump in places like Plush and Pop.

I’m getting depressed again. I been through certain avenues of the mental health system and through these cycles enough times to know. It ain’t me, Brother, Sister. What’s wrong with Jimbo is what’s wrong with the world. I’ve lived my life in the service of Art, and created Art in service to my blues. A couple years ago, while working on The Coarse Grind, fellow thinker, writer and Brother Bean Maguire asked me for some words on addiction. The thing grew into a monster in which I attempted to chronicle the savage road through depression and alcoholism to recovery. I’m thinking it’s time to dust it off and send it up the pole. I need a little distance from the blog, and what the Buddhists call detachment could be good for me-before I trash my job and my house, this town and everyone I know. The blog’s been cutting too close to the bone, and I could use some professionalism as I look for work in the Arts and plug into as many outlets as it’ll take to exhaust my anger and spare my fellow man. Thank you for joining me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m needed at a Black Lives Matter meeting.

See you on the streets motherfucker.

The Coarse Grind, Becoming The Media

Whoa.  Part 3&the final installment of The Coarse Grind, written in better and far less ominous days.  The message is the same.  VOX POPULI VOX DEI (the voice of the people is the voice of God).  See you next week motherfucker.

Aho, good reader.  Hopefully you’ve been keeping up with The Coarse Grind because today I’m going for it.  Last we spoke, I confessed that after 19 years I finally knew I was a writer and it was all ’cause I started a blog.  It’s true.  I won’t get into the vast saga of a backstory  behind it but I tapped into a medium that was immediate and honest.  I had, or felt like I had, an instant audience.  I’ve always looked at writing like performing so blogging really gave me a charge.  The way you feel right before you go on stage.  Super, all too, human.From that saga of a backstory I will offer this- my heroes have taught me well.  My heroes were on the outside and they broke in.  The rules didn’t apply to Hunter Thompson which was hardly always glamorous.

This will not be a recipe for how to be a successful writer, at least not the accepted definition of success.  Do consider however, if you want to be a successful writer, one who gets paid, then you must write.  Have a system or M.O. that you know will keep you writing.  Willing.  Enthusiastic, even.  The thing that keeps me writing is my interest in it.  Sadly what is of most interest to me is myself.  Nothing else.  In fact, current events really bum me the fuck out and opinion pieces are odious.  It all feels like programming to me and all of it just swirls into a hulking barrage of sights and sounds, horrors and “truths” that I must isolate myself from.  Thank god for writing because it has become my refuge from the dark spinning world.
My point is why would campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz attribute Hunter Thompson as “the least factual, most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in 1976?  And, why are we finding out now that this country was dragged into war under false pretenses, that the freedom we were fighting for was only being taken away from us by those same warlords, when we have a free press in America, and reporting is held to a high standard of objectivity and truth?  Without the internet or a distant relative living in the middle east-without Twitter, for Christ-we would have no idea what the Arab Spring was all about.  Well, some idea, and probably a spun one, provoking a reaction that could then be reported on until it was true.  I started Going for the Throat just as Arab Spring started rumbling, just as the stanchions under memorials to dictators were giving way in the parks and out on the street.  I’m not a journalist.  But I am a reporter.  And that, good reader, is the magic of writing.
None of these are reasons why after 19 years on the daylabor circuit I knew I was a writer.  I know that I’m a writer because I write.  I don’t ever not write.  And it’s all because I have found a medium that is as inexhaustible as it is exhilarating.  I have instant material simply by getting out of bed in the morning and with the click of a mouse it’s out there with all the “real” journalism.  I have stepped into the Arena.  I’m up there in the hot lights with all the shit-savvy  polished faces and grim intellectual voices of news media.

Is what I write true?  Better believe it.  Or, don’t.  And start your own blog now.

The Coarse Grind, A Tale of Two Hanks

Fuck.  Well, here’s part 2.  SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.

I always wanted to be a writer.  That’s not to say that I always knew I wanted to be a writer.  It is to say that for the last 22 years I have wanted to be a writer, but only actualized it and felt like one for the last 2 or 3.  Depending on who’s counting and if it’s the inner critic I don’t want to know.  That bastard.  Too many times he’s shut me down.  Told me I ain’t shit and that I needed to get drunk if I wanted to be like Papa (Bukowski) or lift weights if I wanted to be like Henry Rollins.  The truth is I always wanted to be a writer but I didn’t know how.  I mean I always journaled, but-did that count?  Hopefully any writer reading this has felt the power of it, the magic of writing.  In 20,000 Days On Earth, Nick Cave discovers that he can control the weather with his moods simply by writing about it.
“Now if I could only control my moods.”  He sullenly adds.
Today’s installment of The Coarse Grind is a very Zen offering, so bear with me and don’t let me off the hook.  Too often lofty advice is given for the reader to pore or fawn over while the writer’s slipped out to the alleyway to get paid and hail a cab.  Same goes for Spirituality.  The truth about spirituality is the same as the truth about writing.  Both seem equally impossible, utterly unglamorous and something entirely different than our ideas about them.  But both also are redeemed when  you consider that their road is the only road and that’s the one we are on, good reader.  That if you want to be a writer you must write.  Simple, right?  Perhaps.  Do consider what can keep you from writing.  Or worse-what can take the inspiration out of it until distractions become disasters that can physically keep you from writing.
I don’t need to tell you.  You know your weaknesses.  And I know mine.  But the only thing that will keep you going back, sitting down and spending more long hours on the sinking throne is if you like what you’re doing.  Old Hank B. said it must come shooting out of your fingertips, that if it’s difficult then don’t try.  But old Hank R. would probably say the opposite:  it must be hard, it must be painful, because you are a no-talent nobody who must get up hours before everybody else to be on par.  Now here comes the Zen so hold on to your seat.  Today’s Zen of writing moment is brought to you by The Boss:
“Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times. If it doesn’t drive you crazy, it will make you strong.”
There you have it, your religion.  What about dogma?  Because who among us wouldn’t rather have written than actually write?
Those 19 years when I wanted to be a writer?  I knew I would be published when I first saw a copy of Rollins’ One From None.  I knew it ’cause he knew it and ol Hank Rollins showed us how.  Also (and here is why Bukowski is my Papa and his contribution to literature can never be underestimated) Papa told me that I could be a poet.  I could write from where I was at.  Which is right here, in my chair, in my house and from within the circus of my mind.  19 years after first seeing a copy of Rollins’ book and 15 after reading Papa for the first time, I started a blog.  Then I knew it.  I was a writer.