Could this be the end? I’ve never had less to say, that hasn’t been said already, better and even in a worse way. This is the passionless age. The best voices offer no direction. The worst, well, their voices are especially odious now but the problem is my reaction to them. There’s never been any solace or wisdom offered on social media, it’s true, but so glaring now that we’re truly in the tank. Mitten memes aren’t just mindless but as fatalistic as they are dumb. A great man, with integrity and experience, is getting lampooned for ha has. A joke that isn’t that funny and with the passive-aggressive energy of a kiss-off. I don’t think we’d be in half the shit we’re in had Bernie took the helm in ’16. Biden’s push for a $15 minimum wage seems gestural as Bernie was saying that 4 years ago and now we’re over a decade in to pretending $7.50 an hour makes a living in a monolithic corporate economy. Too little too late and we’ll take it, but—ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Now I sound like one of them ain’t it. This isn’t a political post. It’s just to say that the man who could’ve saved us is only getting parodied. Or criticized, according to a Facebook friend of mine, for not celebrating the Inauguration and looking downcast and stoic on such the day for black women. But it doesn’t stop there. Gorman’s poem, a bright sentiment charged with youth and vigor is getting poo-pooed by the writing community. I can’t argue race or identity politics and I’m not a member of the writing community. I can’t voice what my intuition is telling me. Yelling, really. I mean I can but I won’t. It won’t make a damn and worst of all it’ll only make me sick. I’m sick from war and waiting and tired of championing right-thinking. The argument is so low and petty it would only pull me into irrationality, which is as ineffectual as it is draining.
I’ve been sick for years. I suffer tempests of rage that wreck and rack me, turn my blood cold and my guts to tumult and unease. I can’t think of a bigger waste of time than arguing with humans for humanity, though getting wasted comes to mind. I could divert my energies and I am. Play their game and write and petition them. Get political. No harm in that though what help it is is debatable. We won one for rational thinking but the guy in charge is an establishment shill. He’s suffered pain in his life and I feel for him but his readiness and quick moving aren’t coming up fast enough for folks like me who hope the heat stays on and smoke cigarettes to curtail the symptoms of a raging colitis until the book comes out, which, is of course further delayed. I hate them for stringing us along like this and on increasingly dark days I hate you, too. Well, not you Good Reader, of course not. The currency you offer gets me through and a book order and a cup of coffee will pull the quilts back, get me off the recliner and back at the desk. I’m tired of fighting. I’m sick of living in fear. This could be the end of this blog and anyway a pivotal Art Of War moment for your writer. This is when I cede, fall back and look within. I won’t change anyone’s mind and I don’t want to. The recent development, though, is I won’t even be entertaining the enemy. I put down the hoi polloi because they’re enthralled with money and appearance. But now I turn from even my enemy. The shots they take, emotional and real, and detriment they curate are on them now. Perhaps you can imagine how defenseless I feel, how in the wind and without a clue. Vengeance was always my reason why but now I’m only sick and cold.
It’s Winter in America and I’m just trying to make it to the end of the month when I’m broke and lonely with a body of work to tend to. I’d love to see you, next week motherfucker, but this much craziness is too much pain. The end isn’t coming, it’s already here. Protesting predatory capitalism on a platform provided by a corporation is dumber than a mittens meme.
POSTSCRIPT TO AMERICAN PUTSCH BLUES
Depression is a motherfucker. In some ways I’m equipped for what we are collectively suffering but ultimately none of us are. It takes a while for the trouble out there to get to me in here because it’s been war all the time anyway and for as long as I can remember. I never came to any kind of mastery, the blues are a black torrent pulling on my marrow that compelled me toward poetry and song. It got me through and was a remedy of sorts in that it kept me stepping in the work-a-day world. Alcohol too, and drugs, and anything that could be used as such. Every time you heard of my suffering romantically, it could’ve been because the stakes were so high in it working out I went in blind and landed in shell-shocked relationships of codependency. They weren’t innocent but it wasn’t their fault. I don’t expect people to get me but the general attitude of the general population is mostly offensive to me, and cruel. I’ve been so militaristic towards common thought because it felt like I was fighting back. The hook of the piece above was a contention with the level of outrage aimed at aspects of a ceremony. It angered me because I thought the whole production was a waste. Rather than critique the Inauguration I simply didn’t accept it at all.
You need a hook in the kind of work I do. As much as I try to subvert common essay writing, I still need something to say and I’m going to have to lure you in and keep spinning yarn while I’ve got you here. Latching on to common thought and pillorying it from a punkrock place has served me well, if the last 10 years are any indication. The kicker, though, is I had to get mad at some people getting mad and I haven’t given anything or shown another way, and effectively only blocked a road of thought. I’m sick of how organized we are in our complacency and I took my complaint here and thought I was better somehow because it was thought out, beyond byte-size and in a clever way. Truth is I’m no better. I wrote some, which is the point of this blog to begin with, but without any argument besides the contention with someone else’s argument, I’m just sick. Isolated. Unwell and angry. Shut down at the desk and by the glass doors. Shut down at the Office in a shut down world. I end this postscript the same way this post began. No resolution, only anger, and disease running slipshod through my gut and darkness on my mind. I can’t say I’m hopeless but without anything except a debilitating rage, the circuit is closed. It’s cold and dark here and long is this Winter in America.
Curator at Going For the Throat, columnist for Into The Void and progenitor of stand-up tragedy™, Jim Trainer’s KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM: 10 Years At Going For The Throat will be released this year through Yellow Lark Press. To sign up for Jim Trainer’s Poem Of The Week, visit jimtrainer.net.
Going for the Throat 
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