The Office of Jim Trainer
1500 Crestwood Road, Garage
Austin TX
Ms. Dean
600 Piedweltzer Road
Charleston SC
5/17/18, 6:01PM
Good Morning
The hot spring nights here are only good for killing chiggers. I’ve moved since I started writing this but they only doubled at the writing desk. I’m annoyed and outnumbered. Christ now there’s one in my ear where I sit on the love seat. Gnats can make or break the case for divine intelligence. So can politicians. I’ve no idea what you’re up to your neck with in Charleston but I imagine there isn’t much of a wide berth for liberal thought there. I’m sure there are plenty of fine people, or else why would you be, and I’m only basing my assumption on South Carolina’s voting record. South Carolina voted in every presidential election except for the race of 1864 when it seceded from the Union. They’ve voted Republican since 1964, except for 1976 when the state went blue for Jimmy Carter. I can’t tell anyone anything but I do know that the passivity and snide technocrats in Austin can get to me as bad as any chigger or Republican anyway. It’s all f-d, Miss Dean. The die has been cast. The greatest country in the world has fallen and I’d rather not spend the last eighty years this planet’s got left working twelve months a year without healthcare.
Of course I’m a HAAM member and of course my premiums are affordable for the first time in my life thanks to the vision and diligence of President Obama. I can’t really live down feeling like we were winning those 8 years ain’t it. I moved to Austin just after he was sworn in. The market crashed and nobody knew what it meant. 4 years later I was living in the last Confederate governor of the U.S.’ old place when I got the news that they’d buried Bin Laden at sea. It made me think of Hunter Thompson and what he purportedly and dolefully said, in front of a hotel TV when he found out Nixon died. “This changes nothing.” Obama ran on change and he brought it but it only brought out the yahoos. And politics, despite what Obama or Bret Easton Ellis say, doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The fuck do I know? My desires are many but my needs are few. I’d just like enough time to develop and work on a set of ideas. Not this catch-as-catch-can poetry on the weekends shit. The hustle stopped being the hustle right around when the bubble burst and the market crashed, or it was that hot Autumn day in New York City when the planes hit and 3,000 people died, or M.L.K. in Memphis or J.F.K. in Dallas and any number of regressive and dark turns of the screw the oligarchy put to us since. Welcome to the Chinese Century.
I need to get my affairs in order. It’s been almost three hundred days since I’ve saved anything on my disc station. I’ll need a mirrorless where I’m going and a UPN. I think it’s time to get excited about the road and where it will take me but I’ve got to keep an eye out for Work. This isn’t holiday. I’ll be back in Bro Country before you know it and have to sweat out the many tiered nuance of contractural speak when I apply for the Community Initiatives grant. Think about being on the Roll Call, Dean. I’ve heard it said an artist only needs one thousand die hard fans to sustain him. I’d like you to be one but if you’re not already. What can you do? Keep a lamp lit for me in Charlotte. Share a post. Buy a book and, mostly, tell others about me. Of course, you can just be my friend and of course you already are. Especially if you’re not the biggest fan. I’ve never appealed to anyone like this, in letter form, before. Letter writing was always supposed to be for your enjoyment and mine.
I write when I can’t do anything else. When anxiety has choked out the night or I’m distracted by my many black furies or fantastical wild dreams. I write letters when I can’t write anything else, and so, for this I thank you. It’s been nice being with you in this way, especially as the chiggers have ceded. Maybe they’ve found their mates, dead in a pile on the sheet of yellow legal paper on my desk. Maybe they too have laid down to die. Now all we need is for the politicians to do the same.
Stay beautiful.
Yours,
Jim Trainer
Going for the Throat 