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.