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…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.
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.
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.
Whoa. Part 3&the final installment of The Coarse Grind, written in better and far less ominous days. The message is the same. VOX POPULI VOX DEI (the voice of the people is the voice of God). See you next week motherfucker.
Aho, good reader. Hopefully you’ve been keeping up with The Coarse Grind because today I’m going for it. Last we spoke, I confessed that after 19 years I finally knew I was a writer and it was all ’cause I started a blog. It’s true. I won’t get into the vast saga of a backstory behind it but I tapped into a medium that was immediate and honest. I had, or felt like I had, an instant audience. I’ve always looked at writing like performing so blogging really gave me a charge. The way you feel right before you go on stage. Super, all too, human.From that saga of a backstory I will offer this- my heroes have taught me well. My heroes were on the outside and they broke in. The rules didn’t apply to Hunter Thompson which was hardly always glamorous.
This will not be a recipe for how to be a successful writer, at least not the accepted definition of success. Do consider however, if you want to be a successful writer, one who gets paid, then you must write. Have a system or M.O. that you know will keep you writing. Willing. Enthusiastic, even. The thing that keeps me writing is my interest in it. Sadly what is of most interest to me is myself. Nothing else. In fact, current events really bum me the fuck out and opinion pieces are odious. It all feels like programming to me and all of it just swirls into a hulking barrage of sights and sounds, horrors and “truths” that I must isolate myself from. Thank god for writing because it has become my refuge from the dark spinning world.
My point is why would campaign manager Frank Mankiewicz attribute Hunter Thompson as “the least factual, most accurate” reporter on the Campaign Trail in 1976? And, why are we finding out now that this country was dragged into war under false pretenses, that the freedom we were fighting for was only being taken away from us by those same warlords, when we have a free press in America, and reporting is held to a high standard of objectivity and truth? Without the internet or a distant relative living in the middle east-without Twitter, for Christ-we would have no idea what the Arab Spring was all about. Well, some idea, and probably a spun one, provoking a reaction that could then be reported on until it was true. I started Going for the Throat just as Arab Spring started rumbling, just as the stanchions under memorials to dictators were giving way in the parks and out on the street. I’m not a journalist. But I am a reporter. And that, good reader, is the magic of writing.
None of these are reasons why after 19 years on the daylabor circuit I knew I was a writer. I know that I’m a writer because I write. I don’t ever not write. And it’s all because I have found a medium that is as inexhaustible as it is exhilarating. I have instant material simply by getting out of bed in the morning and with the click of a mouse it’s out there with all the “real” journalism. I have stepped into the Arena. I’m up there in the hot lights with all the shit-savvy polished faces and grim intellectual voices of news media.
Is what I write true? Better believe it. Or, don’t. And start your own blog now.
What follows is the first installment of The Coarse Grind, my column that was never published. A local zine and arts collective had asked me to write 3 drafts under 600 words. I ended up writing 5 of them and sent the first 3 to the editor. We had a correspondence then, that included the phrase “curating for millennials”, but ended with me accusing her of being “disingenuous” and “silly”. I can see her point now, almost 3 years later, while reading these over. I don’t know who could be expected to read anything as long as 600 words as even major news outlets race to publish first, and edit and redact later. Besides the horror in realizing how long ago this was, I’m emboldened reading these, in full faith that you, good reader, will read 600 words every week, even if it’s the same old story. That’s the boon and bane of the blogging business-you’ll never run out of material as long as you keep writing about yourself. Christ.
Stay tuned for the next 2 installments of The Coarse Grind.
New Journalism
Christmas Eve ’95 I slept in Cromwell Park. I’d been thrown out of my mom’s house for not having health insurance. It needed to happen. And the rest…I suppose. What happened was I fell through about 5 years of daylabor and shitjobs, another 5 as a mad Boehme, 3 on the getting-sober circuit and shit about 3 years working down here, in the Pearl of the South. What also happened is I decided to be a writer. I had to be, as clichéd as that might sound. I was working a string of jobs that were boring the life out of me. I dealt with it the only way I knew how-with a typewriter and booze.
One of the first things I did when I got here was get a library card. Checked out Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, a biography of Charles Bukowski by Howard Sounes. It was profound for me to discover the great poet had started writing poetry at the age of 35. I was 34. Another thing I did when I got down here was pitch to Verbicide Magazine and write blues legend Steve James a letter, to say hello and ask for an interview. Those first months in Austin were a fertile time, days and months planting seeds and business cards. It was like I landed, dropped my bags and said,
“In 3 years I will be a writer.”
Then I got a job. Then I got laid off. I stayed on unemployment way past any reasonable amount of time, and fell sadly short of my goal of becoming a writer in 3 years. I had to go back to work. It was one of many crises of doubt I had experienced, going all the way back to being homeless in my hometown in 1995. I wanted to be a writer.
I landed a live in gig, in a big yellow mansion inconveniently located off west 6th. A perfectly annoying backdrop and foil for this phase of my life which I can proudly announce to you is “being a writer”. This is the being a writer period, the being a writer time. Now it always was, I guess, but I didn’t know it then. Neither do you. But I appreciate you reading. It completes me. I feel received. Like radio-a magic jolt to it, an urgent zing to these words coming at you-can’t you feel it? Right? Wow.
What do I do now that I am a writer? That I’ve cleaned my guns enough to crank out 8-1,200 words, neat and fine, on a whim or otherwise? That of anything and everything that ever happens I not only have a ticket out of but a ticket into? That’s right, good reader. I got an inroad to the best game in town and the players? Well shit the players are me&you darling and isn’t that nice?
Now that I’m a writer think I’ll bring it back for you. Tell you how I got here and that I’d like you to join me. In the late night or in the bright morning, I’d like you to join me on the savage road-this is the new stuff-join me in this new media, this new age-this moment. Let’s do some shit. Send out our signal into the hungry land. Let’s send out a song of love or better let’s send ‘em some anger. Let us burn.
Hello darkness my old friend. I’ve got a kink in my neck. It’s a few twists away from being a real fucking problem. There’s a leak coming from my kitchen ceiling. I went up and talked to the Kid, but we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. I came home from Portland on Sunday, after being snowed in for 2 days, with three-hundred Letterpressed covers for All in the wind, but no books. I’m scheduled for a binding session at Minuteman Press on Monday. We hope to have 150 copies done by end of day Tuesday. I’m playing House Wine tonight, beneath the palms for 3 hours in 50 degree weather . There are far worse ways to make a dollar. I oughta know. I missed deadline filing my income tax for 2015 so there’ll be a gap in my healthcare coverage. The Boss tells me the plumber will be by at 9:30 tomorrow morning, and I go back on shift at 5. I’ve been fighting with one of my homies, and it all seems stupid and trite, and that’s because it always is.
These are my problems on a warm winter afternoon in Hippie Town. Everything happens at once or nothing happens at all. That’s this life I’ve bought into. These years I’ve traveled down, trying to be anything other than a company man, a factory man. Never wanting to be anything like my old Man. The years slide past, nice and sleazy, while I crank out poetry on the dayshift, and play rock and roll music in wine bars, to women and friends and have an unbelievably sober and fine time.
Things are different in the other hemisphere. Folks are dealing with a whole other hierarchy of problems-shit that could relegate 90% of what’s wrong in America to an entitled and candy ass complaint. Which isn’t to say there aren’t dark corners right here at home. Somewhere someone is paying and you always do-unless you’ve got healthcare and your country isn’t being bombed and you’re white, and you can afford security to stand down the high walls of your gated community. To watch Vice’s A House Divided is to be lividly reminded that what split this country between hateful racist yahoos and the rest of us was Universal Healthcare. Which is what we deal with over here-each other and pitted so by an oligarchy with a Christian hardon. As hard as it is and as undignified is the slough we feed from in the end days of Empire–it’s probably better than anywhere else in the world. Except maybe the Netherlands.
See you in Amsterdam motherfucker.
Everything is political.
–Ian MacKaye
I’m glad that quote reached me from the mouth of one of the greatest intelligences of our time. I’m sure Angela Davis or Terrence McKenna or Camile Paglia has said the same thing, but it wouldn’t have mattered much to me because, except for my punk rock allegiances, I was apolitical. You know, too cool to be bothered. Besides being on the wrong side of whatever side there is, I never stood for anything. Politics were boring. Activism was never as fun as bombing through the streets of Houston in a black Bronco with young trust funded Republicans, smoking meth and spouting on about the evils of socialism. This is gonna be hard to reign in. Especially while the most gorgeous young lady sits in front of me at Ford Food&Drink in downtown Portland, eating a tangelo and sipping tea in blonde curls and elf boots.
That’s right, Portland, and I fucking love it here. Anything could be a step up from last week-being called a peasant by the boss and caught in a flame war about Kanye-for Christ-West with a Democratic choad from my past days delivering rich kids luggage in the hills of upstate NY and New England (love ya Nate!). That, combined with the news these days made it a banner week for shittiness. The only glimmer was listening to Father Ian on Tuesday and getting the fuck out of town and flying into the Emerald City on Wednesday.
I still haven’t got around to being political yet. I’ve been balls deep in the design of the new book, waking up every day to find hours of work wasted, gone, and unusuable but rebuilding the book Mr. Miyagi style, my skills sharpened from failure after failure with Adobe’s Creative Suite. There are some glitches, it’s true, but dealing with their Help Center for hours only to be told it’s not a fault of the s0ftware was time I didn’t have. I had to get 150 book blocks printed by end of day Tuesday, and board a plane with them on my shoulder at 10am the next day. All while on shift, you know, the peasant gig, and shutting it down, cooking dinner for the old man, cleaning the kitchen, doing laundry and packing. I guess it could be worse. In fact I know it could, which, as stated last week, is the change in me.
This blog is completely self mired and utterly self referential. I count on the readership of sensitive folks with anarchistic and anti-authrotarian tendencies who feel my pain. It’s been nothing short of wonderful sharing the plight and the pleasure of being a poet with you, and, best of all-it kept me inspired. After all, I’m just a song and dance man, a performer-and this blog has been more a stage than anything else. As far as being inspired, never having writer’s block as long as the main character in my writing is me-I wouldn’t exactly call it a deadend, as here I sit, 2,000 miles from home, in a cafe full of hipsters in sweaters listening to indie music, with 611 words written at the stroke of noon. Jackpot and Hot Damn, as Dr. Thompson would say, victory over idleness and blues and for the simple fact that I got out of bed and made it into town and wrote all this down without a cigarette. I’m useful, I’m writing and I’m communicating. Thanks in no small part to you. But when I hear the clarion call almost daily, and it’s been revealed that I’ve been sidelining it for most of my life, well I knew that much and it was in fact a deliberate choice, but that it’s not acceptable anymore and all I can do is write…I’m thankful. Purposely. Resolutely.
Ian MacKaye was right. I’ll always need to get it out, get it down and “frame the agony”, somehow come to grips with the nowness and immediacty of everything. Seeing Uncle Hank on Tuesday night reminded me what initially attracted me to the man. He talked about being a hyperventilating borderline child who was on Ritalin until he was 18. I remembered something about myself that I almost forgot. I am what you call “too much” (but never how my cuntface X meant it). Some of us are too much for this life, we can’t contain our energy and love and enthusiasm and pain. Life is too much, the world is too much, it’s all too much. So, we lift weights or do Yoga or run or smoke and drink and fight and fuck or, simply, write. I’m still glad to be here with you sharing these long hours on the sinking throne. I know the pump is primed. I know that, if informed (thank you President Elect Trump) I can write about anything. I can’t be lazy though, and a Facebook and HuffPo diet have made me feel like I was doing something when all I was doing was being outraged. Outrage is ok, until folks like Ian and Henry Rollins and Robert Kraft show you how work gets done. And if you have a tendency to be outraged, like I do, it’s gonna be a long night.
Stay tuned for some incrdible news about the new collection and rest assured, for this week at least, about the political nature of your work, your striving, your song and your poetry.
I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean-in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
-Audre Lorde
Going for the Throat 