Jim Trainer

Archive for May, 2019|Monthly archive page

PASSION WAGES

In Uncategorized on May 30, 2019 at 9:00 am

…people in those positions are controlled in the exact same way as people who are considered traditional employees.  Nothing changes in their lives except they don’t get unemployment insurance, or they don’t get worker’s compensation.  They don’t get the minimum wage.
-Veena Dubal

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system.
–Charles Bukowski

I felt shut out of those relationships. 
–Heather Derr-Smith

…I don’t think the normal rules of journalism would apply to what I was doing.
-David Brock

Warmest Greetings from the War Room.  It’s been so long, eh Good Reader?  Not that I left you holding the bag.  I had 2 of them thangs back loaded and ready to go.  Long ones traipsing the thorny terrain ain’t it though.  Sure enough by the time I had the last 2 weeks’ posts written for Going For The Throat, things began to turn.  I was telling Brother Rob on the phone that it works every time and how blessed we at the wheel can be.  It either drives you or it drives you insane.  This is surgery we gather here for and I can’t do it with drugs or alcohol so I may as well cut and splay the inner diatribes of a workaholic scribe who bartends and captains parties for $15-25/hr to keep me from the outdoors and anyway quiet afternoons like this when I can get it out in 6-800 words here or at The Coarse Grind.  Mencken was right, this is the life of Kings although Rich didn’t seem so jazzed or plussed about it.  Last night around the sink in the kitchen at the Texas Tribune I told the part-timer that his was the real work but he wasn’t so sure.  He’s 29.  Things are different for him.  Now there’s an understatement.  He’s thinking he’s got it made, and he does–it was a moment further from death for him than it was for me, scrubbing out the tequila from a beverage dispenser as he loitered in the kitchen at a work party for journalists.  Long may you run.

We lost the best storyteller this town had a couple weeks ago.  Doc was a brute at the mic and a mensch of a man besides.  All I can come up with is sadness.  He was a soldier and I left him needing, wide open and exposed on the frontlines.  Brian, I love you Man, and I can’t wait to see you again.  I showed up late to his memorial at Kick Butt Sunday but for good reason.  I was reading to support the release of Justin Arnold’s A Dog Outside at Night in a Fight.  Life goes on and death goes on but Brian Doc Grosz’s death has given me a gift.  I want to be there for it, this Life, and you, even and especially when you bore or exacerbate me.  I know that’s not the right use of that word.  I’m a poet–what do you want from me?  I know that this is all there is and that boredom and even irritation with them can be the first line of defense for this lifelong sufferer of a major depressive disorder.  I’ve started practicing Yoga again, with my guru and Friend and I’ll be taking a mentorship with her this Fall to get this rig unwound, start paying attention and devoting myself to something greater.  That’s what I was on about the last couple weeks–blogging here and jerking the days off, suffering the shit carbs and sugar of a 7-11 cuisine after humping 2 coolers full of ice to the 6th floor of the Texas Tribune simply will not do, Good Reader.  I don’t have time to be down.  Or the bandwidth or anything other than beauty and ire to give to this Life.  It’s for Doc.  I’m here to celebrate that I’ve culled some real Wisdom in the arena of self mastery.  I can see how much I’ve wasted and the only way to reconcile this loss is to use it as my inspiration today.

I’m trying to tell you I love you and you’re a pain in the ass and this Life is all we got.  Let us be courageous like the Buddha, stand out in the light of day and die laughing if we can.  Our work will save us.  Vox populi vox dei.

READ THE COARSE GRIND AT INTO THE VOID MAGAZINE

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Love you Brother.

THANK THE GODS

In Uncategorized on May 23, 2019 at 5:26 am
I’m going to work for my sanity
give it everything I got
though so far I have cheated death
I know someday I’ll get caught
just living…
I’ve turned my pain into a masterpiece.  A body of work anyway.  Even if I survive my blues, which, technically I always do, and I get home and hang it up and look around the musty environs of an isolated garage apartment behind a high wooden gate and off a busy boulevard with all bills paid, I’ve a body of work.  Some in totes in the closet—reams of white typewritten pages and journals.  Some published—also in totes but bound neatly in gorgeous covers designed by Snakes Will Eat You.  And most—on here and elsewhere and scattered across the great wide web.  10 years of posts exist here and whether you like it or no (and more importantly whether or not I do) it’s a body of work.  I wonder if I’ve only trained myself in the wrong kind of journalism, that Chas is right and blogging is passé and anyway I’m only a narcissist who when he gets home from slinging food and drink is practically buried in his own words.  Sadly I am the only thing that’s interested me for the last decade.  Sure, I wrote about them some.  We picked ‘em off ain’t it though.  Shot high and aimed low on the bastards.  Point is Creative Nonfiction was wide enough for me to get my arms around what was bothering me and then I took it on the road.  Personal Journalism may not pay but it’s lit my way traveling to the southern tip of the Eastern Bloc last summer and down below the Equator to the Land of Eternal Spring last Christmas.  The question isn’t if I should write less about The Trouble With Jimbo but even more from the Night Kitchen of my own warring mind.  I might not write without the Blues and anyway all I write about are the Blues.  Ain’t it motherfucking though.
Also, I parlayed.  I think I’m coming through with The Coarse Grind.  You tell me I am.  Pioneering the dissolution of classic essay writing can be a lonely profession though, and I’m not even sure it’s a profession.   I start, see it through, and I finish.  If I’m taking the advice I gave writers at my lecture at LSUS in April, then I am writing.  Writing is the why of all this and I laugh recalling how worried I was that the real work would only suffer quitting drinking.  I write more now than I ever did.  Columns and poems, blogs and letters.  I have different kinds of hangovers now but that’s another story—and different kinds of damage.  I’m still getting to the bottom of it and writing’s the shovel, Good Reader.  The last 2 posts on here alone will attest.  It’s always a wonder that writing the worst turns and getting my arms around the diaphanous down my mind takes is what always precedes the pick up.  I come around.  Bet and we do it together, and–isn’t that nice?  Point was I’m able to write about “other”, aren’t I?  Or am I deluding myself and this body of work is only in turns riddled and addled and anyway volleying between a colossal egomania/devastation and the inability to see a paragraph through, at least in common essay writing and ENGLISH COMPOSITION terms.  Ah but don’t too wise—I started this graph declaring I can write about the other and will wrap it by saying it doesn’t even matter.  Fuck Macaluso and fuck any idea I’ve ever had about being a paid journalist.  One aughtn’t never say never (now that’s a fucking statement) though, especially when it comes to ends.  I’m not painting myself into a corner as much as I am fighting my way out of one.  I’ll get a book deal out of The Coarse Grind and self publish an anthology of Going For The Throat.  They’ll know me by my name and anyway with my legs up and the door wide and sipping honey-sweet Italian black coffee while writing is everything to me.  I’m able to take off in my mind, go remote inside and even affect my own psychology.  I don’t think it beyond the realm of possibility that I can write my own ticket, and I’m going to keep at it anyway.  In many ways my dreams of becoming a columnist have come true.

As far as my other dreams, well—it’s been 10 years since I rolled into town and I’m spinning my wheels to black.  I make more money playing music than my dayjob, I just need to book enough shows to live on.  A steady check is more than a steady check as I’m sure these posts will attest. I’ve got an ingrown dread of being outdoors but I’m at a different fork now.  Doesn’t mean the shows should just be up for grabs but the path for me is perhaps somewhere in the middle of playing music for a living and gigging as much as I work the dayjob.  The dayjob’s alright, Good Reader, for now. I just need to get a hold of my damage, what else is new, and make the most of my days even if it means 16 hours at it, for weeks at a time, bartending and serving and banging them out on a Selectric II in the A.M., James Kelman and me, and getting out on the road and finding for you, my People.  I know you’re out there.

See you soon motherfucker.

Jim Trainer — Back in the Game from Michael Batchelor on Vimeo.

 

MORE FROM THE TRENCHES

In Uncategorized on May 16, 2019 at 9:00 am

for Doc

Saturday I took off work.  Well, my scheduled job fell through and I was offered another but I declined.  Most of Saturday was wasted.  Deliberately and semi-joyously.  Doing nothing was the point.  Truth is, I vacillated to painful extremes and pored over job offers and the staff calendar–until they were staffed and the start time for each had passed.  It’s hard to refuse work in this business–you’ve got to take it when it comes.  5 jobs this Saturday and zero next.  It’s the nature of the biz.  It’s hard to refuse work because that’s not how I was raised.  I’ve my parents in my head when I take off work but I’ve no parents in the world who would help me if I fell on hard times.  The fear of the outdoors has reconditioned my nervous system.  It’s well documented and, after all these years getting by, irrational and not based in reality.  I probably won’t end up on the streets again but in my mind it’s a fine line between taking off work and being destitute.  Chalk it up to the karma I inherited from depression-era grandparents and parents who had it drilled into them–without a job you’re nothing.  Throw the Catholic faith into the mix and a belief you get nothing without paying for it and even then you’ve got to grip it with white knuckles because you don’t really deserve it anyway, and I’m a model employee.  I’ll show up early.  Until I start to feel trapped.  Then I’ll start being late, maybe, or at least be remiss on the job.

I’ve avoided feeling trapped for most of my life.  A lot of the contention with my last gig was just that–it had me by the balls.  It was a live-in position.  My boss was a micro-managing pothead who doubled as my landlord.  I got sober there but it’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself.  I had to walk back from my own suicide and spend time on the island in an attempt to shed the dark impulses commonly found in newly-sober alcoholics.  My understanding is that without drink and drug, and anyway your identity as a drinker and drugger, a colossal nihilism can set in.  Alcoholics don’t know who they are.  We’re frozen developmentally and never really dealt with the crises of identity and how we relate to the world.  I can speak for myself–I got blotto for many years, it was a movable feast and anyway heaps better than dealing with how up against it and trapped I felt, and how dismal the world looked to me.  I’d internalized so much of my parents split, my mother’s smothering love and my father’s absence of or any validation at all.  You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to add that up–I was a depressive nihilist with zero self-esteem but doted on if not beloved by a cast of gorgeous and cruel women.  I had no boundaries and I didn’t want any.  I couldn’t see past tonight and I didn’t want to.  Live for today wasn’t a positive maxim for me.  It was more like fuck the world.  I didn’t care about myself or anybody else.  I wanted to die before 30 but I had dreams, I was a dreamer, and I was stubborn about that.  When I tell you Art saved my life, I’m not being cute.  It’s as real as it gets.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu6c03cF7UP/

Not much has changed and I don’t really expect it to.  I’m still a nihilist.  I don’t believe in Gods but have come around on the idea of thanking them.  Things are still fucked for me–I’m wracked and barbed with it, this black disease.  I isolate myself from my friends and everyone else is an enemy.  None of this is news for you though, is it Good Reader?  I’m as fucked as ever but what’s wrong with me stands in bas relief.  Without distraction it’s all-the-time-blues, you bet.  Humility’s doing wonders, too, tell you the truth.  I gave up my power, and I’m sorry to all my punk rock friends about that, but–I don’t know if I had it anyway.  Surrender isn’t really surrender.  Surrender, the Gods, power–call these what you want but call them what they are.  If I’m out of control, the surest way to stay that way is to pretend I’ve got it.  Know what I mean?  I’ll take the truth over the Lie any day of the week and it don’t get more punk rock than that.  I’ve been writing these posts back to back for a couple reasons and it’s all related.  I’m calling this one MORE FROM THE TRENCHES because these last few weeks blogging have been intensely personal and usually the kind of thing I fall back and cringe from.  But I’m getting closer, Good Reader–peeling back the onion and I can’t stop now.  Point is, I’ve only been warming up.  It’s taken me this many posts and in these many words to get to it and here it is.

I’m depressed.  I’m watching Life pass me by.  In my day to day I’m tired, I’m over it, I don’t like you or your politics and you’re boring.  Truth is when I look back these will be some of the finest days of my life.  At least I know they could be.  I’ve got some health issues.  They’re taking the joy out of life and they’re demoralizing.  I can’t love and work is incredibly exhausting.  I can’t be the ladies’ man and I can’t relax at all being that’s how I always did it–spooning with her, in her bed, watching the fan and fitting in there, breathing at her neck and mmm…  All that is gone.  Vacillating between shitting my brains out and not being able to shit at all is exhausting, demoralizing and unhealthy besides.  It’s forced my dietary hand though and I’m loathe and strangely thankful for it.  I can’t do carbs, dairy, sauces, gluten, spice or refined sugar of any kind.  Barring heroin I’ve done everything under the sun, and sugar is at the root of it all and the worst thing we can do to ourselves.  It’s the antidote for this cruel game we’re trapped in but not a very good one.  Coping is just that–getting by.  Be it:  food, booze, sex, drugs, dysfunctional relating and drama, and anger–these are all ways in which we try to distract ourselves from our one great wound, our zero point and even just this grim reality surviving the meat grinder of capitalism and watching our Brothers and Sisters go down, with blood on our hands and powerless to turn or hold back the murderous fucking fray of–the United States, hegemony, money, lust and power and the rest.  Darkly turns the wheel of these end days of the final century.

I’m not telling you you’re wrong about the end of the world.  Nor would I ever simply suggest you feel any way other than how you do.  I believe that in the coal mines of isolation there are diamonds of solitude.  Being alone most of the time affords me time away from the Lie that most folks live by and have to, to get by.  I don’t fault them.  I don’t want to be around them either.  In the meantime, I am not living my dreams.  I’ve zero nights at the bar, zero mornings hungover and waste zero time texting or waiting to hear back from partners who aren’t stalking their dreams or living their best lives.  I’ve plenty more time on my hands than before.  Less in the long run but death and the fear of it should only put some spring in my step.  I’m hiding away and only coming through with the bare minimum.  I’m depressed and I’m in a bad spot right now.  I suspect it may be the same spot it ever was, I’m just better equipped to see it now.  I’ve less illusions and perhaps only one–that this world ain’t for me.  I don’t deserve to be happy or live my dreams.  This is where my heredity kicks in, though Good Reader.  I’m half Irish so you know that if it’s a lost cause I’m only going to champion it.  I’m half Italian so you know I am not going to give up.  I’m accountable to you and these posts, here on this blog.  I don’t want to be depressed anymore and at the very least do not want to give any more of my life over to a disease.  I’m looking back at how much of my life was wasted in its thrall and I’m terrified watching these few and fewer days go by–coping and hiding from the world and otherwise wasting away.  Wish me luck.

See you on the frontlines, motherfucker.

Rest easy my Friend.

brian

BRIAN GROSZ 

Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#20, Dear Maximum RocknRoll

In Uncategorized on May 10, 2019 at 7:02 am

#LetterDay, send me your address and I’ll write you a letter. #goingforthepost—we’re all mad here.

Going for the Throat

3923 Run of the Oaks Drive #G
Austin, TX 78704

Editors, Maximum RocknRoll
PO Box 460760
San Francisco, CA 94146

10/4/11

Hello-

Punk rock doesn’t mean anything anymore.  If you were there or part of it, sure-it means allot to you and for the rest of your life.  But this generation doesn’t get it.  And I fear they never will.  They’ll only think of punk rock in Guitar Hero terms, as a fashion or hairstyle.  Kurt Cobain.

11 years ago a band came out of Philly that was the real deal.  Seeing The Bad Vibes play meant you’d get your whole body chopped off in just under 15 minutes.  There might be bottles broke and basses through windows but you welcomed this annihilation.  It was rock and roll.  You had to find a way to get the world off your neck.

2002’s Hate Your Everything was propulsive-fast.  Furious and full…

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TOO STUBBORN TO DIE

In Uncategorized on May 9, 2019 at 10:36 am

Let’s walk back from my own suicide.

November 2016 I couldn’t shit.  I was ok for awhile after but by the same time the next year I was having explosive movements.  Painful, wet gas.  Not easy to deal with driving a box truck to W. San Antone or through the Samsung lot in the pre-dawn dark.  I know this is gross.  I can’t let that stop me–or any other kind of reservation.  I need to get this out, pun intended, and lay it on the line.

My libido has been touch and go since I was involved with a woman back home 10 years ago.  The issue was emotional but it came back with a vengeance.  It blinkered out again while on anti-depressants and I don’t think it ever got back up to speed.  I should mention I’m fine by myself, if you know what I mean.  I don’t wake up with a hardon much anymore, but–what male over 40 does?  I’ve also had a successful and moderately sexual relationship with a woman I admire very much.  Things got weird between us in this area though, and for this and other reasons we split.  I’ve had sex since I quit anti-depressants and it’s been fine.  Fine isn’t great, mind you, and mostly I’ve lost interest.  In the act even, I just hit a wall.  It could be my age.  It could be depression.

[EDIT:  After extensive, ahem, research, I’ve concluded that my libido is ok.  My woes are mental and not being able to relax.  Tell you something you don’t know.  😉  jt]

I’m working for a caterer in town.  It’s alright.  Exhausting, especially with my condition.  I temp out my weekends, with any number of other companies, and work like a pig for them for shit money–which is especially exhausting.  The main gig is alright.  I’m making good money with them, a raise of almost 100% from what I was being paid last year, and I like the gigs, mostly–and I especially like my boss.  I don’t have any plans for the summer which seems criminal considering what I did last year.  So I’ll work.  For money and otherwise.  Make plans so I won’t have to work and can be out of town as much as possible.  It is what it is.

I live in a garage apartment, centrally located.  It’s alright.  $750 all bills which is about what I’d pay living in a group house, or with roommates, and it’s all mine motherfucker.  The location is great.  It’s rough though, dudecore–a little musty in here, dorm room fridge; it could come up heaps by way of its comfort level.  I’ve a loft bed over a writing desk, a love seat, kitchen table and a chest of drawers.  The rest is gear, books and writing–mine and others, taking up and covering valuable surface space.  I often have to move to the love seat in the middle of the night due to my innumerable runs to the bathroom with painful, wet gas.  My stuff is everywhere and the place could stand some TLC as well as general order and organization.

I’ve a Japanese car, a Honda Element, with 65k miles.  I bought it cash, and will need to go on record as making enough money to get something else financed when the time comes.  This worries me.  It runs a little loud but otherwise fine.  A blessing I am most certainly counting.

Summing up–I can’t shit or I’ll have to shit uncontrollably and explosively, on the job and in the middle of the night.  There’s a bunch of things I simply cannot eat but that’s only bad in the sense that I can’t self-medicate with food anymore–although I try.   I have maybe 50% of my previous sex drive.  I’ve less to do or look forward to because sex was pretty high on the list of ways to spend my time.  Besides, a lack of a libido makes me feel like a eunuch and certainly not strapping or virile.  This alone keeps suicide higher on the list these days.  I work for money.  The money is alright.  The work is alright.  Or it’s grueling, thankless and horrible–in other words, catering.  It’s not what I want to do with my life but it is what I am doing with my life.  Of course it’s all in the meantime–what else is new?  I’m just getting by which is getting old.  I’ll work for an hourly, and drive my used car, and live like an artist in this space until I can get the grant I want, the travel stipend or plan and anyway find ways to fund and support swathes of time creating Art.  I won’t be distracted–I’m never at the bar, unless it’s to meet with Doc, and chasing women is the last thing on my mind.  If my lack of libido is mental/emotional then it’s because I fear rash and consuming amour fou.  I’d hate to have my Art and all the progress I’ve made be taken out in one fell swoop by an adrenaline dump of a relationship that’s toxic, dysfunctional and the greatest sex I’ve ever had.  I’m not comfortable in my apartment but I’m getting by.  I’m still living like a 20-something which sums up this post ain’t it though.

 

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Underneath it all, I’m 44, and I’m looking at the world I live in, wondering and even fully realizing the choices I’ve made to get me here.  I’m wondering if it was worth it and I am realizing fully that that time is gone.  Most of the time my regrets are great fuel but the pitfall of walking around under the whip of failure is–I can, at times, get sunk.  I can feel fucked.  Isolated and suicidal.  Y’all should know by now that I ain’t gonna and it’s the writing it that helps–just being able to say it.  My work has legs and I can’t deny that.  Posting here every week landed me a column, which is exactly what I wanted, and it looks like The Coarse Grind has found me a book deal. I’ve been talking with 3 different poets about publishing their work and they’re all onboard which means I’ll have plenty reason to clock in and out on the dayjob because my days will be filled with the real work and my nights lit up by the print shop light.  I’m inspired–I mean, I can see things now I couldn’t see before I took my European jaunt last Summer.  I know it’s a worthy goal and that without it there would only be the idea of suicide and no treatise or post like this to get it out and into the open.  Aw, Hell–may as well say it, without Art I would only feel trapped and if I felt trapped then I’d end it.  You bet.  Goodnight and God Bless.

Damn.  1,137 words.  I just wanted to include you because letting you know completes the circuit for me.  It makes these thoughts real and of course it releases them from my restless and warring mind.  I give it up this way, on the altar of Us and your Readership is indisputably what saves me–week after week and post after post.  Of course the decade of posting at Going For The Throat comes with an onus.  This blog is included, when I ask What the fuck have I done with my life?  These posts don’t make it easier in the add-up, as useful as they are in the get-by.  Perhaps I am phasing out the ‘get-by‘.  I sure hope so.  Depression has taken so much of my life.  Which is a strange comfort.  I won’t need to commit suicide, good Reader.  Depression has already taken my life.

You’ll see me next week, motherfucker.  Bet.

Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#34, Dear James

In Uncategorized on May 3, 2019 at 9:00 am

Dear James,

I read your latest Coarse Grind this morning and it kind of made my day. I just lost my job last week and have spent the last few days obsessing over finding new work. And just when I thought to myself, well shit, what if I get a job that starts even earlier in the morning? What if it cuts into my writing time, and what am I doing, and why am I a writer, and when will my book get published and what is the point and what is my goal—someway or another I came across your latest piece on Into the Void, and it really felt like a sign. So what if I take this job that starts early and if I’m losing a little extra sleep in the morning to make room for writing. If I’m not writing, what’s the point?

Anyway I’ll spare you all the wild swirling thoughts this article gave me but I felt compelled to let you know that you really did make my day and made me feel encouraged. Like I am doing the right thing, this is exactly what I should be doing.

Thank you for writing.

Best, M. Kechio

AB IRATO

In Uncategorized on May 2, 2019 at 9:00 am

Let’s be honest, your writing will never be sunshine & unicorn farts…unless the unicorn is shitting itself as it is slingshot into the sun.
–Kati Taylor

It’s hard to give a shit these days.
–Romeo Had Juliet, Lou Reed

Don’t live by this game because it’s not worth dying for.
-Iggy Pop

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
-Arthur Miller

Morning.  I just wrapped last week’s post.  It’s positive in its way, and doomsaying.  I’m hoping I won’t have to explain it. A lot should be left to interpretation in the Arts, but I’ve gone on record as staunchly anti-Christian and an adamant pacifist.  That said I hope every body lives and prospers, war hawks and the billionaire class aside.  I don’t know how we can change the world except violently, but I’m not talking about the physical kind.  I mean in an abrupt way, an about face from this cauldron of blood we’re churning and cackling over.  If there’s any hope it’s the fact that the 24-hour news cycle and social media are only 6 years old.  If the centuries without immediate access to everything everywhere haven’t ended us then maybe we can go on.  Or is this how Rome felt right before it fell?  Ultimately, how good are things when you’re only meditation is that it’s always worse somewhere else?  I’m a naysayer and a fool–hoping for the world’s demise as I drive my Japanese car to serve pulled pork and chicken at the H-E-B Center, or pass apps at the Chancellor’s.  I’m bitter and I’m wrong, and you are too and I’m sick of living here–which is bitchy and blithe and a terribly privileged complaint to have.

I know I need to get out there because I’m dying in here.  I’ve no plans for the summer except an East Coast and midwest jaunt so I may as well work–sling drinks and deliver food in the terrible 12th summer we have left on this planet.  I woke up with acute anxiety this morning–a feeling of dread without explanation.  Maybe it’s the Final Century blues.  Probably it’s because I know I’m working 10 hours today, after doing 7 yesterday, or–could it be the steam, seen out my window in the middle distance as I sit here, writing this?  And what looks like frost on my window.  The cold is a trigger.  My nervous system won’t live down being homeless.  It’s put the fear in me.  I’m scared straight.  The fear of being outdoors combined with the karma of working class and depression-era parents and grandparents respectively, has kept me in line.  It’s kept me on grind, hauling hot boxes in the pelting hail and rain while trying to maintain meticulous records of my hours across formats and mediums, battling traffic, always, and getting up hours before shift to shit, if I can, before I head in to the kitchen, the shop, making dollars per hour and dangerously close to confrontation with the Mexican chef.  I do it for money but I keep doing it out of fear.  I hate to cut this short but I’ve got to go to work.

I’d hate it even more if my writing discourages anyone from doing the same.  If you’re going to write then nothing I say will stop you but if you need my encouragement here it is.  What you read last week was of a culminating bitterness, rising up and swelling in me as I work like a pig and watch the intellectual class get all the accolades and funding.  Make no mistake they’re a bunch of aristocrats.  I’m over being dressed down by other Artists, who come at me for being a nihilist and for welcoming the ruin and dissolution of things gone way out of hand and detrimental to humanity and the working class besides.  That’s who I was addressing last week, Good Reader.  If these Artists could direct their anger towards something besides an antisocial self-publishing bartender, we might make a change or at least have a unified voice that says, adamantly, ‘No.’  It aint me, Poet.  I ain’t no fortunate one.  As far as working for a living, there’s got to be a better way.

See you on the streets motherfucker.

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Living in the Age of Nutter’s Rule