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.
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Your Poet,
Jim Trainer
AUSTIN TX
Going for the Throat 