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Thanks motherfucker!
It’s been a while but I am at a loss. The world may have gotten in more than it usually does but I haven’t been without inspiration since the early days at Going For The Throat. Those days the crisis was real. If I didn’t make it as a writer I’d be stuck behind a bar or working hospice for 9 an hour. Dressed like a Hershey’s Kiss on campus or test driving the Golfquick LE in Sugarland. My definition of “making it as a writer” is broad and wild. I can sit down and come up with 600 words out of thin air, and by keeping it simultaneously all too and not personal at all, the thing will find its legs and walk its way into you. The archetypes are free to roam. The fact that I’ve become a character in my own story, coupled with a 10-ton outrage and Black Irish honesty has made Going For the Throat a success. My definition of success, too, is unorthodox-but if anything is true about my 20+ year career trekking down the savage road of New Journalism, it’s that the medium is the message. That means that I’ve got my transmitter, just like in my Radio Days, and I can feel you out there listening. I’m a writer so I write. I still got a day gig, one that’s winding down, and I’m not 100 on what’s in store. I’m booking overtime-I hope to play every night and write every day. That’s been my dream and charge for as long as I can remember. “Writer’s Block” is less than a memory for me, but waking up today, fully clothed, in a dead confederate palace with all the curtains pulled back-is taking me back to when I knew I had to be a writer, and tried to do every day what I now do every week. Back then it was 1,200 and pure agony. I volleyed the imminent avalanche of self-hatred that would fall if I didn’t become a writer with the agony of coming up with 1,200 words every day. There was beer involved. And cigarettes you bet. It worked but it drove me out of my mind.
I’m just as fond of those hardbitten scoop days for what happened away from the desk. Hopping fences, getting shitty. Falling through the Night Kitchen, driving down dark barrio streets with my tongue in Gwendolyn’s teeth. My hangovers were grim back then, nothing compared to what was coming. It was beginning to get old but I saw no other way to assuage both the loneliness of writing and my utter dread of never becoming a writer-as the money ran out. I caught some breaks. I got a good job. I met Rich Okewole and Najla Assaf. I found my community. I was taken in by the good folks at the IPRC in Portland (and taken right back out by Trump’s America but that’s another story for another time). Perhaps my hesitation to pull the trigger this morning is indicative of the end of those Salad Days as a struggling writer. The gravy train has left the station. Of all my myriad blues and woe, movement seems to be the answer. As proud as I am of what I’ve become, I’m terrifed here at the midway. Possibilities that ain’t been realized won’t be and I could die at any time.
It’s got me shook. I quit my gig of 5 years, should be out October 1. I bought a car. I enrolled in this year’s SWRFA and sent 22 booking emails out into the Live Music Capital of the World, even canvassed West 6th. Survivors Wisdom tells me it’s time to grind it out, hit the road and stop being such a pussy. Maybe the truth is that struggle is over. Not this one, but that one. The battle with self can conclude. It’s I and I and a good night’s sleep contending for top place on my list of priorities. I’ve found myself. I am who I am. Cruel time has showed me who I am and branded me with the wisdom that there’s not enough time to change that now.
We both know there would never be enough time but that didn’t stop us before ain’t it though. We rebelled. We clanged against the deathhead, came for the Gods and offered them the head of the King. We bled for it, we had something to prove. It was useless, futile and fatal and the biggest waste of time. We squandered our youth. The youth is gone. It’s time to get off social media and take to the territory. Our lives depend on it. I got witchy women mixing up the medicine for me and an Ayurvedic scholar laying out a diet plan. I got Brother Don on the telephone and Sister Sarah at the other end of a computer screen. I’ve got friends like blood, holding vigil and corroborating and besides all this big love-a fear of death that is all too real. The prime motivator. The best time to hit it was a long time ago. The next best time is now.
I better see you on the streets motherfucker.
Oh, the work I could get done if my heart weren’t so full of hate.
–David Sedaris
I know this is not Church, but get close to the Lord. The world is getting close to the end.
–Little Richard
If it could happen then — in 1980 — then it can happen now.
–Scott Crawford
We love your voice.
–Rebecca Loebe
I’ve been clean and sober for over 2 years, but you’d never know it looking at my apartment. It looks like I been riding with the King, drinking with Papa and partying with Guns ‘N Roses. My kitchen doubles as a place to type, much like Bukowski and Hunter Thompson’s did-but don’t ask. Boxes full of Farewell to Armor and Anthology Philly (WragsInk), September and All in the wind (Yellow Lark Press) are underneath the War Room table. The black nest of power cords, USBs and chargers beside it ain’t pretty either, and it’s a fire hazard besides. Topo Chico bottles and La Croix empties christen the floor like cities and the bedroom at the back of the mansion is sinking in a cyclone of fitted sheets and pillows. The bathroom is gross and there are piles of clothes everywhere. “Dude clean” is apt and I’d do well to get a maid-but then I’d have to pre-clean, like Doc does, and her visits would be another deadline for me to stroke out over. I have no excuse and no one to blame. It’s a fucking mess in here.
The last 4 days on shift were an epic and colossal laziness, a laziness I needed to recover from, which is why I’m sitting here at 3 in the afternoon sipping cold coffee in my sleeping cargos, writing. The world is out there and at large. But I couldn’t get to sleep until after 2 last night, when I finally pulled earbuds from the phone and left Uncle Hank and Mike Patton mid-show. We’re not even halfway through the summer and I feel fine. The new lease starts 8/15 and I’ve got a flurry of shit to get cracking on, none of which I started, or even attempted to, since we last spoke. As per usual, I sat down to write this with the intention to bag my bad blues, let you know what’s bothering me and get right to it. Besides being beholden to a deadline, and despite all appearances of transparency at GFtT, there’s a lot of shit I’m loathe and even ashamed to admit. Mostly it’s how I haven’t done much with my time, that I’m depressed and stuck winding down the end days as an indentured servant. I’ve squandered precious time, that for the last couple years I only sensed running out, winding down, acutely and terrifyingly-fuck.
My other blunders, faults and peccadilloes-I’ve been writing them down, just haven’t posted them here. They’re in a file called FVK Daily, a draft of a blog post like this one except it goes on and on, listing and enumerating all my dirties and lust, all the venom and corruption that haunts me daily. Maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing, or the imperative of Natural Selection to never be satisfied-but I feel like I can do it, get it all out and fix what’s wrong with me simply by writing it down, posting it or etching it in ink on the lined pages of a store bought yellow bound pocket spiral I call LIGHTNING/RENDERING. It’s a tradition that dates back to 1992. I’d buy a notebook at CVS, its color informing me and setting the tone for our time together-me and my Friend the Journal, who would be with me, help me to manifest, worship and smash my idols, and self-actualize. It’s the power of writing, good Reader, and poetry. It’ll never fail to get you out of a jam-that is, your head, and help you to fetishize your pain and cast your journey with pomp and grandiosity. It’s how we mythologize, and how we make ourselves heroes, how we hang it on the fucking wall, find and take from a sense of place, which in turn gives us a sense of ourselves-our shape and color, our small graces and thunderous foibles, our smokes and charms, our roaring and our lightning, the drums of the arena calling for your head in the black and endless rain.
I don’t have any answers this week. I don’t have any answers most weeks, and I’m loathe to wrap this in a cute or poignant way. It’s the end of the world. Thank you for reading.
…it all just seems so sensationalized.
–Aziz Ansari
I know ppl like u think it’s “cool” to theorize about quantum fluctuations, but the heat death of the early universe isn’t something to romanticize.
–Frances Bean Cobain
…I say hey Janet
you are the one, you are the sun
and I’m your dutiful planet…
–Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds
This Guns N’ Roses weekend is over.
-Your Writer on Tour with Ironwhore, July 2005
Waking up with a hardon is the best thing to happen to me in years. Never mind I quit smoking, drinking and the Life, that I’ve published three collections of poetry and prose and survived as a working singer songwriter for the last 5 years, or that we just wrapped 4,484 miles pulling in to Hippie Town at 9pm last night. Waking up erect is good news from the Gods, like we’re gonna win this thing. Know what I mean, good Reader? As we were leaving Austin 19 days ago, it dawned on me that I probably have arthritis, if not in my left middle finger, then certiainly on my right thumb. Anyone reading this blog on the regular knows I haven’t caught my breath in over a year-and there are other, less savory conditions and maladies that’ve fell on me in these paling years, not the least of which being a lack of libido. I let it all slide, rather than jump through the bureaucratic hoops of health insurance that only led nowhere-but decreased interest in sex was, at the time, viewed as an improvement. Sex seemed to always land me in trouble somehow, and, by and large the partners I had were colossal wastes and the biggest drains of my time, on my health and my career as a day worker, writer and performer.
The truth is I’ve let a lot of things go. I’ve insulated myself from the world with this gig. I’ve maintained at minimum, and pushed harder when I needed to, but when I look back at the last 5 years and think about the fact that I’m 42, I’m terrified and disgusted-the former boring through nights pocked and shot through with anxiety, and the latter beating the opposite sex to the punch. I couldn’t fuck and I didn’t want to. It’s called depression, and low self esteem, which can intermingle in a vicious cycle that the worst people will blame you for, but actual compassion for, even if welcomed, can veer too close to commiseration and in any event is a shit substitute for understanding. The silver lining is the coffee’s done, it’s time to wake up, this gig is over in less than 2 months and, like the Buddhists say-the best time to start was last year, the next best time is right now. Lest we forget, I taught myself how to write these last 5 years, and the dream of being a columnist has been realized, thanks in no small part to you and your wonderful Readership. I’ve got a 2009 Monk’s Robe Orange Honda Element and a Tacoma Guild. I live in a post-gentrified Paradise and every dumb ailment and malady I’ve mentioned can be treated by swallowing a pill-ok, I still need to look into why I can’t catch my breath, it’s true, and wish me luck as I enter their world and try to get the help I need.
This blog has always been the balloon to my wet cement blues. I talk myself down from the noose here, and you read me and it’s perfect. Healing myself with my own medicine bag, sitting down to type and hang it on the fucking wall, feeling supported and, most of all, seen by you is terribly important to me-a rudder in the shitswells of a dark and calmitous world, the biggest boon and best thing to happen to me in years besides waking up with a hardon this morning. Oh yeah, that. It seems like the weeks get away from me. I mean, sure, I work full time, and I just spent 18 days on the road with my Boss, but time gets away from me-that is, the time to address the many peccadilloes and tragic breakdown I’ve been skirting since I turned 40. I feel like I should address it, tacitly, get up on it like Ahab, and chronicle the savage journey I’ve undergone since deciding to stop being depressed (I am NOT saying that this decision cured my depression AT ALL). Brother Bean has asked for it, in the past, and I feel like I’d do well to bring it back for you-hip you to the saga of a working class ex-Pat punkrocking rockabilly New journalist with a a whole lot of time on his hands, a new car and a rekindled libido. I’ll still try, good Reader. You bet. But I’ve got to wrap this. I still believe in my dreams and I feel like I’ve got something to live up to, until the next time we meet, so I should get cracking.
May your crown be a halo. See you next Thursday motherfucker.
How is it that we never completely comprehend our love for someone until they’re gone?
-Patti Smith, M Train
Magic comes to me in fits and starts. Yesterday, out front Tops Grocery, I heard the crow first, looked up and waited. Another appeared. There are always more and of course there is always the shadow of crow, there on the ground in front of me but looking up again see one flying just overhead. That made 3, from none, that I first heard, and one. Something else catches my eye. The boy in orange crocks, looking up too, at the same crow, watching. Later that night, after swatting the horseflies from my face and belting out the lyrics to a new song in the driveway of the cabin, a woman came from out of the brush with the boy beside her. His name was Remi and he played drums and guitar and bass. Remi is 8 years old.
In the kitchen I show him open D and teach him Mona, the Bo Diddley song perhaps better known as Who Do You Love? It’s a simple 2-chord vamp and Remi picks it up instantly. He teaches me No Sleep Till Brooklyn while refusing several offers of cold seltzer and philosophizing how he’s only concerned with being alive and what could kill him. The scrapes on his shin, the scratches and bite marks on his hands (from Bandit the Maine Coon), his poison ivy-they don’t worry him.
“Only if I die and that I’m alive,” he offers not sagely but just like a boy.
He shows me some drum patterns. Tells me how he fell off the stage but climbed right back up behind the drums in time for the solo. Talking and interacting with him is unassuming, simple, and factual but enthusiastic. Mentions that he’s been here for a long time. His mother wraps it up with Blair on the screen porch. They leave and me and Blair part ways.
I’m sitting out front of Cafe Sarah in North Creek, at an impossibly small, aqua-colored garden table. I can’t see the bugs but can feel them biting me. I haven’t caught anyone staring at me but can feel it acutely. The family just to my right give off a toxic, American vibe. Whatever charm there is on these streets is bled out, the bitter rasp of smokers’ laughs never puncturing the heavy meanness. I’d do much better at the beer garden up the street, or even Laura’s, but I don’t drink and I don’t want to spend any dollars anywhere up here, only to have to fight for my psychic place all over again. They think I’m a golem and that’s fine. I’m a man and I mask my sadness masterfully by only shining back anger.
I finished Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, by Carrie Brownstein, and am just about through M Train. Brownstein put me back in the 90s, the last time it meant anything anywhere. The detrimental rigors she suffered on tour with Sleater Kinney were all but ignored by me-I was going for the glory and read on as, unsurprisingly, Brother Vedder rose from the pages to affirm the power of rock and roll, like only he can again and again. Patti Smith understands better than anyone that to be a poet is to stake your claim in the magic of the world. Her existence is shamanic. Her inner life informs her outer life, and her outer life always becomes manifest.
Guess you could say I’m out here in the territory. North Creek sadly feels like the end of America, and it just might be. My inner life is populated with legend. My outer life is having to fend for myself psychically, with the flags flowing and thousands of miles travelled and thousands to get back. I’m off hitch here-disconnected. My only way out is in a greasy barn with a ping-pong table, up the hill from the cabin where Ben, Blair and I bunk like untoward and swoll dorm mates, away from home and girlfriends at University. I talked with Jill this morning, who I adore. She’s 86, out there cutting back the long leaves and talking about the effect of sobriety on Art. She’s twice my age and if I had a wish beyond this ordinary, cold water phase, it’d be to have her faculties, at her age, and drink chilled vodka in a squat glass while smoking Camel straights.
The road was fine-exhausting as it always is, like a Goddess, an event of endurance. Seems fucked that this is the prize-at this cafe with the chiggers and Americans, but it’s nice by the lake and I heard my first loon call, late yesterday afternoon. I’ve got some things turning in my mind, aspirations that sprung up and surprised me, and, despite my road and ageworn body, I should do wise to take note and make these seeds sprout and make happen. What else is there but the idea and its manifestation? I never fit in anywhere, let alone upstate where it seems like all anyone ever does in America is wait around to die.
Ab irato,
Trainer
North Creek, NY
Let’s focus on the steak, not the peas.
-Minchia
Liberals want our country to be more like Canada. Conservatives want it to be more like Mexico.
-Realist
Raising a kid with medical needs is a very, very steep climb in the best of circumstances, and so when we say Medicaid is like the handholds that you’re using to scale up and get your kids to help-without those, there’s nothing below, there’s no safety net once those supports get pulled out, you just fall off the cliff.
-Robert Howell
If they were to collaborate they could strangle data access to parts of the internet, it’s not an understatement to say they could influence history.
-Elliot Brown
One need only look closely at such drag queens as Michelle Visage or Violet Chachi on the RuPaul show to suss out the cruel, cold-blooded lizard that lurks behind the eyes of the Illuminati elite.
-Stephenson Billings
What the hell.
-Jared Yates Sexton
I wish I had let go long ago. Not long after I quit smoking I began to experience a shortness of breath. I’ve had to teach myself to sing again. Psalmships’ “Little Bird“, again and again. Up high in the mountains of Minerva and out here on the blistering plains. What felt like the broken middle finger on my left hand has moved to the thumb on my right. If it’s arthritis, then, what the hell? I should’ve never quit, shoulda kept drinkin’ and womanizin’ and waking up dead in a dead confederate palace, with my pants at Kim’s pool and the aching yellow sun splitting my skull like a shiv, until I could down 400mg and tell her to get…OUT. It’s painfully apparent, these are the end days. I should’ve never left the life but I wish I’d let go a long time ago.
The stupid truth is the life never helped me let go either. I was as hung up then as I am now and drugs never worked. You’re not going to believe me but I could never enjoy myself on drugs because I knew it was only a drug. How terribly unfun and what a fucking drag, eh Brother? The closest I came was on mushrooms down at Stone Harbor, on the shore in the dark, with the Reverend and Butch as a storm rolled in. I lost myself that summer but never before and never again. I’ve kept myself locked tight, fought against it in my 20s but embraced it until now. I perfected my isolation and my Father’s poker face. Like him, the world only hurt my feelings and to be obvious was to be played. What the hell? How did this thing rear and turn into a psychoanalytical journey and examination of why I’m no fun but still wishing for the days?
Oh well, if it brings us to the truth then I can live with that. However we got here, we’re here, and these days I prefer to drink dark coffee with honey, read the news and pretend I’m smoking cigarettes in my mind, like a mid-life Cassavetes and type here in the center of a crumbling palace amidst: piles of poetry collections, poster-pressed covers, a copy of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, CDs and receipts and guitar strings, stacks of typed and handwritten poetry-edited in red ink, the trusty NAS plugged in and humming beside and a cold cup of Italian Roast, in the blasting AC in what I thought at one time was the center of the Rock and Roll universe, in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country-the Pearl of the South and the Velvet Rut, Austin Texas Hippie Town U.S.A.
Incidentally, that moniker and euphemism for the good vibes and pretty white girls that grow on trees down here has become outdated. All the hippies live in Smithville now and I’m outta here, too. Call it The City of Izods&Boots, or, the Town of Technocrats or simply, Bro Country. Call ’em the New Rich or Fancy Dog Walkers, call ’em whatever you want because I am outta here. It’s been a long time that I should be far from here and 5 years since I wrote that elegiac paen to my departure from the barrio. Facebook says I been on there 8 years today, which makes for an interesting capsule of my time down here-beginning with my very first post, a video of Cory Branan singing “Survivor Blues” and ending with, well, “The End” by The Doors.
I’ve learned a lot. I’m a different man. I’m making the seismic changes that come from staying in place. It was real and it was fun but it wasn’t real fun. I’m staying on this side of the river but I am getting the fuck out of dodge. I’ve got 4 gigs booked in the next 2 months and 2 pages of contacts on legal yellow, letter-sized paper. Work in media suits me. I don’t mind the world, from a good safe distance, and writing about it transforms it somehow, makes even the horrid and unconscionable worth going through. I’m a fire walker on here, a hard bitten scoop in the hard lands. And, lovely and overwrought I bring it on home to you, good Reader, my Friend.
See you in Hyde Park motherfucker.
Greetings from the wasteland and hello from the high rooms. I’m writing this from the War Room, a kitchen in an apartment of the last Confederate Governor of the U.S.’ old place, in sweltering downtown Austin. I’m writing it on a Monday so I can get the world off my neck. The afternoons are best for poetry but I blew it out yesterday with a poem so bitter I won’t be able to share it with anyone, except maybe the Devil himself. Although, when it comes to offending folks, the creation of Art usually wins out. As it does over: sentimentality, decency and even privacy-yep, all of these and especially privacy are rolled over in favor of getting product out. Be it a poem, blog post, Youtube clip or article-content trumps everything. Which isn’t to say I wanted to hurt you. That’s not true. There are some of you I was trying to hurt. At least I’m not trying to offend. Whoops. That’s not true either. What do you want from me? I’m a digital garbage man so stick out your can. If I don’t put out at least 600 words a week, black detritus piles up in my mind and I start weighing heavier and less savory options, if you know what I mean.
I started this blog 7 years ago, emulating Dr. Thompson and all but killing for his place on the pulse, his connectivity and prescience, his wit and high drama and even his gloomy war drum tone. His predictions always came home to roost, leading Frank Mankiewicz to dub him the “least factual but most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in ’72-and we all know what’s happened since then. Trust me on this, Brother, if it got too weird for Hunter Thompson then you know we are in for one hell of a ride. Nutter’s Rule. I’ve written on it before. A future on the order of raining frogs and swarming clouds of locusts is all but imminent-because that is the power of dreaming and it’s all those Nutter’s could hope for. The music they play in mass alone should hip you to the sad imagination of folks who don’t have premarital sex and are afraid to die. In their defense, we’re all afraid to die-it’s just that some of us have the sense to understand the Wisdom that living their way is just like dying, so we may as well get on with it, which is probably what Dr. Thompson was thinking on that black day in Febuary 2005.
That’s what is wrong with my generation but don’t get me started on my generation. Or, do. It’s only Monday. My next 600 ain’t due up until sometime Thursday, and that’s plenty of time for me to examine my place in this culture and where I fit in to my Generation-because I certainly didn’t know it or fit in at the time. Shaving your head and donning braces and boots wasn’t popular where I come from. Neither was skateboarding, or doing anyting except getting your 12 year old girlfriend pregnant and drinking a case of Bush big boys at the trestle on a Friday night. Playing in a band wasn’t either, believe it or no, at least not the type of music we were playing-but we did it anyway. Of course I’d want to go back there, like the song says, but if I can’t then I’ll settle for the attitude we had back then. Because goddamnit, the Buddhists were right, attitude is everything. We did shit back then, that no one else was doing. Because we were bored and our parents didn’t care. We smoked and drank post-Nevermind, and we wrote. Those journals are gone, or burned, or on a shelf in a cold garage in Middletown, Delaware at my father’s house. It’s a shame what happened to those journals and the young idea is gone. We’re all alone in the New Century but connected somehow in the hall of mirrors of social media.
It’s all fucked and I guess it always was. The real kick in the balls is that never stopped me before. I haven’t been breathing right for the last year and a half. It’s been a long time that I should be far from here. I got a Monk’s Robe Orange 2009 Honda Element with 53,000 miles and some hail damage on it that bothers me way more than it should. I’ve got 64 copies of All in the wind’s pressing of 150 left, and orders are still coming in. I’ve got clips of me reading and telling stories that I shouldn’t post if I cared about certain poets in my commnuity’s feelings, which I don’t, so I will. In 23 minutes I’ll have to report back to my boss, smoke him out and make a dinner run. 5 years ago I walked out of the food service industry for good. I threw out my serving blacks and began the search for meaningful work. I’ll let you fill in the blanks as per if I’ve ever found it, and offer that the only meaningful work there is is for yourself. You can be a slave in the service of another but you’re still a slave. You can draw your own conclusions, of course, but I should’ve been gone 2 years ago, when I looked back at my life in horror and knew that if I stayed any longer I’d only be dying.
See you coming out the grave, motherfucker.
I’ve read your blogs. I’m not impressed.
–Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana
You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism.
-Jeremy Joseph Christian
…By the time that ad hit TV, AM radio had been taken over by “music” played by fake bands that were putting out fake pitches for “flower power”…completely divorced from the Nam, the military funerals we were serving daily in our parish church—where the caskets didn’t have bodies because the boys had been blown to bits, the heroin being shot by draft dodgers and vets alike over in the park across the street from my childhood home…and the police riots in Oakland against the Black Panthers….
–Anthony
Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.
–President Jimmy Carter
I go inside her pants. I move my fingers. I do not talk. She doesn’t talk. But she makes a sound which I feel was an orgasm.
-Bill Cosby
Christ. Ain’t even been back from the island 2 weeks and already got them Babylon Blues. They’re playing Steely Dan at the bougie coffee shop and singing along in biker shorts like useless bearded choads. The heat’s reaching for triple digits out here on the patio and I’m coming down with flu-like symptoms-a soreness in the bones and spongy raw feeling besides, no doubt depression knocking and the ennui of prescience in these End Days. I am truly at a loss. I mean, before I left for retreat I was fucking exhausted. Now I’m on call in the middle of an 11-day shift. My sleep is fucked from 5 days in a row of turning a disabled man over in bed at 4 in the morning, and I’ve got 6 to go. It’s been a long time I should be far from here, and the irony is that when I finally decide I’ve had enough and it’s time to go, I find myself working even more and for longer (October), and gearing up for 21 days on the road. Christ.
There’s no consolation in the news. Nothing promising on social media. Everything is painfully bleak and bland, and enough to drive a man to drink. Know what I mean Brother? Lucky I have this time, though, and lucky we have each other. I’ll be posting a poem for the Black Lives Matter movement, on my pages and feeds. It perhaps offers very little for the struggle, if staying the question of where my outrage is and where it’s gone-why I lay on my back in the afternoon and can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call those hardons on the hill. They’re taking away our right to live healthy happy lives and they kill you out there on the street, in front of your daughter and your girlfriend, and nobody will be outraged or speak up for you, let alone the NRA, who heretofore couldn’t shut up about the right for people like Philando Castille to bear arms.
Musings on my neutered outrage and declarations at the end of the world aside, there are torch bearers out there-like Saint Shaun King and Jimmy Carter and Henry Rollins and Lamont Steptoe-and anyone telling it from the mountain and making ’em know. It should be noted. Whatever these good folks are on they should send some our way, right Sister? Blow some of the smoke of outrage downwind to weak dysfunctionals like us, who’re struggling in our own way with something on balance with the guilt of keeping our mouth shut while the Police declare war on black people and elected officials declare war on the poor. I’m looking for a way through, good Reader, because it’s gotten so dark and twisted here, and my only hope is in the dumb strength of my Irish Italian-American blood. We’re long suffering but hard to kill. I’m disgusted at this disease and that it has taken to this virulent level. I mean, it’s black and it’s in me and I can feel it acutely. Which is heaps better than waking up 3 months from now with a three hundred dollar bar tab, smoker’s cough and all my friends mad at me.
At least this way I can get my arms around it, right? I can really have a go at taming the beast, maybe look into psych meds and self defense classes, start that post rock band with Doc and start blowing doors in East Austin and giving ’em the what for. The alchemy of this blog, the power of writing, never ceases to amaze me. In penning this post, sweating it out out here, drinking Hairbender and Topo and admitting these gnarly thoughts and dark kinks in my psychology to you, I have discovered that I do have hope, however myopic and self-interested. I have hope that one day I will feel better. That one day I’ll have taken this thing up a notch and I’ll be in better health, maybe even be in a place to serve. What the hell? Even a bougie place like this will play Randy Newman if you show up (and complain) enough. I hope that one day I’ll feel better. What’s wrong with that? Should I hope that I don’t? What’s tragic and funny is, with the way things are going, and the way the world is slanting darkly down, it’s a toss up. Do I assume the worst for myself, and only buckle in for more misery? Or do I get it together somehow, really put up a fight and claw my way up to the plateau for a better view of the end of the fucking world?
It’s lonely at the top. See you next week motherfucker.
It’s beautiful down here. Great weather. No stress. People come here, they live to be 100.
–Joey Merlino
We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.
–GY!BE
As long as we live in this world we are bound to encounter problems. If, at such times, we lose hope and become discouraged, we diminish our ability to face up to what challenges us. If, on the other hand, we remember that it is not just ourselves but everyone who has to undergo hardship, this more realistic perspective will increase our determination and capacity to overcome what troubles us.
-The Dalai Lama
We are living in a news cycle that can be measured in nanoseconds.
-Dan Rather
If this doesn’t take you down,
it doesn’t mean you’re high
-Soundgarden
Yo. Trainer here, at the bougie coffee shop, where the jazz is smooth and the skin is white. I can’t complain but I will. It’s been a long time that I should be far from here, and I’m way past being sick&tired of my own bullshit. Probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend some time with others, hang out and fraternize, but-most of them are worse. What an existential stalemate I’ve reached and for shame, too. I’m in the prime of my life with money in the bank but all I can do is bellyache about how easy living is down here in the Pearl of the South, crank out another 400 words and go home and jerk off. Oh well, it could be worse, I could be satisfied with life, like any of these feel goodies here at the coffee shop seem to be, listening to Curtis Mayfield, eating bananas and grinning like imbeciles.
This could be a great opportunity to take to the streets, or hit social media and throw my complaint onto the pile. I can’t even pretend to care anymore and it could be because the whole thing has been at hysterical pitch too long. No wisdom can be discerned. I see outrage and I understand. I see smug complacency and I didn’t think I could ever understand but-look at me, with my fat stomache and apathy, black clothes and apolitical angst. Whichever side you’re on, one thing is certain and that is the genie can’t be put back into the bottle. Racism is the biggest problem in this country, barring imminent ecological disaster, and the American experiment has failed. We ain’t gonna make the nut. It’s all over baby blue, big business has trumped all and the thing that really spurred it on was as dumb as the color of our skin. I can’t pretend I’m not entitled, no matter how much I ignore the national scene. Does my apathy anger you, Good Reader? If so, then use it-impeach the fucker, eat the rich people, start a riot in the street and burn it all down. Let these be the chronicles of a sorry bastard who didn’t care, or whose own emotional load was too close to capacity to affect anything except putting out fires. It’s that bad.
We came up with a soft date for my departure, and it’s after the summer and the over 3,000 miles we’ll be doing up to the Adirondacks and back. I looked at a car today. Lady wanted to sell it to me at almost a grand over the Kelly Blue Book value, and that was after my mechanic found about $500 worth of repairs she claimed unaware of. It goes on. Psychologically I suppose I’m at a crossroads. The worst is done. I’m sober now. I’ve survived and I don’t even entertain the bad drama needed to get laid anymore. Mr. Excitement has retired, the dreamer is fully woke. I suffer bad anger and terrible boredom though, the former flaring in my abdomen and stiffening my neck and upper back, literally getting my haunches up and cursing to myself in the dark. I can’t carry that burden anymore, either, Brother. I feel like there’s an opportunity here, that I could do a lot better than cranking out 600 word complaints to you and generally just getting by. My first time on the therapist couch I’d been up for over 72 hours on whisky&cocaine. Safe to say I’m over that. I’ve survived. Maybe it’s time I give my man a call and see if we can thrive.
See you next week motherfucker.
…to live outside the law, you must be honest…
-Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie
It’s a good thing I don’t care about what you think then, isn’t it?
-Your Writer on Facebook this week
Last week on Writing On The Air cohost Martha Louise Hunter asked me where I get the time to do it all. God bless her. We were talking about this blog and how 600 words a week is the least I can do if I’m going to call myself a writer.
“Of course there’s Letter Day,” I told her and cohost Joe Brundige, “and I’m posting a poem every day for the month of April celebrating National Poetry Month.”
I told them that All in the wind was book 2 of the 10 that will be published through Yellow Lark Press, beginning with September in 2015 and ending with a collection, as-yet-unnamed, in 2025.
“10 books in 10 years is great, a fine goal,” I went on. “-but I’m only making up for lost time.”
Brother Joe and I share a symmetry, and experience the joy of communication that can happen between two stringently honest people. It took appearing on the show twice for me to realize-I am doing the thing. It’s good when that happens, as opposed to the slave driving I’m usually doing with myself and the crippling feelings of despair anyone reading this blog is, by now, all too familiar with.
I finally booked Boston. I’ll be speaking at the Middle East Corner with the Reverend Kevin O’Brien and bussing down to Philly the day after, for the Philly release of All in the wind. Joe and I recorded an episode of Chillin Tha Most at the mansion last week, and it should be on the net next Thursday. Last week was the kind of week I’d like to have every week, with gigs and radio appearances almost every day. I kept on pushing till the light of day. Which is heaps different than the life I’m living in my head, where it’s never enough and I’m only a day working coward. What’s next is complicated but simple in terms of intent.
I’m quitting this gig. Moving out to the east side. Minimizing. Scaling down. I’m not sure how it will look or how to even vaguely monetize poetry and the spoken word-but I’m full of ideas and already making half my imminent rent with the gigs I’m already playing. It’s strange to be striking out now but hardly unlikely. I’ve long since abandoned anything resembling the common tropes of being an American. I don’t have any kids, don’t even have a girlfriend. But I’ve got a passion for media and all forms of communication. I hope to get further invested in print and broadcast media. Before I fly out to Beantown the MAMU should be fully assembled and my next purchase will be a touring vehicle.
It took me a while to wrap my head around it. I had to keep it to myself and it made me resentful. I couldn’t talk about my plans on here, there was some bad blood about me leaving but there doesn’t have to be. I’ve started paying my taxes, I got a new dentist and a healthy line of credit. Everything is moving as it should. My next venture will be some time researching topics for the blog, so’s to avoid the kind of soul searching pap and whine that she hates and can appear on Going For The Throat when its weekly deadline is on my neck. Your ideas are welcome, as are paying gigs-do you have a story for me? Can we find a way to pay my freight so I can come to your town, speak and play? Please chime in, in the comments below, or drop me a line at: jamesmichaeltrainer@gmail.com.
This east coast jaunt will be a short one but I’m thrilled to be sharing the stage with the Reverend Kevin O’Brien, Duncan Wilder Johnson, The Droimlins, and Jim Healy in Boston. The Philly release of All in the wind is stacked, with award winning poets Charlie O’Hay and Lamont Steptoe reading. By the time I go back to work I’ll have played at least 3 shows on the east coast, sold some books and burned hundreds of miles. I’ll be exhausted, which is how I like it, and plan to be in the coming months. Into it, no stops, full bore.
See you on the East Coast motherfucker.
Going for the Throat 