ANNOUNCING STRIDE, JIM TRAINER’S 8TH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, 9 Sales Needed At Press Time, Get Yours Here…OAT MILK&COLD INSTANT: Part 4, Pounding Ham In The Anthropocene & Wading Through The Blood, Personal Journalism On Patreon…THE WORST KIND OF TROUBLE IS NO TROUBLE AT ALL, Blowing Deadline At World’s End…90s ‘TALLICA & TURTLE BLOOD…EVEN SAMURAIS GET THE BLUES BUT ROCK BUT ROLL CAN NEVER DIE, Jim Trainer Returns To The Workforce With Loose Teeth & A Bad Catalytic Converter…THIS IS NOT A CULTURE WAR, Fuck You Stew & Recipes For Eating The Rich…WAR ALL THE TIME, Uncle Joe & Vladimir Talk Turkey&Hegemony…YOU’RE MY FUCKING PROBLEM, Poet Shuts Down Sawed-Off Castro Look-A-Like At The Sahara Lounge Saturday…TAMANAHA 2024, Amateur Hour Extended For The Rest Of The Dumb Year of the Ox
What do I know, as my small victories with the New Dumb have only come to a sexless and unsteady peace at the Office, where I sit with my dick in my hand and nothing but time to devote to this life. This life of course being the writer’s life, which includes all such droll minutiae as date night, at the antifascist bar, and getting in a fight with a cosmopolitan Castro-a-like in beard and bowtie, with my Beaumont beauty beside—pretty and lithe with legs long enough to kick ’em in the teeth and walk right out.
—OAT MILK&COLD INSTANT on Patreon
I prefer her to any other…
—Nirvana
Good Reader I need you. I need you like all the things I need but when I get aren’t you. I need you in the day, passing like scraping marrow, and at night, beneath the moon tower, some white noise whirring and making me mad and restless like a domesticated dog hearing something out there and keeping me awake and pacing the floor. Though the hours I keep at the Office these days could technically qualify me as a bat and anyway some cross between vampire and street-dog. I’m good but I’m wily, and uneasy. The nights are short in the Antropocene ain’t it and when you get up at 1A.M. the days aren’t anything but long. But what do I know? I’m an aging punk rocker with an anger solution. Writing hours are squandered on the phone, with spiritual and material-advisor big Sisters setting me to rights and getting my shots in like any little Brother should. The Black Witch of the North tells me life is only wasted if you’re not digging on it. Maureen Ferguson told me this years ago. We let it all go and see what remains. It’s good for the chaos-quotient, a little pick-up sticks with the calamities and needs of a middle-class life we accepted being trapped in the belly of the beast. None of this is what I came here for as what I came here for was you.
I had to get off social media and anyway be sure that the brand of Jim Trainer was throwing enough smoke I could handle my dark dirties in the A.M. and yet still get my performer rocks off. Being seen is power ain’t it, unless you’re throwing your heart and soul and even holy loads of shit into the fray on the socials, with shakey butts and pundits, self-righteous gurus and prudish street people. I had to get off the socials cuz it made me ill. Everything did, back then, and bet that Bitch and her little fat sasser at my last job were the bane and crux of my dilemma. They were at the root of every existential problem I had in the Year of the Rat, and they did it smugly and smiling in their crooked way, as I lost doctor’s visits and healthcare, income and finally even my voice on this blog. Yep I hung it up and bet it hurt me, too, as the only other time I’ve had to password-protect this site was when I was so blue in 13/14 I only took down the sad slope of alcoholism with a bad lilt of defeat. Hard times. Rivaled only by what that bitch and her shit-sister threw at me in meetings, aggressions met in better times with full retaliation. I often wonder how some people down here would fare acting the way they do on the streets of Philly. Not so well, me thinks, and anyway I don’t think so, Janice, but they try and try don’t they—to avoid their own fear of death by tempting you to throttle them.
I can’t call it and far be it from me to couch-analyze the wonts of a sawed-off beardo with a Daddy-didn’t-love me problem, stepping to me at the Sahara Lounge last week and giving my lady a giggle when I had to swat him down. People, am I right. They’re everywhere. You try and get away and once you do and your fridge is full and if the heat’s still on, they cut off your internet until the end of the dumb weekend, or they play Iron Maiden ironically at a café barely open at dubious and bourgeois hours. I ain’t worried. I survived. I’m relieved about all the noise and dissolution out there at the end of the world. It means a man can get some work done in here but sometimes—Good Reader, even getting to the work and in the headspace to do it is a full-time job. If you’re like me and were raised Catholic you might confuse things running smooth with the fact you’re doing it wrong somehow. Anything in pleasure and with flow is certainly not what you should be doing. Country simple I think I’ve just spent the last 2? 3? 4….months in a stalemate of unaccepatance versus self-worth as a writer. Which was the real and compelling reason that took me from you and these pages, tore me from your heart and threw me to the cesspools of anonymity of the Internet, where I didn’t have to sign my name or tell the truth.
“Smoke and mirrors,” I told them. They of the inner circle which used to include you and I am sorry for leaving you in the lurch. I missed my accountability to you. We came to Jesus ain’t we. Did the thing that in recovery is recovery and that’s telling it, scraping up the black mar and your own churlish and true resentment and anyway thoughts and self-talk that, for me anyway, includes what I call suicidal affirmation. When I wrote you that you were saving me you think I was kidding. Or that I’d ever lie to you. You gave me this platform and a microphone, it was you on the other end of this media that I just had to know would be there with a net or grabbing hold and falling with me. It was you and I turned away. Shits-for-brains and tragicomic cunts held sway with their prying syphylitic eyes. Their need to avoid their own fear of death by confronting Jim Trainer was flawed and not only because if we met on Hostile City streets I’d of wont to bash ’em with a ladder stop, or rip out her high bun and brain ‘er in the kidneys over a bum-buster on a park bench. Instead I had to keep my cool. In a way I had to turn my talons in, or claws, but don’t get it twisted. Bats have hands, with claws on 2 digits of each. They’re bound to be smarter than dogs as they can grab but at least they look cool. If I’m heavier on the bat medicine these days it could explain why whatever white noise rumbling however inaudibly to the sleepers and nubes of this technocratic, yuppie-town has heretofore unnerved and got me thinking on murder which, all things considered is fine. Sim Bawb was right, it’s either murder or suicide, and the choices that flower from our intention to kill just to end our, or their, suffering (and anyway the suffering that can only come from them) if unacceptable at least can be forgiven. You draw up the turret ain’t it, batten down and all that. Hang a sign THE KITCHEN IS CLOSED or without a peep dip off into some weird liminal corner of the internet, where all the you that’s seen is what you create and it’s mostly only seen by you anyway. What a fucking nightmare. Thank God for you. I’m back bebe. Buy my book and I’ll see you at the screens, motherfucker.
WE ARE 9 SALES AWAY FROM FUNDING STRIDE, MY 8TH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY. ALL WE NEED IS YOU. GET YOURS AT JIMTRAINER.NET/SHOP.
STRIDE, true romanticism on how to keep it moving at world’s end.
Going for the Throat 