Please join us this Thursday for
WALK ON
The Virtual Release of Jim Trainer’s STRIDE
with
Nathan Hamilton (TX)
Amy Turn Sharp (OH)
Spencer Mirabel (OR/TX)
Christia Hoffman (TX)
Charlie O’Hay (PA)
Aimeé Mackovic (TX/CA)
Eric Peffley (CA)
Jim Trainer (PA/TX)
Thursday March 3 on FB Premiere
8P.M. EST/7P.M CST/5P.M. PST
To support Jim Trainer’s personal journalism, and for live readings of poetry and songs go here.
Welcome to the room. Perhaps you need no introduction. Or maybe you do as you’ve only been fleeing its existential hum. You’ve got confetti in your hair and cake on your face. You think that adventure is somewhere out there and you’re a stranger to the room. You made no endurance with your solitude and never accepted the true sentence of our time here. You’re never alone. I know the type. I’ve spent considerable time trying to learn their language and years beside trying to get the fuck away from people who can’t be unto themselves. Up until very recently and last week’s post in fact, slagging “crazy btiches” and sadly doing like I’ve always done. Perhaps hit pieces and hack writing like last week’s blog are my way of denying my own lonely plight but my point is I have known them who could never be alone. Spent long hours suffering them and trying to be what they need but failing to see: anybody trying to avoid their own self will never be happy with you. Your time with them will be a fucking drag and you’re never off the clock and besides, it can be a clever way to trick yourself out of your own isolation. In which case I hope you like drama and white trash theatrics. The police. Blood. Infidelity and lies and strange and unhinged voicemails in the dead of night. I could chalk up my own plays in the narcissist’s arena to a few things that include lust and a mentally ill mother but reduce it here to its useful root which as mentioned is distraction.
If I take the meta view of getting fucked around and writing about it then essentially I’m a part of it ain’t I and that would be dumb. Of my many unbearable flaws and pecadilloes there is one that I’ll never forgive or even tolerate from myself and that is being dumb. So I took that post down. Put up a live reading of SLIPSHOD LIFE. Put it back up again.
Talked with my therapist for 45 minutes burning shag and drinking 7-11 breakfast blend. The good counselor is wearing a weight vest and increasing his load until he hits 40 lbs. so that in June when he retires, and he and his wife hit the trails, he’ll be prepared to do all 1,200 miles with his world on his back. Me I wrapped 28 hours caregiving with beans from the can and porn and I’m at the desk this morning reflecting on my own life as a shift worker, in and out of dumb trysts with dumb women and dumbest of all thinking it was worth it as long as I lived to tell the tale. Well it wasn’t. I might look back at my last 10 years as a crazy lover and shit-talking scribe with pride but I’m not hoping to continue in any way penning bad press as an online personal journalist and poet. I feel like an asshole tell you the truth and even this corrective piece won’t change that. I’m in the room and always have been but redoubled here, as my own time out there was a fuckaround and only fodder for a malicious woman hoping to find someone who hates her as much as her father that she can prove wrong. Fuck her but fuck me, really, to get so far in a decade but only be snapped back to a reactive slob and alcoholic with a poetry problem.
That last hangup I’ll keep by the way and though I don’t think I am solving any of these problems by writing this, resolve is built into the writing life. It’s in my toolbox to be the writer, and witness and conduit, on hot mediums like this blog and the stage. I’ll take it with me, bet, though I’m not really going anywhere. It’s just me in here and I’m glad to be. Shuttered and shut in like always and feeding the inner forge all day until at night when the room glows. It’ll burn bright of the past and be the hard and charged moment that for solitary beasts such as we is all that is holy and real.
Please join us for
WALK ON
The Virtual Release of Jim Trainer’s STRIDE
with
Nathan Hamilton (TX)
Amy Turn Sharp (OH)
Spencer Mirabel (OR/TX)
Christia Hoffman (TX)
Charlie O’Hay (PA)
Aimeé Mackovic (TX/CA)
Eric Peffley (CA)
Jim Trainer (PA/TX)
Thursday March 3 on FB Premiere
8P.M. EST/7P.M CST/5P.M. PST
| For letter pressed collections of Jim Trainer’s poetry and broadsides by Will Stenberg go here. |
My last serious relationship ended up being a rehash of the one that preceded it. She acted much the same and in fact worse our second go round which included: gaslighting, lies, claims of being solicited by my songwriting hero and a cry for help cloaked in a terribly-acted voicemail of her being abused by the man she was shacked up with while avoiding contact with me. I could chalk these theatrics up to being a fool for love, which I don’t much mind, or maybe her way of exacting some kind of vengeance for leaving behind the white-trash circus of her life the first time. I responded to her abuse and lies and pissy vengeance(?) maturely and with all the growth I’d garnered since the first time we broke up and I walked out of her kitchen, got in my car and drove from Philadelphia to Austin in 36 hours. It burns a little knowing I’d wasted so much time on someone who didn’t care at all but it’s just sad to consider she’s what my therapist calls “really fucked up” and there isn’t any hope there, never was and never will be.
Not long after our breakup I went to Hawaii for a job offer and subsequently had the best tour of my life. I hit 5 cities and came home with the last show on film and money in my pocket. Tour ended well but it was gnarly on the road as the other performer on the bill accused me of some seriously horrible shit. All of it untrue and heinous to deal with out there on the road. She backed out of the shows but I didn’t know where I’d stay and was unsure if even my flight was guaranteed as it was booked by her. I just knew that the show must go on and it did. Much the same as how I handled the breakup, I responded to her maturely and stepped back with open hands, as the Buddhists say—pulled a 14-hour day performing in Athens and ending up back in Columbus the day before a red-eye to Hostile City for the last show of the tour. I can’t remember if there was any conciliation from either of these parties, which leads me to believe there wasn’t. As much as the malicious and vindictive behavior of my X and terrible subterfuge from my touring partner didn’t track with me, neither would have any half-ass apology, which, again, I can’t be sure even happened as I’m on my own wavelength and operating from this height and never lower.
Most of what’d been bothering me my whole life doesn’t track or affect me and certainly not in the same way anymore. I know it’s a script. That I’ll probably go after and in fact devote myself to unattainable love in the form of someone suffering with BPD, or end up collaborating artistically with someone and suffer from bad boundaries and petty conceit. Also my own bad blues and this up-until-now story of blowing it and coming up forfeit at being an artist, that all I’ve sworn off and gone without was for naught and I’m left only with the sacrifice I made for this life, and never the boons, as I never took the risk or laid it all on the line. It was Uncle Hank’s birthday yesterday and it’s not hard for me to slip into comparing my life to his, my hero and someone I modeled myself after in regards to everything from spirituality to publishing. These days though, it’s easier to remember that even if I’m not leading Rollins’ Henry Miller-kind-of-life, and though I haven’t seen half the things he has or found the same outlets and ubiquity as he, my life is still pretty great. I’ve managed to build my own brand, as odious as that sounds, and operate a publishing house that does small runs and tour in jaunts and spurts until I could string some cities together to perform every night so that by tour’s end the show is a killer. Now that’s vindication, eh Reader? I’ve worked for years at making my life better and now it is. I’ve got a gig on the weekend and the whole week to write, book and promote. I’ve come up roses and I didn’t have to lay a hand or even say a bad word to the enemy. These days the trash takes itself out and I’m better. Regardless of anyone or anything and with love and support from the good ones I made this austere and loitering life, squinting at brilliance and up and swinging at the sky.
Please join us for
WALK ON
The Virtual Release of Jim Trainer’s STRIDE
with
Nathan Hamilton (TX)
Amy Turn Sharp (OH)
Spencer Mirabel (OR/TX)
Christia Hoffman (TX)
Charlie O’Hay (PA)
Aimeé Mackovic (TX/CA)
Eric Peffley (CA)
Jim Trainer (PA/TX)
Thursday March 3 on FB Premiere
8P.M. EST/7P.M CST/5P.M. PST
But I couldn’t find out what the reason was…
It’s a new kind of suffering, one I wear if not proudly then as a matter of course. I’m still falling through with nothing to stabilize me or grip upon. I go through old wounds and past hurts and they’re no answer and they’ve never been. I don’t blame or bemoan just take to the days, rudderless and spun in a howl of wind. I dreamed of a million-heiress, she kept me in a master suite. She climbed on top of me and slinked and purred and when her friends came by I had the place to myself while they clinked glass on the roofdeck with their Teslas in the drive. I also dreamed of you and that’s why I know my suffering is a kind of right, if not holy then because I am cut apart from the world except when it comes to you. In my dreams you are easy and our time like an anticipatory grin. Your working class legs are as fine as I remember.
The dusks are spectral and the nights heavy as law. The dark mornings brighten as I find luck and even ask for passage through with this burden. The boy cat comes at the glass doors, from out of his lost wild and he comes in and I am touched whole. There’s a magic to the days, as laden as they are, with my questions like thorns pulled upward and around the stem. I come through the past again, am resolute and nothing but stubborn. A brutish refining. Knowing the ease of you, that you’re out there, that to prevail is just to be—move and shake through with the torrent, get to work, despite being hollow inside, something curious and turning will bound up and out, break my heart til it breaks open and fill these empty rooms.
| WALK ON The Virtual Release of Jim Trainer’s STRIDE with Nathan Hamilton (TX) Amy Turn Sharp (OH) Spencer Mirabel (OR/TX) Christia Hoffman (TX) Charlie O’Hay (PA) Aimeé Mackovic (TX/CA) Eric Peffley (CA) Jim Trainer (PA/TX) Thursday March 3 on FB Premiere 8P.M. EST/7P.M CST/5P.M. PST |
| For letter pressed collections of Jim Trainer’s poetry and broadsides by Will Stenberg go here. |
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| Jim Trainer is a poet, publisher, writer and performer. He blogs weekly at Going For the Throat and contributes to Music, Movies&Hoops. As a proponent of personal journalism Trainer reports on the inner life while writing about recovery, mental health and the creative process. Trainer publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, every year through Yellow Lark Press. STRIDE is his 8th. Trainer is the progenitor of Stand UpTragedy™ and performs throughout the world. To support Jim Trainer’s personal journalism, and for live readings of poetry and songs go here. |
We slipped through each other’s hands
our lives had their own demands
I’m still one of your biggest fans
and it’s been long enough…
—Mike Stinson
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
I’m on deadline at the Throat, in case you didn’t know, and anyway have made a deal with myself to have something up there every Monday plus a formal 6-1,200 words here every Thursday. The fact that it is Monday and 7 minutes after 7 in the evening as of this writing means I am feeling the crunch, if not already evidenced by the aforementioned too-many smoke breaks. Why the crunch and why the deadline are a weird deal I made with myself to try and snap out of it—this block and slump of suicidal affirmation my life has become since I got off the road.
—ROOM WORK on Patreon
Well. It’s ya boy, working 28 hours this weekend and listening to Psalmships on Bandcamp in between shifts. For my double on Sunday I drove straight through, parked in the mega lot of the HEB and downed hot gumbo and sweet tea before reporting to the night shift. There’s a lot going on in the world which I’ll be honest doesn’t make a damn with me. I’m reporting here because I said I would and because sometimes all you can do is get it down, on the page, and frame it as best you can before a hot breakfast after a good night’s sleep. Sales of STRIDE are inching along, and we’ve sold almost half the pressing of TO A DOG I MET IN CALABRIA. We’ll get their releases on the calendar and in the meantime shuck and jive between the lunch delivery gig and caregiving work.
The idea is to start putting some money away, if at first to get out of the hole that is a bass bag & rig, my home studio together and set up to record music and video performances, and maintenance on the Element including a new catalytic converter and cosmetic repair. Working on the weekends mostly, I should be able to curate virtual and live releases for STRIDE, TO A DOG I MET IN CALABRIA, the VAX POP VAX DEI screening and Singers On Writing showcase. Of course I’ll need to sleep and eat well, make strides toward the betterment of my mental health and libido with Yoga and actively choosing presence in my immediate environment. And of course I’ll have to hit the road and thinking Indiana in the spring, if not Hostile City for the AWP in March. I’ll need to demand desk time of myself and do my own room work until I can get back out there. This includes columns on culture and creative process for Music, Movies&Hoops and my own weekly on Patreon.
It’s weird to be back at it if only because I can’t be sure I’m all there, or here, as I’ve been slipping into self-doubt and wondering of my place as a poet within it all. I know that the work I’ve done has been in the inner forge and I’ve made for myself a joyful loitering of life. I’m happy on the fringe and down for the strange and diaphanous turns of the Anthropocene, as long’s we’re together. Judging by the stats on this blog it looks like we are—here together, and isn’t that nice?
We accept that we’re broken. We’ll never get along or be happy with what they’re selling and so we take it on and make it ourselves. Books and music, poetry and the spoken word. Rather than bemoan or regret their ill-fitting program we get up and tell our own stories.—READ MORE OF ROOM WORK, AND ENJOY JIM TRAINER’S PERSONAL JOURNALISM, POETRY AND MUSIC ON PATREON
Going for the Throat 