There’s something acting on this body
something goes in when nothing comes out…
How’s your dissolution going? I checked in on Neal Street last Saturday to bang out the design of KEEP BLEEDING. I hit a snag in production and I’m sorry. Never mind that everything I set out to do gets put off and sucked down by the bad heaviness of things. Besides lockdown is this black maw of our days now ain’t it. The world ending in slow motion doesn’t compute. How does one integrate the knowledge that these days are our last and how important could anything else be in light of this information? Addicts and survivors, we’re cursed with our indomitable and impervious will though ain’t it. You been through Hell you keep going. To boot, Gen Xers like me never went in for the zeitgeist or government, pop music and the news. On top of it all the insistence of presentism by the human race can make you feel disassociated and crazy or unproductive and sad if you’re not already. Going on for me ain’t much different these days except I can’t even do what I have to. Yet the leaf blowers keep blowing don’t they, in stereo on either side of me while I sit here writing this morning.
I always did what I had to and then I went home. I found something better than the games they were playing and lived off the “trash of the entitled” for most of my lifetime. I made a career out of evasion ain’t it, though, after 10 years blogging has only started to pay. I invested in the inner life and it got me through on shift as a live in caregiver, bartender and Volunteer Coordinator. Further still I get real sustenance with each Yellow Lark Press release. Ideally these releases pay for themselves and even assuage the cost of tour. Tour of course is a function of promotion and part of the cost of doing business as a stand up tragedian. I don’t make money putting out books or speaking and performing in other towns as much as do my damndest to meet cost. You bet but even if I’ve found real work in the great outdoors, far and away from day gigs and shift pay, I made my own bones telling it on stage and writing it down. It’s all I ever wanted. The thick skin and never-say-die determinism of a survivor though, it’s not serving me if it ever did. The weight of the world’s heavy, it’s slowing me down and I’m making mistakes.
I’m at at a bad breach as a personal journalist besides. It’s down to me to come through and report on what the fuck is bothering me but if what’s bothering me is keeping me from work I’ve agreed to at your employ then it compromises things and anyway makes a post like this a sticky wicket ain’t it. Ultimately I decided to include you, Good Reader, because I’m a communicator and all I’ve ever done is reach out and ask you to include me. Time out of mind are these sessions ain’t it. Read me and my blues and in all hopes the space between me and you is enough to make a break. I’m a current writing here but only when you close the circuit. Country simple I thought I’d let you know I’m still hard at work though my usual dumb and brutish artistic comethrough has ingrown and become strange. The end of things is really getting to me. It’s getting in the way of Art which if you know nothing about me you know that’s always been unforgivable. Yet I press on, as we all are, without a bottom or a plan. The day-by-day that are our lives now has rid us of pretense and left us bare in the present tense. I feel lighter confessing my trouble to you but better I feel clear. The lines are open. I’m sorry about yesterday. I’m living with what I could never live with before. I’ve let you down but I’ll make it up to you. The new presentism is no past if no tomorrow but today I am up and swinging.
KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:
10 Years At Going For The Throat
Going for the Throat 
[…] wrote anyway, and got to the meaty and real stuff again somehow. I felt the urge to call it strongly last December as I’d just wrapped the design on a 10-year anthology of these posts and felt reflective […]