EVER GET THE FEELING YOU’VE BEEN CHEATED?

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

SUPPORT JIM TRAINER’S POETRY AND PERSONAL JOURNALISM

For letter pressed collections of Jim Trainer’s poetry and broadsides by Will Stenberg go here.