Hi Jim- Whenever Thom sends me forwards I just react. It really wasn’t meant in either a positive or negative way-just another prompt with some antonyms that weren’t even exactly line by line. As a Creative Writing Professor for many years, I can tell you it’s pretty common practice to take someone’s poem and work variations off the theme. Hope that helps. Peace and Happy Writing…
A woman who was severely burned in a domestic violence attack in Vermont is hoping for a second face transplant after doctors recently discovered tissue damage that likely will lead to the loss of her donor face.
–ABC News
Since then, some have moved away and I have lost quite a lot of diversity on my street. However, my homeless neighbors have increased in population.
–Dawn McCombs
How can a seventeen-year-old like me suddenly be eighty-one?
–Lewis Wolpert
The way out of darkness and into light is what you’re holding in your hands right now.
–Belle Leaver
Hello darkness my old friend. Suicide is taking up my thoughts again. I’ve been here so many times–the perigee of depression, when my blues is closest and I’m not well and finally admit that something has to change. Before you go on you should know that if you’re reading this I’m probably fine. I’ve a long record of at least feeling better by the end of a post like this. At best I’m taking an honest account of a lifelong sufferer of a major depressive disorder and at worst I’m spending some time out of mind, doing something besides being down.
Allergies have flared up. I’ve a tightness around the bridge of my nose, which is strangely better than the rawness I had in my throat last night. When I got out my car in the drive, I sharted and it shot down my leg. It’s weird to be pleased about something like that but I’m glad that anything is coming out, to be honest. I haven’t shit since the Presidential Election of 2016. It’s been a nightmare and it’s brought suicide to mind often. I can’t shit, or I practically shit my pants, and I’ve a sinus headache clamping down on my nose and temples like a vise. I see little reason to continue living, especially if the years are only going to blow by at breakneck speed like they been while I’m shucking and jiving and getting little respect on the dayjob, not sleeping or feeling well and when I do feel alright I think about the end of the world which is strangely the baseline. Baseline is we’re all going to die and at least be extremely compromised in or about twelve years from now. I feel like shit and it’s the end of the world. Why shouldn’t I be depressed?
The 40s are the strangest age. Great in a lot of ways. You get up to the vista and look around. Almost everything you wanted is gone or you got it already. Your chances getting the rest are easier than ever while paradoxically slipping away. I can tour now because I have credit cards. I can’t go out for months but instead have to do a long weekend and catch-as-catch-can it before I have to head home to make the money to pay my credit card bill. The 40s are great. I’ve never been so terrified. I feel more fragile than I’ve ever felt but the trick is I suppose I know now, and hope to integrate, my weaknesses. I see how depression has taken whole swathes of my life (and savings) when at the time I just felt tired or fed up. Tired and fed up are very real and discernment’s the key. More like a sword ain’t it. Discernment can cut the shit between your damage and what the healthy voice is saying. Because they come from the same place. Fucked right? Sure is and I’d never tell you different. I started this post earlier this week when the scales were tipping heavy to the suicide side. I’ve since got a new lease on life, thanks to 2 consecutive nights of log-heavy sleep. Discernment. I could’ve signed on for a 13-hour bartending shift yesterday but instead opted for a 4-hour mini Friday and a 5-hour last night. I’m doing a double Wednesday which is what it is, and I’ve got 3 jobs over the next 3 days and a performance booked for HAAM day on Tuesday. The Poem Of The Week needs to go live and rehearsals on the doghouse are beckoning if I want to be in fighting weight for 2 church gigs in October.
The difference between thinking that hanging myself might be alright and being genuinely excited about what’s ahead is 2 solid nights of sleep. No alcohol (if you’re just joining us), no cigarettes or drugs, and no overselling or prolonged and late-night negotiation with the other sex just to get a taste and only want to split first thing in the morning. Plenty of writing and water. Prunes, too. This is the highlight reel. Plenty to be down on. Plenty of reasons to get upset. I’ve saved myself from the chipper this week but still wonder, like Sister Sarah:
Many people try to find a spiritual path where they do not have to face themselves but where they can still liberate themselves–liberate themselves from themselves, in fact. In truth, this is impossible. We cannot do that. We have to be honest with ourselves. We have to see our gut, our real shit, our most undesirable parts. We have to see that. That is the foundation of warriorship and the basis of conquering fear. We have to face our fear; we have to look at it, study it, work with it, and practice meditation with it.
-Chögyam Trungpa
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The Office of Jim Trainer
P.O. Box 49921
Austin TX
Laurie Gallardo
KUTX Public Media Studios
300 W. Dean Keeton, A0704
Austin TX
1/26/19, 10:56AM
…the Zen master is evidently playing the long game—the longest game of all, in fact, which is eternity.
-TIME
Ahoy Gallardo
How instantly folks must feel at once connected with you, having experienced your voice in their cars and homes, and of course through the love of music. The magic of these mediums is constant and being at the helm of either is unmatched. I love singing and playing music but I really love speaking into the cardioid and being broadcast onto the city. I’m in awe of radio but more than a little jaded with playing music. For one thing, I’m not nearly as depressed as I used to be. I’ll have to re-examine the need to scream my fucking head off onstage, maybe even think about technique and that a song could serve something other than the devil inside. The blues is just a good man feeling bad and I’ll be a punk rocker until I die. Of course it’s an ethos and we know this but my point is the reasons for me to be up under the hot lights aren’t as crucial as they used to be–thanks to psychotherapy and whatever Gods have fell in love with me. Radio on the other hand, well–nothing really trumps that feel does it, the absorbency of the atmosphere out there, the command and diction through hot ‘phones and carried on a radio wave through hard stanchioned walls and high-reaching steel and glass. And when you put on Bob Mould or The Ramones and for 3 or 4 minutes all is well with the world, the knives of the mind have ceded and we’re still and completely engaged. Punk rock may be the most important socio-political movement of our time. It certainly dwarfs most of what the square public swore by in the 20th Century. Punk was unerringly prescient and for me it’s been my unflinching “why” and armament searing through any amount of “how” and fuckaround, red tape and small hours on shift and paying taxes, listening to the news and anyway shucking and jiving and taking what they’re giving until I can get under those hot lights or sit at the helm as the ON AIR sign goes red.
I feel a kinship with you and it’s not just the songs you play. It speaks to the magic of the medium, that we can enjoy the music in the same way and at the same time but from our own corner of nowhere. Rock and roll’s charm isn’t a deluded one. We know things are breaking down and that the world runs on power and greed. Rock and Roll doesn’t deny. We celebrate, we shake and groove in calamitous tones and we celebrate how inadequate we often are to overcome the beast within. The heart can be savage and the confidence of decay may be our only faith. Nick Cave and The Sea and Cake. These are all the reasons why I wanted to write you, reach out and say YES and THANK YOU. Afternoons in this town can feel like you’re waitin’ round to die and the tragedy of it’s compounded when you look around to see you’re planted on the hot tar with a horde of patrons of horrible Capitalism and a religion of money and death. But you put it on ain’t ya and we revel the littlest inch, we rattle our chains and make it, off the deathway into the carport and throw everything down on the other side of the door just to get online and lookup the band that gave us that sound. That thin wild mercury sound, that killit punkrock music and couplet that cracks the hard nut of solipsist suffering that is working full-time in the America. Man, I really tried to keep this concise, at least not be entirely wild and poetic. This unhinged missive and cracked narrative only speaks to how much I love rock and roll. Put another dime in the jukebox baby. I’ve no regrets for how it makes me feel nor even this nonlinear letter to my beloved hometown DJ.
Letter writing never fails to circumvent writer’s block. I’m happy to be writing but I can only commit so much Personal Journalism. It’s bad, Laurie. Blogging is a dirty business–it’s self-mired and passe, unreliable and insane. It all comes down to craft, though, and only if the craft is being practiced. I’m sick of myself so I write about that. I get unruly and blue, so, that too. I fantasize, ostracize and get wiggy with truth, or at least come to what Dr. Thompson has called the Wisdom. I can get there and it’s usually a line or two that’ll bring me around on the idea of living that will justify spending some hours hitting the keys by a grey window and drinking AA-levels of coffee while occasionally blasting Shellac or Cory Branan before I dive in for another go round and exciting draft of Personal Journalism. We’re all mad here. Thank you for you. I can’t help feeling like I’m in High School when I listen to you which leaves me wishing for my youth if only so I could burn through Marlboro Reds again, take black smoke into pink lungs, maybe read The Rebel and get inspired by the songs of the street, dare to be unjaded and move despite the acute tenderness of being in love with a world that’s destined to end. There weren’t many good things about High School and sadly the worst things about it are only prevalent today. So are our days now. High School never ends.
See you on the airwaves. Keep rocking. If the kids are united then we’ll never be divided.
Ab irato,
Trainer
Austin TX
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
Deadline trumps all. I wouldn’t exactly say I phoned it in these last couple months, but I couldn’t commit to the material and the deadline won. I had to go with what I had and catch-as-catch-can it while taking an uninvited houseguest, learning a new repertoire on a new instrument and moving. All’s well now I guess. I had a little downtime yesterday and spent it just shy of the brink and at my favorite place in the back of my brain before I made the drive to Dripping Springs and reported to my bar captain, the trolling wench. I sit here this morning with little to nothing wrong facing the green window at the writing desk, sipping the dark stuff with the fan blowing overhead. Realizing it’s only been 2 months I been remiss feels a little better if not great. The worst thing in the world for me is if my work suffers as I’m sure you can understand.
I set up my life in service to Art. I took the example of working class writers and poets and take jobs that take the least from me mentally. That might mean I’m exhausted but it’s easily remedied. The kind of jobs I take won’t be calling me after hours and if they do they’d be wise to just hang up and save it for the shop. In short I get paid by the hour and when I’m not on the clock I’m as good as gone. The idea is to make it back to the place and bang it out on a manual or electric typewriter. If my work suffers than I’m only a bartender and suffering the hard luck hits of a Boheme life for naught. Point is in the midst of learning upright bass, housing and carting around an uninvited guest, working 2 jobs and moving and going on tour, I had to fly by my seat on here and go with posts I’d have rather sat on and anyway took more time to revise before I hit PUBLISH. So I’m here today, at the writing desk, putting a little time in before I woodshed on the bass and get my set together for a house party in Wimberly this week. I’m hoping for the best writing this and at the very least making sure this week’s post is written well before Thursday, when it’s not crunch time and I have to go with whatever I wrote because the 40-hour work weekend is looming or I’ve got to rehearse for a gig that pays $50 a man.
It’s a good life. Besides having to remind myself of that constantly I can’t complain. Though I often do, as the weeks burn by and I haven’t done the work, that is–put in the time. My posts at the Flake News are a great example of how work can flow if you work at it. My appearance on Dig This! in the summer of ’18 as well. I sound informed and it’s on the breath–everything from the stolen election of ’00 to media and the end of the world. You can refute a well-informed writer but you must esteem him as an adversary first. Hell I’m glad I got those posts out but it’s not enough. Well it was enough but not what I want. I hate to be hacky, on the page or up there at the mic. I was rusty Friday, at the Hearsay Poetry Open Mic and it was one of those nights you got to just get through, not exactly a bad night and certainly better than my worst shows of the past. Some nights you can only try not to suck. It’s only rock and roll, but I wasn’t prepared. Just like I wasn’t prepared to read in Brooklyn last month, printing out material in a FedEx on Market Street in Philly an hour before I had to get onboard a Peter Pan to NYC. I made the nut in Williamsburg and read to 6 or so people who didn’t seem to care and I spoke and read last Friday and sold a book to Poet Christina Jackson.
I’ll get back at it–early mornings at the ARCH and St. David’s, corporate lunch in the triple-digit heat and rehearsing on the doghouse, really digging in to that thing and playing music simply because it keeps the depression away. It sure as shit does. Even if I fell out of love with songwriting, playing the bass calms me, sets me to rights much the way writing does. It sucks when this blog or the Poem Of The Week becomes something I have to do or even worse something I need to fit in between rehearsing and working part and full time as a computer lab tech and banquet captain. It all sucks, I won’t lie, being conscripted to this life but it’s better than the alternative. At least I keep telling myself that. I hate always having to be somewhere and I’m coping by telling myself I wanted everything I have. Half way through a slipshod life and burning everywhere, piquant with lust, dark and bitter and too stubborn to die.
Beshert
6:10 PM
Funny how you can be in two places at once, isn’t it? Funny as in queer and queer as in shifty, dynamic and mercurial. We both know that accepted realities and truth, sane and staid law and order, are harder to believe, and by belief I mean in the truest sense, in the deepest body—the difference between knowing and being-believing. Why should I be in New Orleans on a pew, sipping chai in the Bywater, watching Bernard lurch like a bear with his shoes off, doze in and out in front of the small volume of Kerouac poems? Why couldn’t I be in the court with you, stalk thin and bright, and those matriarchs of your youth? Why can’t this bayou air, in this town below sea-level, be the same air, high and white and far away, at another time on another continent? There is magic to be had, to grasp and be grasped by, as the small illusions dissolve, as a sword of presence can sever us from all we thought we were, until we’re falling into what is, what truly is—the grand and molting illusion. The dreamer and the dreamed.
Bernard is asleep but awake. Our nights are different but the same. Native Americans believe that Crow are the keeper of mystic law. Mystic law is beyond contradiction. Mystic law is and is not. Neither and both. Maybe there is no you and me, two sets of eyes, two pairs of hands as one and at once with this letter. How can I be there with you now but still be sitting here, in the past, in the Bywater, Louisiana? When Crow saw his shadow he pecked at it. He pecked and pecked at it until his shadow became alive and killed him. The Crow we see in this world is not crow. The Crow we see in this world is Shadow Crow. Real Crow lives in the abyss. Shadow Crow can do some impossible things in the real world. He can shift and multiply, appear and disappear. The real world is not as it seems. Maybe the real world is not real at all. Night is here. Like it always was. My dusk in Zimbabwe is over. Fly to me.
Jim
3/3/16
…Well I don’t know,
I might not speak the language any more
too long in the wasteland
will close some doors…
–James McMurtry
Your compulsion to tolerate only that laughter which comports to your political and ethical purposes is cosmically ridiculous and doomed.
-David Simon
Hell came to get me again.
–Chan Marshall
The poem was born in me en route to a doctor’s visit, for which I had no insurance.
-Xandria Phillips
…the masses, the common people, the populace, the public, the multitude, the rank and file, the lower orders, the crowd, the commonality, the commonalty, the commons, the third estate, the plebeians, the mob, the proletariat, the common herd, the herd, the rabble, the riffraff, the canaille, the great unwashed, the many, the ragtag (and bobtail), the plebs, the proles, the peasants, the people…
-Oxford Thesaurus of English entry for hoi polloi
Recovery is a long road. Quitting drinking was the easy part. The hard part is getting a good night’s sleep. Staying present through the loaded, blood-soaked and mundane, envelope-licking moments. My compulsion to hit the OFF button is practically involuntary. Luckily sometimes I just need to rest but the problem is I can’t without turning off and this life I chose has little to no downtime and certainly no breaks. I work for the money to afford a place I can come home to and get to work. Not that writing is hard–but who said it had to be? Catering, now that is a very hard dollar Brother. Charley horses in the triple-digit heat. Diarrhea in a parking garage seconds after the sun’s come up with nobody and no bathroom anywhere. Dickhead-rich cowboys in the freight elevator acting like you’re not even there. I’ll admit, I lucked out and my Boss is a mensch and better–one of those people you can just look at while you’re in the shit and laugh. It’s also the most money I’ve made in this town barring a 5-year stint as a slave to a millionaire in a centuries old governor’s mansion off West 6th. Poetry though? Personal Journalism? No problem. The hardest part of writing is starting and starting is only hard for a couple reasons.
One is you ain’t got the space or time. Someone somewhere is making a neurotic noise or you don’t like the way they breathe and anyway quarters are too close to unfurl and dig in to the work. This is a problem easily remedied with a day gig where you make enough bread to afford walls and a door without having to slog the brutal 40-hour American shuck&jive. Providing your neighbor isn’t a young twat constantly bumping “country” music on the other side of the wall, your people problem is solved. The other reason starting writing is so hard is you’ve got to give yourself permission. Anyone who says Hurry up and write understands neither hurrying nor writing. If they understood hurrying they’d instinctively know that telling a writer to hurry is inefficacious and potentially disastrous. If they understood writing they’d do well with the sense to get the fuck out my face with that bullshit, especially with the diverse supply of impalements available and less than an arm’s length from me at all times at the writing desk. An IBM Selectric II could kill a man if the writer swinging it could get enough momentum behind it to lift the thing and bring it down with all its skull-crushing weight. The reason this writer can’t hurry up and write is that for me writing is accessing the deeper voice, some call it wisdom and anyway it’s a kind of knowing, beyond the temporal and certainly beneath the machinations of the monkey mind. It’s bypassing the mind to get to spirit and then taking what you’ve found right back up through the mind and relying on it to carry out the functions of typing and synthesizing: image and idea, fact and feel. Maybe writing isn’t that glamorous for you in which case I can only offer my condolences because for me, writing is better than sex–well, almost better than sex.
I’m still living like I’m in a war. That’s why these missives seem so urgent Good Reader–because they fucking are. You kidding me. I’m shell-shocked and waking up in the recliner, hungover from sugar with my boxers around my left ankle. I’m taking refuge from my own response to a wild and roiling world. The fight is over but now I’ve got to learn to live with what’s left. I’ve got to learn to live with my self. It’s pretty bad but it’s alright. I’m able to get these posts off every week ain’t it and the struggle, these days, is real. I’ve reached the pinnacle adversary and surprise it’s me. I’m learning how to be a more efficient biological organism because thank the Gods my work grew legs and is getting up and walking across the room. Writing’s not hard. Abstaining from sugar and resisting the torrents of lust that pull at me on the shore, getting up before the sun on my day off and calling the healthcare provider–these are my battles now. These days I’m only rivaling me and it’s the most beautiful and terrifying life I’ve ever lived. The days are sublimely barbed. When the sun comes into my room I can’t believe I’m given more breath for another day and when night falls I remember them, who have none left and are gone forever. The big top’s still spinning and echoes of the dead Gods’ laughter still bound through the young hills. It’s a strange solace knowing things wouldn’t be so horrible or heart-breaking if I wasn’t awake. Presence is my charge now and the wider my eye the more pain I see. This is being here, getting down daily-nightly, crushed beneath the gnarly and benevolent wheel, kneeling and looking up and out to those far and unforgiving heavens and saying, thank you.
The Office of Jim Trainer
Delaware Division
℅ Starbucks Middletown
Middletown, DE
Justin Southern
Hostile City, USA
8/16/18, 5:56PM
Mr. Southern
Greetings from the slower-lower. The sun down here is criminally beautiful. It slants long and into places and evokes nostalgia for the youth you never had. At least I didn’t—we were sewer & creek rats, crawling through and coming out to ravines where we drank Rolling Rock ponies and smoked Marlboro Lights listening to Slayer’s Show No Mercy. I have great fondness for my comrades but I’m the only one who made it out and is still playing music today. I was thinking while driving here that the reason I haven’t grown tired of writing is because it doesn’t come with all the bullshit included in being a professional musician. House Wine is over and I’m glad. I wish them nothing but the worst. The Americana I came down to Texas for is cute now—a fad. My stuff paints in broader strokes. I’m not as depressed now, for one thing, and I think I’ve finally learned how to sing. What all this has to do with writing you I haven’t a clue but I write to keep the beast at bay. If I’m not as depressed these days I am certainly just as anxious which can come before the fall. Writing is the best thing I can do with my hands besides taking them to a punching bag. 40s are the strange age, Southern. It’s when the universe wants to know if you’re sure and I think I am so I’ma keep writing it down and sending strange letters to friends when I’m nonplussed or uninspired after traveling more than 8,000 miles away from home and having been too long in the wasteland.
You were right about Philly, it’s the same, but I was right about Philly because it brings out the worst in me. This last trek was the longest I’ve lasted before bugging the fuck out and driving South for an hour to get it out of mind and off of me. I got caught in a torpor paying the meter in Logan Square and gave the city about $50 all day before I finally got a ticket and just said fuck it. I been down here 3 days and haven’t done much. I got a blog off, of course, and I booked a flight and 10 days in Austin. I need to drive my car in from Slidell and wait until my apartment is ready on September 1. I got a kind woman there waiting and we’ll be together. Hot Damn. I’m sitting on maybe 4 travel pieces I would love to get paid for; and a feature on the nature of traveling across Europe with an insufferable, loudmouthed partner and training yourself not to act on the murder impulse in the close quarters of the commuter trains and eco villages of a foreign country. Hope I can find some way to recoup or at least hit the road again on a mag or pub’s dime. Travel is the freest I’ve ever felt. It’s like falling in love without the baggage and saying goodbye never stops feeling good.
I said goodbye to Philly, 10 years ago, in a 2001 Hyundai Sante Fe, and I said goodbye to a thankless 6-year run at a wine bar with the personality of a tech conference that allows dogs, I said goodbye to Sofia, for now, but I think there are some stories there, on those streets and Autumn could feel Byzantine or like the Lower East Side in the 80s. I said goodbye to all the loves of my life—some voluntarily but none from the safety of a computer screen. I said goodbye to my Father on his deathbed and found the meaning of forgiveness. I said goodbye to my hometown and the cops there a cancer on them all…goodbye to my High School and goodbye to the cushest gig I ever had working in the Last Confederate Governor of the U.S.’ old place, and I said goodbye to my ex-Publishing partner, that blackleg wench, as she rolled out on the bridge and I sped away into downtown Portland. You never say goodbye to love and if you’re lucky your true love is a road. You get up in the morning and you look it in the eye. You hope you won’t end up in some slim podunk place where they play the entire Whitney Houston catalog, but, if you do you can just gulp down your tea and put your hands in your pockets, open the door and without turning around say…goodbye.
Yours,
Trainer
You Americans, you are all so dramatic. Everything is like movie with you.
-Dakota
What a ride. Nobody Move may traipse in familiar tropes, with scenes and characters we’ve all probably seen before, but here is L.A. the archetype and a Hollywood of the collective unconscious. Nobody Move tells a timeless tale but masterfully, in a fresh and different way. It references the greats and classics of the genre, but never gets cliche or cute about it, and is not, for one second, tired.
We want the good guy to win and he does. But he doesn’t. We want him to get the girl and he does. But he doesn’t. Even in all this familiar territory writer Philip Elliot keeps the dialogue fresh and the action sharp—hairpin by hairpin turn. This book should usher in Retro 90s Noir, with gay and transgendered characters and even a vegan police detective and a cop named Bukowski. It’s all in the writing and would be a great read for its brilliant similes alone.
Nobody Move is a straight-through jawn. I read mine from 6 to 11 one night and finished it between 7 and 9 the next morning. Thrilling, page turning and purely entertaining—all while never getting predictable or trite. It’s snappy, with unexpected turns of phrase and all the action you should expect from a book called Nobody Move. Heroes can, and should, find redemption—but, do they have to win? And, worst of all, if they lose do they have to say the things we know they’re going to say? Not if Philip Elliot has anything to do with it.
The writing is what keeps Nobody Move from merely being a retro hit piece that’s all too popular these days. (Stranger Things this is not). Nor does Elliot make the arrogant mistake of attempting to re-invent the wheel. The evil die as they always do in the fiction of L.A.—in blazes of shootout glory—not because Hollywood told us they do, because we want them to.
Going for the Throat 