It is incumbent upon the savage to submit to civilization, the civilized are under no likened obligation.
-John Staples
Success comes from staying in the fight and using what you’ve learned over and over again.
-Joe Rogan
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
painted upon a pole, and underwrit
“Here may you see the tyrant.”
-Macbeth, Act 5
Rock ain’t nothing but a white version of rhythm and blues, motherfucker.
-Quincy Jones
Warmest Greetings from the War Room. I’m on cup 4 of Italian Roast with honey. There’s a diffuse light glowing through the blinds. In the distance I hear the hiss of wet wheels on the highway. I’m off temp work for now, after spending 30 hours behind a desk at the Austin Convention Center over the last 3 days, getting up at the butt-crack of dawn and back in bed by 10. This is a good life Good Reader. It’s not fair and the stakes are rigged but, despite my life-long career as a misanthrope and cynic, I think people are good, mostly, and by people I mean working folks. The wealthy fall into 2 categories, and neither of them are affecting change to make things better for people like me, who have healthcare, or for those who don’t, God help them. Healthcare in the greatest country in the world ranks a lot less than great worldwide, but—don’t too wise. Folks lucky enough to be born elsewhere may be covered but no one is safe from American Hegemony. The world is on a precipice, turbulent and wiggy. Everything we’ve feared we created and between our interventions and a dictator, what’s the difference? There are folks who’ll say it’s been this way since the beginning. Man builds his own cages, the rich go on gliding and the poor get sick and die. That kind of acceptance bothers me tremendously but I’m sure my own version of apathy-as-armor is just as gross and worse, entitled. I find little comfort from spiritual teachers about the way of the world but plenty of practical advice on how to be good to myself and make it through the day. Perhaps that’s the best place to start or else a rationalization and complicity that keeps the whole thing roiling and mired in blood and toil.
Going For The Throat has always been a fight. Over sixty two-thousand words against. If I wasn’t at war with them it was the dayjob and if it wasn’t the dayjob it was the USGOV, and if it wasn’t any of these it was my parents or heartbreak–frivolous love and paltry passions that, to be honest, I walked straight into, as gullible and lovesick as any romantic poet should be. The fight now though is against this blog, as meta as that is and if you can believe. Behind the curtain and pulling the strings on the whole show is the inner critic. Point is, it’s a great and grand dissatisfaction that drives me to write, and as we know writing is my goal and refuge. I want to write and I write when I’m dissatisfied, so I look for something to be dissatisfied about. Sounds like the inner critic to me. It’s certainly the inner critic condemning inside or outside 90% of these posts as trite and hackish. Then I read a post a year later and fall in love with the written word again, and see that I’ve come through with something exceptional in this power play of malaise and angst we call life, and the whole thing starts again. The inner critic’s like a crew chief, chain smoking over me as I work the hard ground, digging until my bones are clanging and jarred. The only comfort I take is in knowing a writer writes. I may only have a journalistic diary here, I may be a prima donna candy-ass who posts 6-900 words a week in order to feel better but—what’s wrong with that? At least I’m writing. I tell that to the inner critic and he’s sated and I can go on about my week.
You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall and every post you read is the latter. We win this way. We clear the chamber and reload. I’m writing to survive and you’re here with me and isn’t that nice? It redoubles me, Good Reader, and it goes on. These sessions here are proof. We made it through lightning rounds of suicide ideation and doubt and this column of black words on a white page flies as a flag of victory. When we meet again, we’ll know we made it through and we’ll laugh at our pain and skewer the bastards to the wall. Until then, much love motherfucker.
Ab irato,
Trainer
AUSTIN TX
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Going for the Throat 