THE DELETERIOUS BOON OF AGE

Let me put it this way: when they compile a list of the heroes of this era, I will not be on it.
–Fran Lebowitz

Pernicious, baneful, noxious, and detrimental are the wicked synonyms of deleterious. All five words refer to something exceedingly harmful. Of the group, deleterious is most often used for something that is unexpectedly harmful. Pernicious implies irreparable harm done by something that degrades or undermines in an evil or insidious way (“the pernicious effects of corruption”), while baneful suggests injury through poisoning or destruction (“the baneful consequences of war”). Noxious can apply to anything that is both offensive and injurious to the health of body or mind (“noxious chemical fumes”), and detrimental implies an obvious harmfulness to something specified (“the detrimental effects of excessive drinking”)
-Definition of deleterious by Merriam Webster

The vampire is dead.
–Will Stenberg

I’m gonna go against even my own grain.  I’m gonna make it good.  Always on the wrong side of whatever side there was, paltry poetry and meme culture, and the simple fact that happy people always seemed so fake all but sured my reputation as the spoiler.  I sidelined the parade.  I poo-pooed.  Only had a good time when they weren’t.  Went for the throat and pulled out every rug I could.  I was born to lose and proud to but now I think it high time to flip my own script and make it good.  The second worst thing I’ve ever done is waste time.  I’m here to make amends for that.  The very worst thing I’ve ever done, well—I’d like to make amends for that, too, but I don’t think it’s going to happen and certainly not here for the benefit of the public and as a function of my career as a personal journalist.  These last couple years have been the Age of X—X being this nameless and horrible thing, I’d all but forgot about, rearing.  Truth is no matter how I strive, no matter my progress or stride—this thing I’ve done is always there assuring me I’m not great, I’m no better and if I decided to throw stones they’d never make it past my own glass walls.  So much for all that, though it’s not over and anyway the thing I can change and at least make amends for is time wasted.

Depression and anger are a two-headed snake and if I wasn’t strapped or bogged down by one then the other exhausted me and kept me from growing and at least knowing myself.  Anger’s burned a lot of folks right out of my life.  I suppose I’ll have to reckon with who I lost but I don’t know if that’ll ever happen.  I like being alone.  I probably would’ve liked the Italian countryside in the summer of ‘03 too but I never took her up on it.  I hung back in the cut of working class Philly, burned down my Father’s life insurance payout, drank and generally did what you do there—wasted time.  Depression made the moments hard to bear and it sent me out, sometimes wildly and with success, too.  Was a time in Philly I was in 2 bands, DJing for 2 radio stations and still finding time to write and even fall in love.  All good things and fine memories to have as I wake as if from a dream at 45, in a town far away and living and writing in a 1-bedroom with an electric typewriter and an upright bass.  Point is there was some brightness back there and some bright here now, today.  Large swathes of dark though too, Bubba, that still lurk low in my life like a creeping fog, making me feel tired and overwhelmed and wooing me into self-induced sugar comas and “naps” that are really nights taken from me and this one precious life.  45 is cold, Jack, a slap in the face of someday and death tolling loud and clear.

I want what I always wanted.  The difference is I want it now.  If I’m not making strides then I’m only living and while that deserves some pride and recognition, it’s not enough, it never was.  Making a living doesn’t make a damn to me.  I got no kids.  No college debt.  A 9-year old Japanese car with less than 80k miles.  Over 50,000 people who didn’t have to die are gone.  The rest of us just as expendable.  The US GOV has spoken.  There isn’t anywhere to run or hide except maybe the Netherlands.  You know why I’m here.  On the pages of this column anyway.  Why I’m still bought in to The America is a marriage of convenience.  The fact that the whole world is ending out there, every day more dead and all they do is cash us out as the news media panders to our identities and otherwise only jerks us off.  Truth about this column is the truth about everything I write—I’m only trying to say one thing.  The rest is bluster and filigree.  My name is Jim Trainer and I’m an alcoholic.  I’ve wasted decades you want to add it up and I’m here to make amends.  I get up early now but not early enough.  I write at least 600 words here every Thursday, and another 1,200 at Into The Void every month.  I send out letters, write poems and clear out the wreckage.  I’m starting my own business—as a sole proprietor or LLC.  I’m poised to do what I’ve always done but now I know.  Being tired is bullshit.  Overwhelmed.  The end of the world is a sad state of affairs but I’m not crying about it anymore.  I thought we’d have at least 11 more years but no matter.  I also thought I’d be 23 forever, that you’d forgive me and always let me in and out of the heat.  You haven’t forgiven me and it’s getting hot out here.  I’m 45 and compiled of all the years I lost and bad business done to self-medicate and numb out the pain.  The world is over, the US GOV is cashing out.  I’m not here to tell you any different.  I know now more than ever that I am gonna die but if you’ll excuse me that is precisely why I’ve got so much work to do.

PART 26 OF THE COARSE GRIND, THIS SUNDAY AT INTO THE VOID.

2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, IS AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.

TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, JIM TRAINER PARTICIPATED IN THE #30for#30 CHALLENGE AND WROTE AN ORIGINAL POEM EVERY DAY FOR THE MONTH OF APRIL.

4/1
ANOTHER DAY OUT
4/2
UNTITLED DOCUMENT
4/3
POET AT DAWN
4/4
SHUDOWN#
4/5
SHUTDOWN#2
4/6
JULY IN SOFIA
4/7
SHUTDOWN#3
4/8
SHUTDOWN#4
4/9
SHUTDOWN#5
4/10
THE DEAD
4/11
THE MYSTIC DICE OF HEAVY BONES
4/12
UNTITLED
4/13
UNTITLED
4/14
LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
4/15
JUST KIDDING
4/16
DEPRESSION MAGIC HAIKU
4/17
UNTITLED
4/18
PALE LIGHT
4/19
NEW CENTURY MYTHOLOGY
4/20
DIMINISHING RETURNS ON PRIVILEGE
4/21
FOR BLOOD
4/22
EVEN
4/23
4/24
4/25
IMITATING ART
4/26
EULOGIES
4/27
THE WHY OF ART
4/28
4/29
4/30

THE AXE AND THE FROZEN SEA

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
-Franz Kafka

I mean, I basically never hear bad music any more because I can push a button and it goes away.
-Steve Albini

Rise above others who try and take you down… I’m at my BEST NOW…and that’s all that matters.  I pray for all of you because we care.  Jealousy is toxic, and toxic people are a waste of time.  We walk away with nothing but a SMILE.
-Wes Scantlin, Puddle of Mudd

It’s not pretty, but getting people elected unfortunately has a lot to do with dividing. . . That is different from what it takes to govern because governing is all about finding consensus on difficult issues and bringing people together, people who don’t always agree, under some sense of common purpose.  And we are obsessed with getting people elected, and we are obsessed with the show.  And so are you, or you wouldn’t be here.  So we provide daily entertainment; what we are not providing is serious solutions to what’s going on in the country.  Not us, not Chuck, not Clinton, not Bush, not anybody.
–Mark Goodin

Something in the way…
-Kurt Cobain

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?  Rather than fuck you around I’ll get right to it and let the chips fall where they may.  I’ve only had one thing, a very niche and private thing, that everything else revolved around for my whole life.  Mostly it’s been small and secreted hours here, in the War Room, at a desk as wide as I am tall and at the wide green window as the world rallies and roils out there.  I found some peace in the backroom of a huge 1 bedroom in the beginning of the final century, drinking dark beer and smoking black tobacco and swag and hacking away on my Dad’s Global or a 1969 Grestsch Single Anniversary through a Fender Pro Junior.  All my life can be reduced to one thing.  Everything else was in service to it, or because of it and anyway the closest I could come to a reason for going on as the torpors of depression rang like a wrench around my head and heart.  Depression made it hard to live and this country made it hard to live.  And she and you did.  Motherfuckers but mostly I did.  I made it hard to live but it was no matter.  As long as I had this one thing.  8 hours crammed into a monkey suit, in and out of the kitchen of a dining hall with 20-30 other dumb bodies?  No problem’s long as I had a place to come home to and sit down, plug in and get to work.  It didn’t have to be so hard.  Did it?

I can’t live down what I’ve done.  You can’t know how much I mean this.  The longer I’m sober the more I realize there’s a trail of dead behind me and worse–I’m the reason some people have a hard time living, today, and still.  They’re out there somewhere, working through trauma that I caused.  Think about how hard it’s been, think of all the things in your way to get to where you are today, things that came into your life unbidden, that you didn’t deserve.  Now imagine that these same tragedies, fuckarounds and pecadilloes were caused by me.  If this sounds like it’s a hard nut to crack well you’re goddamned right about that.  There are things I will carry like a mark and should suffer for.  The fact that I did you wrong is hard to live down but I will.  I’ll be better but never free of the memory of what I’ve done.

That’s just one of the dark motivations that in isolation I’ve been brewing up some black magic from.  I regret what I’ve done to me and my life too, as selfish as that sounds.  I fucked around and hid out.  I cursed everything and I ain’t saying I was wrong.  Just that with experience I can see most of that suffering was born of either a shortage of dopamine/serotonin or lack of coping and any kind of mechanism to help myself out of the blind and dark SNAFUs of self-sabotage.  My Father’s side of the family—depression wasn’t a thing back then.  It certainly wasn’t a disease.  My mother’s side is a whole other can of worms.  Let’s just say I got it good and crazy and I got it bad.  The loopy, fearless shit from my Italian side has served me well and probably kept me alive for many, backalley, never-should-have-been-there nights, bet.  My Father’s honesty serves me, quite well Good Reader, as it’s his Black Irish Who are you that I should have to lie? attitude that informs, and in fact is the raison d’etre of this blog.  Going for the throat.  Pulling out the rug.  Pissing on your parade.  They’d all work as bylines here.  Die laughing, though, that’s my own take and rests on the mantle for good reason.  We shouldn’t suffer.  We shouldn’t hurt each other.  But we do.  We should learn but nature has her way of sorting that out.  If I haven’t learned that hurting you was wrong then you’ve no doubt had the good sense to get gone.  The fact that I am going to try and laugh, despite it all, could just be spite (Irish and Italian, remember?).  Otherwise, I am trying to laugh because it’s been so ridiculously tragic and lovely and I’m sorry, truly so very sorry and if I don’t die laughing I’d probably just up and die.

TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, JIM TRAINER IS PARTICIPATING IN THE #30for#30 CHALLENGE–AN ORIGINAL POEM WRITTEN EVERY DAY FOR THE MONTH OF APRIL.

4/1
ANOTHER DAY OUT
4/2
UNTITLED DOCUMENT
4/3
POET AT DAWN
4/4
SHUDOWN#
4/5
SHUTDOWN#2
4/6
JULY IN SOFIA
4/7
SHUTDOWN#3
4/8
SHUTDOWN#4
4/9
SHUTDOWN#5
4/10
THE DEAD
4/11
THE MYSTIC DICE OF HEAVY BONES
4/12
UNTITLED
4/13
UNTITLED
4/14
LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
4/15
JUST KIDDING
4/16
DEPRESSION MAGIC HAIKU
4/17
UNTITLED
4/18
PALE LIGHT
4/19
NEW CENTURY MYTHOLOGY
4/20
DIMINISHING RETURNS ON PRIVILEGE
4/21
FOR BLOOD
4/22
EVEN

2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, IS AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.

PART 25 OF THE COARSE GRIND IS LIVE AT INTO THE VOID.

21/30

FOR BLOOD
it wasn’t for lack of worth
just that the roar and tumult
took us past everything that
held us there
we got concussed, brained
on the hard reality of those nights
and only dipped into dream
deeper and strange
the present moment comes
stands in the light of day
and I’ve nothing left to protect
just a journeyman love, a
blue strand of road, a glove
I know we passed
and judged
keys sticking up
through knuckles in the city
then
I don’t regret
trying to get free
buoying against bodies in those
casual years
I met you—you’re as crazy
as I remember, and me, well
what do you think all that
fool ardor and rage has wrought
if not a lunatic and objector
through and double through
I’m not sorry we were enemies
maybe we’ll engage again
until then
let’s have a sit and collect
on the wisdom of this breath equity
so we rivaled, got beat and broken
and even rose up some—
that’s nothing
my friends, my enemies
we’re still here and if they don’t know,
we’re coming.

18/30

pale light, at dawn
waking whenever I can shake off
dreams’ stronghold, from those fields
I was only circling
coming in from those
dark fields of rust and reed
the deep industrial waters
I wake before my shame with dream still
all over me
and what the dead said echoing
admonitions like leichen on the soft,
blood-filled side of me
in pale light now because
the wisdom of time comes as a warning
what’s lost is clarion
and ringing in the dark
what’s lost, receding back
as the doves’ moans erode and fade the dark
the pale light is this inspiration now
bitter drops
on the tongue
swallowed and gone
it wasn’t that long, was it?
we were piled in to your
’88 Omega, sinking deep in green New Jersey
lost in a country that gave us our names
copy of Kerouac, pack of Marlboro
trash bag full of dirt weed
and a hole in the left foot
of my black Vans
mighty Father Sun
up there in my 18th sky
days slapping like cards on a table
from the lake out to its furthest point
the water body-temperature warm
and stained red with cedar
felt like our last summer (it was)
driving back to PA, the moon
fell-down, scooping out and scything
the sky North, back across the borderline
leaving the girls to their abusive fathers
home, night, hometown, 1993,
radio switched off, pulling in, sneaking past
sleeping neglectful mothers
clasping a heavy lid of dark over
come Fall, come failed love and college
marriage or no marriage, neglected kids
of our own
bands and Art and writing and battling, I do
the pale light, these pains, shaking off
what could’ve been and what definitely was
unmitigated glory, all ours, letting
the day take me again, from that painless state
that
deep veldt of innocence a field
I only circle in dream,
when our skin was tight and browned
and we had no fear.

2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, IS AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.

LAISSEZ PASSER BLUES

But how fucked up is it that seemingly every four years, we as a country do a collective sigh and cast a vote for whatever person we’ve deemed least likely to ruin our goddamned lives?
–Reina Sultan

This is an emergency.
-Max Brooks

Have some self respect.  Stay home and masturbate.
–Bill Hicks

…Slide down the banister, go get your coat
‘Ferry ‘cross the Mersey’ and go for the throat…

Yes, finally–the laissez passer blues and an active censure on all that’s broke and broken down.  There’s a weight in the bones and a horror from just watching.  The acceleration of chaos and the whirring fan, coated in shit, is starting to spray.  My name is Jim Trainer and I’m an alcoholic, a lifelong sufferer of a major-depressive disorder and born into a generation that found it cool to lose because of what it took to win.

And I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I never wandered down the wrong path
and ended up some kind of addict, or a loser, some kind of psychopath!
-Viagra Boys, Just Like You

The apartment’s been filled with a second hand must more than likely from the endless construction next door.  They haven’t stopped for a day of quarantine or for any reason at all.  I ain’t seen my lady, I ain’t seen my friends.  Since I’m essential I’m exposed.  Even if it’s only for 3 and a half hours every Monday, I’m out there in the public, and the rest of the time I’m home alone.  I broke from this column, I couldn’t parse it all.  I didn’t want to, tell you truly, because we both know all the processing I do happens right here.  At the desk is the slow wisdom and a kind of knowing that comes from scraping the truth and lies away.  I’m thankful to have you and the counselor writing’s been, like allies we are stanchioned in storms of our own dysfunction and seated squarely in a world coming undone.  That ought to do, the wisdom I came here for ain’t it and more…like I said in The Coarse Grind, I’ve grown tired and hacky.  Writing my way through was great when I needed to get by.  I still need to get by but I’m sick of my own tricks.  I’m not over needing to be here, but at 45, I find myself wanting so much more.

It was one thing to cloister and hide away as the hits kept coming.  Coming through with 600 words meant I annihilated another week.  The dissolution of things now though, Chief, needless to say is harrowing.  Makes blogging seem silly or worse and like Chas said–passe.  I need it and I need you, I just couldn’t face myself.  My complicity and age and ways of circumventing the horrors of The America and tragedy of the Anthropocene.  I dealt like an addict would–I didn’t.  I hid myself in deadlines and got lost here at this column.  The torture of my own mind combined with the bilious torpor of world order were an event of endurance for me as a writer.  I wrapped misery and got my arms around the blues at least as many times as there are weeks in the year.  Thursdays the bullfighter, ain’t it and though I kept spinning and writing it down, the reality of the end of the American century, the forever war and 63 million yahoos yelling on the wire (and all my people yelling back) is finally setting in.  I’ve nowhere to run or hide and my apartment’s a crucible of boorish regret and grotesque sloth.  There are no easy answers and there are no answers at all.  We both know there never was but there used to be places you could hide from The America.  There was a middle-class and a music scene, the nameless, weedy place behind the billboard and the denial that alcohol and cigarettes can kill you.  There used to be rock and roll and weekend liberation, poetry and fiction and nothing wrong that driving a couple hours in the same direction couldn’t fix.   Now we’re just trying not to die and the worst part is knowing it’s been like this for a good while, elsewhere in this country and anywhere else out there in the world.

The hardest part is knowing I could’ve fought.  Strike that–the hardest part is knowing it wouldn’t have made a damn.  The fact that I think that, still, and that that weak rationalization is supposed to salve these entitled, middle-aged regrets could be the most regretful of all.  It rains all the time here.  This post has devolved.  Just like it’s subject.  You think this is bad you should see the drafts.  Most of this paragraph used to be a conversation with my Dad.  That convo turned into a poem and I’ll take it and what’s left you’re reading here.  It took me 712 words to say it simple and say it plain.  I’m 45 and I waited too long.  There are so many things I could’ve done except hide out and even though I’m glad I at least made Art in exile (Art was the exile, tell you the truth) it’s hard to keep at it.  Stuck at the ground zero of just dealing with it.  Country simple my reaction to a world gone wrong, coupled with a hereditary disposition toward depression resulted in a heavy motherfucking blues that I luckily found a way to motivate me using new forms of journalism and technology. I blazed a digital trail over 72k words long.  What’s wrong with me was the best motivation, when it came to hatred and dread I was never out of fuel.  I wrote and self-published and posted, hundreds of times, through my blues.  But at the end of every post I’m still blue.

 

TO CELEBRATE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, JIM TRAINER IS PARTICIPATING IN THE #30for#30 CHALLENGE–AN ORIGINAL POEM WRITTEN EVERY DAY FOR THE MONTH OF APRIL.

4/1
ANOTHER DAY OUT
4/2
UNTITLED DOCUMENT
4/3
POET AT DAWN
4/4
SHUDOWN#
4/5
SHUTDOWN#2
4/6
JULY IN SOFIA
4/7
SHUTDOWN#3
4/8
SHUTDOWN#4
4/9
SHUTDOWN#5
4/10
THE DEAD
4/11
THE MYSTIC DICE OF HEAVY BONES
4/12 4/13
4/14
LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
4/15
JUST KIDDING
4/16
DEPRESSION MAGIC HAIKU

PART 25 OF THE COARSE GRIND IS LIVE AT INTO THE VOID.

NO COMEBACKS BY WILL STENBERG AND 2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, ARE AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.
GET YOUR COPIES HERE.

14/30

LEARNING TO DIE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

 

there’s a giddiness for some of us

at the end of the world

like a disintegrating Christmas

birthday for the dead

it’s been raining since 2018

you were too busy with everything being ok to notice

but I did

the best thing about the end of the world

is how cold it gets in April

and the lizards in legion

stuck everywhere just watching

some of us are glad and it’s a relief

the psychic weight of things had us frayed

we were nervous all the time

and never really present

it’s as quiet out there as my hometown now

and all my friends from High School are here

somewhere a despot roils in his greed

somewhere a feminist doesn’t even

somewhere my mom’s watching Trump

in a red hat making gravy

somewhere my Dad is cold and thin as plasma

(and probably smoking)

for us, the darklings, dispirited, never heard or

celebrated

the world ended already

and this winding down

and atrophy, it’s quiet finally without their pouting

theaters of strife and vanity

things are coming to rest

motes of the cosmos landing softly on the ledge

before they’re taken on the wind

and it all gets blown away.

13/30

strange life sitting up in bed
half naked in socks and tee
in an apartment high above
a city I wasn’t born in
strange, life, that it’s still happening
that it keeps going on
after blowing it so many fucking times
the past is a monolith
with so many futures coming out of it
being older than I ever wanted
sitting up in bed
next to a woman who’s ok
with herself and should I need to
get up and out of there she’ll
say ttyl and ciao
lately I been seeing myself
at my desk at night at a screen
and I know it’s precious life
and it can cut through every lie
I’ve ever told myself
to make it in their world
and to get by
enough
with that mummy shit
pain covetous pain, always being tired
strange life it’s got so
strange
going on’s like an exploding gift
I used to be afraid to die
now I know death is only looking back
considering some ghost—that’s
who I am to me now
and from the past, a monolith
walking out of that dream
taking to the day
while something marks and
hunts me down
and carrying all that pain—
it’s true I didn’t ever live my best
or better than I probably am
right now
and that’s the gift, it’s laden
I know I can’t ever be forgiven
I’ll have to take that with me
being sorry’s keeping the fist
of the heart open
ain’t it
in every pulse and throe
and every moment is knowing
I shouldn’t even be here,
and don’t much deserve to be but
I’ll take it, this
bounty, this new youth, this tumbling
bumbling
strange life.

JUST LIKE YOU

for Brother Jon 

UNTITLED DOCUMENT

wasn’t anything the prophets said
changing their stories to accommodate the end
not the people
with their 
politics of convenience
it was James Hansen on the Senate floor
punk rock and Cornell West
though any bearers
of truth or prescience
died with it or told
to sit down so they did
whoever it was
knew this Century would be the last
we’ve lost them
their message sunk
by rank rallies for a system
kept our eyes on towers while beneath us
the floor open-mouthed, wide
no comfort anyhow
to have known then or know now
fate’s circling it won’t land
everything’s moving there’s no skin
left on the monolith
the old gods turned over and
tumbling
my
backyard’s overgrown
the charming blue petals
strangling
in root and tacky vine
overrun
with lizards
red-necked and blue on their spine
looking at me sideways with
their lizard eyes
through the window
through the glass door
standing at my desk
I must be
like a meteor to them
an event
they splay stuck against
planks of the wood fence
between my little rented square
of briny moss and tall grass
and all that’s out there
beyond
the tree-line
across the roofs
and the vast sky
giving me their darting
unblinking
side eye
waiting.