END OF THE BLUES

pack light
what you’re running from
is already there…

I can’t parse my own depression from imminent totalitarian rule. In the meantime I gotta make a living and either stay below the federal poverty level to stay insured, or pay a hefty premium. Any way you shake it I am broke. A motor mount from devastation. Rolling teeth like dice in this gamble of life-as-an-artist. I think about my own death several times a day. I don’t know how I’m gonna make it so maybe I won’t. Might as well go on anti-depressants if I can’t tell the difference between the doom in my head and bloody ebbing tide of the final century. I’m doing gigs, caregiving on weekends and bartending during the week, and samplings in the supermarkets. All of this destroys me. Even though I spring back, I always find myself in the dark place again. This isn’t a cry for help as much as the need to tell it. The usual channels, and career I made as a writer on the socials, don’t feel as real as they used to. I want so much more than that. Even this blog doesn’t pack the same wallop, lost in feeds of pro-lifers and the horribly vainglorious. But it’s better than not saying it ain’t it and anyway this is to say—it’s bad, Reader, real bad.

I don’t have much more to offer. The Right tried to overthrow the government. My rent’s getting raised. The Honda’s running great if rumbling at 80mph or sometimes just when the AC’s on. Everything is a fucking slog and I’ve no real connection except for hit or miss phone conversations. Everyone on the street seems blind or dumb. Or mean and dumber. I need to get on something and pull myself out of the life of a dayworker. The shifts take more and more out of me and I’m only working to stay in place. There’s the doom approaching and the heavy tread until it gets here. I’m sure my art is suffering and the truth is it’s teetering on the edge with everything else. I didn’t mind firing at will, running a hundred books off, booking a flight and doing readings until I sold out of them. But my short-term thinking has landed me here, and my health and the economy won’t support that lifestyle anymore.

Patrons are still trickling in. Y’all are saving my ass in every way. I had a piece of personal journalism published last week and it’s everything I wanted for my writing. I’m getting paid to write my way, which isn’t factual or topical, per se. It’s the word on the street from Your Guy, running his deal there. If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you’d read this piece, called HIT ‘LIKE’ AND SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR DOOM at Music, Movies&Hoops, you’ll be celebrating with me. It’s a victory and I’ll take it and thank my lucky stars for you. Now back to the bloody fray. I can’t wait to see you on the street motherfucker.

Buy me a bubbly?

Most of my Patrons are contributing as little as $5 a month, and they’re getting letters for it, letter pressed broadsides, live readings and songs. I’m your mutineer, and I need your help.  I’d love your readership, vis-á-vis a a few minutes of your week and for the cost of a fancy beverage.

Patrons keep me writing until I can find someone to pay me for it. Luckily I’ve a piece featured in Music, Movies&Hoops this month. The good news for me is that I’ll live and the good news for you is that as a Patron you’ll have access to street-level reporting, poetry and song.  What could be better?  

Please support me on Patreon.

Your Poet,
Jim Trainer
AUSTIN TX  

THE AGE OF CURATION BLUES

Out in the fields they were turning the soil,
I’m sitting here hoping this water will boil…
—Neil Young

Hello darkness my old friend. Some time ago I made the decision to hang it up here at the Throat. I’m sorry if that confused you and I’m sorry to have lost your weekly readership. I can tell you’re still out there, just scattered. We all are. I stopped posting here because I reached an impasse with my health, and I felt like a hack. The anger, or, thee reason this blog even exists, was doing terrible things to me. The anger hasn’t gone away but it’s been muted. Which one’s worse ain’t it. Feeling like a hack, however, hasn’t changed. I’m fucking pissed at the way this country treats us, and I’m out here working for a living and leaning on my health to do it. Which one’s worse, well, country simple the banes and ills of life are still coming at me, all of us, really. Yet I still feel like a hack.

I got a gig writing for Music, Movies&Hoops at the end of the summer. They ran PART I of a tour journal called TOURING IN A POST-PUNK WORLD. They ran 243 words of mine on Nirvana. I don’t know what happened between then and when I had what I call the Rogan piece published. I can’t explain the lull except to say the blues, motherfucker. The hack feeling, and no weekly release here, running out of money I made on the road. It put me in a bad way, Reader, and I can’t snap out of it. I’m ruminating on the past at the expense of what’s happening in the present. A lot of what I’m calling the hack feeling has to do with the state of the world and clicking into place of what I’ll call institutions of culture. Social media has become a reality. What a horrible sentence. I don’t have to tell you that while we’re “seeing what’s going on” online, we’re prostrate and anyway motionless and transfixed, in a word—distracted. We’re distracted by the world falling away and the terrible turning of this age, and we’re helpless in its thrall. The rally and roar on the socials over the imminent rollback of Roe V. Wade to me is a perfect example of yelling into the void. I’m not saying we shouldn’t and that things won’t change without anger, just that when it comes time to organize, we’ll be on the same networks beholden to corporate interest and well aware of who’s pulling the strings.

I’ve paid enough late fees to Fucking Spectrum to keep the internet on for a year. Internet access is a main gripe of a piece due to appear on MM&H this Thursday. The internet has ingratiated itself into my writing but my cause is just. It’s time for internet access to become a utility. So who should pull the strings? The federal government of course, or therein be regulated somehow, like radio and the telephone—wait a second, Good God. We are so fucked and I’m over the honeymoon phase with our doom. I’m not just scared, I’m blue. Any vindication I felt about how wretched things are and how catastrophic they will become, has been replaced by hopelessness. Of course it’s happening by degree. I don’t notice until I’m broke again and war is waged in Europe. It’s Spectrum on the phone and it’s Verizon and what could be the biggest humanitarian crisis since WWII. The thread is me, in fragile health, working doubles and listening to our leaders’ speeches. But the through line is internet access. Of course it’s not all about me. I mean, the blog is, and all of us. So here’s your free internet. Your access to me. This isn’t a persona but a reporting on the darkness advancing while in the charms of the writing life. We need each other. The blog has gone fallow and I’m not even sure if it matters. I think about my own death daily and anxiously grind through another 24 hours as a freelancer, destitute of the desk and suffering a silent rage until dusk. I’m relieved in dusk. The most exciting part of my day is going to bed, which we can admit is pretty bad. But much better than before.

GET YOUR COPY OF STRIDE HERE

Buy me a bubbly?

Most of my Patrons are contributing as little as $5 a month, and they’re getting letters for it, letter pressed broadsides, live readings and songs. I’m your mutineer, and I need your help.  I’d love your readership, vis-á-vis a a few minutes of your week and for the cost of a fancy beverage.

Patrons keep me writing until I can find someone to pay me for it. Luckily I’ve a piece featured in Music, Movies&Hoops this and next month. The good news for me is that I’ll live and the good news for you is that as a Patron you’ll have access to street-level reporting, poetry and song.  What could be better?  

Please support me on Patreon.

Your Poet,
Jim Trainer
AUSTIN TX