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’sRule. 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 servingblacks 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.
…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?
We couldn’t… we had no control over anything, and it’s just taken us a while to—it sounds weird to say—organize our emotions. Otherwise you just can’t live, really. –Nick Cave
Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
–James Baldwin
So I didn’t get in my 600 last week and I’m feeling it. How fortunate I can pen 600 words, neat and fine, like I’m regurgitating a live snake, and get back to the grind and on with my life. I didn’t realize what a service we do for each other down here at Going For The Throat. I was up to my neck writing my resume and buying a car, and I thought it pertinent to soliloquize and do something in remembrance-offer something eternal up to the fading and ephemeral parade. God knows Chris Cornell hadn’t been dead for 48 hours before some of my friends were judging me for suffering from depression. Which is also a great way to segue into the grim admission-it happened again, I got depressed.
Now normally this would mean whisky and cigarettes, maybe a lost weekend with a loud and crass Betty who only cares enough to kiss me on the cheek before leaving me in a sad and soggy torpor. In the new age, depression can look like too many days indoors, Brother, and nights of shoddy and sore sleep. You heard me, not only am I depressed, it’s manifested. I threw out my left shoulder and my head is raw and pulsating. It’s all enough to make a fella fall off the wagon because-what’s the difference, right Sister? I don’t know what this is, this phase, but I’m burning new pathways down the middle of my brain the hardway. I’m thirsty and miserable but a dry drunk at least. Allow me the bold alacrity to say, other than the fact that depression is a medical condition and a disease, the thing that brought it on this time was the Lie. Or, the many lies that came tumbling down covering my ass living here and working this job and this situation I am in.
Fact is, no one’s to blame. Folks love me in their own way. It’s never enough but besides the fact that I ain’t ever satisfied, people are who they are. My situation has stagnated but it’s all so strange. What I am trying to say is while walking through old Austin this morning I could’ve cried thinking about the last 5 years of my life. But see, I was also out there, in the territory, walking under the tall oaks and staring out into expanses that don’t exist on Judge’s Hill. I was way out on Burnet, walking from my mechanic’s to a car2go on Allendale, smelling the fresh morning air and getting philosophical texts from a sexy blonde in Dallas. My sadness was there, it was palpable, but so was the magic. Something I can’t and would never explain. The best way to describe it would be the strangeness of mortality, the impossibility of you, the uncanny and profound nature of survival.
This is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, worked anywhere-you name it. The fact that I was 37 once, way back when, when I first interviewed for this gig in a pompadour and black pencil tie, makes me incredibly sad. The fact that I got my shit together, published three collections of poetry and prose and wrote at least 600 words and a letter to the post every week can’t and should not ever be taken lightly. If I were to pull away from the writer’s desk and step into my living room, I can pick up a copy of each of my books and hold them in my fucking hand. That’s not nothing, as my lovely Sister Sarah says. It’s something. And the fact that we’re here, you’re reading me, we’re not hanging ourselves but hanging it on the fucking wall week after fucking week, is not nothing and more than something.
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.
Recorded live at Brickbat Books, Philadelphia, September 2016.
Catch Jim Trainer speaking in Boston next Wednesday April 26, at the Middle East Corner, with the Reverend Kevin O’Brien, Duncan Wilder Johnson, The Droimlins, and Jim Healy.
8:30PM, $5 advance tickets, $8 day of the show. Please click here.
Jim Trainer will be speaking and reading from All in the wind, his latest collection of poetry and prose, at Toast Philly on Thursday April 27 with local favorites Charlie O’Hay and Lamont Steptoe.
7PM, Please click here.
Jim Trainer returns to the Mill Street Cantina for a special 90 minute set on Friday April 28.
9PM, Please click here.
…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.
A dear friend is in the hospital in Berlin. He’s being charged 10 euros a day until his insurance kicks in. We lost the Queen of Austin Comedy last night, all the more shocking because she seemed to be making it, even if having to start a GoFundMe to help with hospital bills after her kidney failed last year. The machinations of the Trump administration twist and grind darkly and the days are adding up since he swore in and I swore to keep up with his every move. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’m gonna hole up and just read the headlines from January 20 until today, but the reality is sinking in that the rulers are the rulers, and short of spitting in Paul Ryan’s face out on the street, I’m neither willing nor able to stem the tide.
Professor Joe Brundidge asked me if the fight is over last night, during our taping of Chillin Tha Most. My gut tells me it’s not but I often wonder. In a strange turn it takes tragedy to shake things up and get a response from me. I’ll pray in the way that I can but the question of God seems like pointless conjecture when right here on earth a Christian shitheel with an Eddie Munster haircut will try to make it even harder for us to do anything but get sick and die. Meanwhile in the other hemisphere, 250 innocent people will die for no reason at all. It’s hard to be zen about it all-when the base and corrupt, the murderers and plunderers can advance any fuckall agenda while progress for the common man is only mired in red tape and rollbacks. I let my gut answer Joe’s question, but, after I thought about it I had to concede, sadly, that the fight is over. We’ve got about eighty years of a sustainable ecosystem left but, like the poem says, somehow, strangely I feel fine.
In an even stranger turn things are only looking brighter for me, your writer, the littlest bit these days but that’s enough. I’ve gotten by on nothing for so long, it’s not hard for me to thrive with just a little of the gods’ favor. I feel like they may be smiling down on me, and it could very well have to do with the years I paid them respect and attrition. I bowed down to the god of luck even while bargaining broke against the black night, gambling with the shards of a glass ceiling, floating a broom and gnashing my teeth ever since I dropped out of college in the twentieth century. What can it mean? I don’t know. I’d like to tell you I’ll always give back, that no one besides me and New Ghost know better that it’s got to mean something to the folks back home. The truth is I’ve always been giving. Am I privileged? Should I be out there, on the street, fighting the good fight? Well. If I lead, who will follow? You think it’ll be these hordes? The Americans? There comes a time when you’ve got to ask yourself: am I being lazy or is it just too damn late? You know what my answer is. I’m after what I’ve always been going for. This and every post since that bizarro shit show of an election last November have been my long and protracted extraction. I’ll be keeping my people close and closer, and conquering my own world over here.
Don’t believe the hype. There is hope but not much. If you’re busy shaming me for what I’m not doing then you’re not suited for politics. Try religion. There’s plenty a flock to be fleeced in making people feel ashamed. But it ain’t me babe. I’m invested in the arts and up to my tits in bearing witness. I’m not much of a mover or a shaker. Although, with your help, good reader, in the coming months I’ll be doing both. Stay tuned for a whole lot of good news coming from the Office of Jim Trainer. I’ll be putting my protest on to the page.
Rest well, Lashonda. See you next week motherfucker.
Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light, it reflected the times, especially the presence of the atomic bomb which had preceded it by several years. Back then people feared the end of time. The big showdown between capitalism and communism was on the horizon. Rock and roll made you oblivious to the fear, busted down the barriers that race and religion, ideologies put up. –Bob Dylan
And after two years of trying our best to convince you that all these things were true, it turns out that we, the media, were the ones who were lying.
–Brian Joyce
I’ve been listening to nothing but live Fugazi. They’ve got to be the greatest rock and roll band of all time. That’s only slight hyperbole, used to convey the utmost respect and admiration I have for this band. Throughout their career they managed to maintain form as content. Despite a complaint against the proselytizing of singer Ian MacKaye, the lyrics of Steady Diet of Nothing show a marked shift from direct moralizing into more abstract and artful tropes. Fugazi will always represent the spirituality of salt to me. Without drugs or alcohol, they explored deep and archetypal forms-which is a very fancy way to say they managed to let their imaginations run wild without any outside influence. It’s very pure. In “Latin Roots”, co-frontman Guy Piccioto’s journey of a regressing young adult laying on his parents’ bed and falling backwards through the centuries of his genealogy, happens without even the smoking a cigarette. Perhaps this is only how I imagine it, I’ve conflated the narrator/performer/writer with his subject matter. It only speaks of the mythology at work with this band, as there is with any great band, performer or artist. The other thing Fugazi share with great art is that they’re in the air, or, in the water, as poet Bernard Pearce wrote. Fugazi is the east coast, where I grew up and first saw them perform, at 15, in the gymnasium of Drexel University in their backyard of Philadelphia. They’ll always sound like adolescence to me.
Fugazi will always be crystalized into one moment, walking down some forgotten street in Clifton Heights, as a 14-year-old skinhead, being picked up by one of the only skaters in High School at the time, him having their s/t album on cassette, rewinding it to the beginning and listening to the whole thing. So many things are gone from the day, the most tragic being a time when I could holler out and hop in the pickup truck of someone I didn’t exactly know but trusted more than family because of how he wore his hair and the fact that he knew. We knew. We knew what was coming, what was happening, and it wasn’t punk rock, that was our older brother-the generation before. This was now. This was brand new and it was kids, like us. They were just like us. That feeling would last until the release of Nevermind 2 years later, when jocks and squares started dyeing their hair and it all became a silly fad-repurposed and sold. Fugazi continued touring and putting out albums throughout it all, until the apocryphal announcement of their hiatus at the dawning of the New Century.
Fugazi will always be a winter band. There’s a resourcefulness that comes from living in winter climes, and I always think of them with their knit caps on, a chill in the air and chimney smoke mixed with the smell of wet stone just before it snows. I’ve become a new man so many times while listening to them, on so many levels, not the least of which having shaved off my long hair and starting High School, a new man but barely one…in the Fall, which is when I received their last album from WKDU’s Stevie D., and played the whole thing front to back on a Monday evening just a short walk away from the gymnasium where I’d seen them play 13 years before-they sounded ebullient, and they always will, jaunty and fresh and political, just like youth.
…without you my address would be the wind…
-from All in the wind
…you’re going to have to accept that a lesbian chainsaw dominatrix or two might be involved. –broliloquy
My name is Jim Trainer and I wish I was somebody else. I mean, there’s something in the way. I mean, I took the last 2 days off work, for my birthday and to “get some stuff done” and the result was only epic laziness. Lunch and gift swapping with a friend. Driving into dusk to see musicians perform in plays. Eating water ice and falling in love with Austin again. Before I chalk up the last 2 days to “not living my dreams” or being lazy, allow me to invoke the wisdom and language of psychotherapy, and ask-what am I getting out of it? The answer is dumb-I had a peaceful couple days with no torture, no monkey, no blues. Basically I was hiding. This doesn’t bode well. Psychologically speaking, I’ve set it up so I will have to live my dreams. Using the alchemy of inner dialogue I told my Self, “If you live your dreams I won’t come down on you for being a piece of shit.” There are so many ways to deconstruct this deal I have with my Self, and none of them are good! Ah, but don’t too wise, for writing is my rabbit in a hat, and this blog my weapon of choice-and this is how. By the end of this graph I have had some insight, a revelation that there within the dialogue with my Self is the kernel of it-the micro and the blueprint. My life has been always being 2 steps ahead of the whip. What a fucked up way to live, let alone think and react. Out of fear, like a slave or Catholic. For shame.
Not to mention I feel great. I mean, today I woke up at 7:45AM, like always, but I went back to bed after I put the coffee on. I dreamt that my boss had wiped his hands on my tux shirt and when I went to confront him about it, his door was closed and his room was dark with a note on the door (and it was my Mother’s bedroom door wtf). Tangential but relevant. It’s a circus in my mind. Fear is the carnival barker and the crowd has lined the tent 2 times round, clutching their dirty children and tickets in hand. I’m sitting here typing this in the bright light of day with my Hugh Hefner robe over the clothes I wore to bed last night. I feel rested, which is necessary. Hell I even refused sex a couple weeks ago because the call came in after I was already in PJs. Do you have any idea how baffling it is for the male mind to refuse sex? It can short out the man-wires. I woke up the next day confused and ashamed, like I had done something wrong-but I was so rested I forgot about it and got on with the day. My point is I feel rested today, after 2 days of hiding from the whip, instead of hustling 2 steps ahead of it, and somehow not being a “piece of shit”, according to myself anyway, the Mind. In body I couldn’t feel better. I just wish I was somebody else and here’s why.
It’s been a long time that I should be far from here. I know that my desire for the artist’s life is how I got this far. It’s not what I thought it would be and I know I could do so much more. Knowing you could be more is strange. Well, not strange-it’s evolution, it’s growth. It’s savage, amoral and bloody. Birth comes from death. Knowing you could do more is heaps more manageable, if slippery. I can’t say I’m not accountable to myself. I can’t say that there isn’t a chasm between who I am and what I’m doing and who I think I am and what I’m doing. It’s all so very twisted and fucked and I can’t see the bottom. All I can do is live my best today, try harder this time. (Do you know how exhausting that is?). It’s just so fucked because I know I’ll find myself here again. Dissatisfied. I need a life coach who’ll tell me that everything’s gonna be ok before she fucks my brains out and kicks my ass out the door. Sorry. If I’ve lost you it’s because I lost myself.
What I am trying to describe here is what has gotten me this far. Dissatisfaction is why I dropped out of college, left the hometown, found work as a DJ, singer songwriter, orator and spoken word poet. Dissatisfaction is why I spent weeks on the road, sleeping and driving for as many as 7 weeks a stretch, across Canada and the midwest, along the Gulf and up the West and East coast. Dissatisfaction is why I’ve had 3 books of poetry published in the last 5 years and dissatisfaction is the sole reason that 2 of them were published by my own press. Dissatisfaction is why I left Philly, and tried my hand hawking wares and doing everything from handing out lunchmeat to donating plasma to walking around campus dressed like a Hershey Kiss. I’ve lost you. I’ve lost me. Is seeking and forging the life I want born of dissatisfaction? Or is it something else? Is knowing I could do and be more the same as hating myself? That’s certainly how it feels. And as far as how it feels, this, we know, is my remedy. These 903 words. This post. This time at the knives, hacking and working it out. We do it ’cause we have to. As far as pace and productivity, goals and the ability to relax and unkink without fear that the whip will come down but yet still pushing on? You know if I had the answer, good reader, I would give it to you. Right before I fly out the door and hit the streets after the heart of this dream. A lonely hunter indeed.
Jim Trainer is a communicator. Growing up in the hardcore scene of the early 90’s taught him everything he needed to know about real work. Jim Trainer believes in rock and roll. It may be our only salvation in this dark world. He’s carried the torch for independent media, broadcasting ... Continue reading →
Going for the Throat 