NIGHTMARE WITH A DEADLINE

You can do hard things.
–Aimee Mackovic

I might be wrong but I don’t think you write to impress, I think you write because you mean it. It’s not a “please read how smart I am” thing, which bores me. It’s not dishonest and predictable. I feel more of a “I needed to write this” feeling from your writing. It’s confidence, but in your product, not yourself.
-Barbara J. Many

They told us our Gods would outlive us
but they lied…
-Nick Cave&the Bad Seeds

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
-Napoleon Hill

This coffee is as big as my forearm. It’s hot and black with honey. The sun is coming up and I’m at my desk. Where else? It bothers me to have something in the can but have to write anyway. Bother is a strong word, more like hesitate, and “have to write” after all these years isn’t in the lexicon nor even the realm of possibility. I didn’t have to write all those 643 posts for the last 10 years, there was something bothering me sure you bet motherfucker, but the truth is I had to do something and I chose to write. Much as I’m choosing now, I mean, I could just go to work or spend more precious time sipping this forearm-sized cup of coffee and doomscroll while I pretend to listen to NPR, but whatever this piece I’m writing now could be would bother me. It’d grip the gut and bloom in red blood and suck back to blue-black. You know, dread. That special Final Century brand that survivors such as we learned to keep in check and not go out on a limb and lose our mind on a Wednesday and that is suddenly a flare and firing I’d venture at least once a news cycle. Truth is the big business of news reporting is made up of people, too. People like me and you who’ve got bills to pay, so–why not? Shock doctrine sells. The Carny in Chief. We watch, we listen and scroll ’cause it’s got us by our flight-or-flight and so with our attention we buy. They make their bones and we ours. I suppose we could choose to fight, but whom or what? It could be so easy to be a Proud Boy, wake up in the morning and go to bed at night with an enemy in mind but too easy, maybe. We’ll find out soon enough ain’t it, but my point is…well–Barbara Jean is right I don’t want to get cute here or ever. I’ll leave the pandering to the infotainment purveyors and a simple truth to those armed chowder-whites champing at a Fourth Reich. I write because it’s the only thing that calms my guts and I post here every Thursday because I said I would.

It’s my own special blend of accountability, intermixed with fear of failure and an incomplete sense of self, that compels me to the page. Once I get here I’m alright and you too, Good Reader–once we both know what the fuck I’m on about we can just be together and isn’t that nice? I said I would post and so here I am. And I got 1002 words in the can yesterday but I’m going to save them for this Sunday’s Grind. It’s a drop-in written like these posts are here–personal journalism without edifice or attempt at objectivity. It goes for the throat and it announces the Throat antho so it’s perfect for this Sunday’s Grind. When I turned 40 I told you I’d be publishing a collection every year for 10. Nothing’s changed, we’re coming up on Yellow Lark Press 006 and though I’d some idea I did not expect us to be so close to the chipper blades of history. 2031 came out last year and gave us 11 years. I couldn’t see anything worse than ecological collapse and so I wrote about it, compiled and edited the collection and put it out. Now it’s something else ain’t it, though it’s fitting to be releasing a collection on the estranging development of a personal journalist at the teetering edge of the Last Decade and fraught with the dysfunction and peccadilloes uncovered after self-medicating with alcohol and cigarettes as an Ex-pat punkrocker and womanizing Hunter Thompson wannabe for the last 10 years down in the Pearl of the South. Plus if a collection of poetry ruminating on the melted atmosphere and lack of O2 choking us out of the human experiment can get published then mote it be. Ain’t it. I made deadline then and I’ll make it now. And I’ve still got almost half this cup off coffee left.

READ PART 31 OF THE COARSE GRIND THIS SUNDAY AT INTO THE VOID

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Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void, progenitor of stand-up tragedy™. Jim Trainer publishes a collection of poetry every year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.