Take Your Medicine

…to live outside the law, you must be honest…
-Bob Dylan, Absolutely Sweet Marie

I’ve really let myself go. I’m doing my best but my best is paltry and weak. Nights I fall out, days I do what I have to. What I know, in my mind, is fear. It’s fear keeping me in line, not taking any chances. What I don’t know, in my body, is trauma, or the memory of it, the abuse that continues, that’s changed me and keeps me on a dark and narrow track. I tried to disengage from this blog. I shared poetry and performances and I wrote about others. Writing about others came home to roost when they started taking notice. Not so much because they took notice but for the kind of attention they paid to being what I felt was a hack anyway. It’s all fine and well. Writing isn’t a perfect art. Guns need to be cleaned and even then you’ll breach wide and fire into the blue—instead of taking down the enemy you only alert them to your location. My explanations only dug me in deeper. To the uninitiated, the newsletter I sent out last week made me sound petty and worse. There’s no excuse. It’s not funny anymore. Asserting masculinity can no longer be at the expense of femininity. True power never seeks without but always comes from within. We know this, and the world going to pot? That’s no excuse either. Ultimately, the truth is a good medicine. It’s often bitter and harsh but that doesn’t make hiding out in the dark any easier or any more sense being afraid. The truth hurts but it’s trauma that keeps us hid and a memory of pain that’ll keep us suckling at a lie.

This is the blog I’ve been trying to write—for weeks, the diamond in the mire and sticky dross of gossip and vituperation. I can’t live down that it worked, for a while, that I felt like I was living Mencken’s life of kings slinging ‘em down week after week. There’s hardly anything more satisfying than taking down the Goliath in 600 words. Nothing feels better than a bourbon in the morning either, but the real problem ain’t the hangover. The truth is the truth. When the light of day finds you it can feel like it’s cutting you down your cold middle, especially if you’ve been hiding out stanchioned in the frozen night. The light ain’t wrong, the light is the light. It feels good on your back and bids you enter the sacred spaces of dusk and dawn. The night is ok for poets and soldiers advancing, and alcoholics and sex addicts—me, I’m peeling back the layers. I quit drinking to get to the Real and oh boy have I. The fireworks, Doc, have started. I’m confronting myself, it’s dank and musty in here and like the song says there’s too many skeletons in my room today.

I been trying to dig myself out. Hang up the gossip column and get to the hard stuff. I fell into a hall of mirrors. I was so busy trying to convince others what an artist I was, when the truth is I was only trying to prove it to myself and either way I haven’t been an artist, haven’t been writing—not in earnest, anyway. I wrote about chronic masturbation at the end of the world, burying horrible xs and practically day drinking cocktails of resentment and woe, leaning grim and perverted beneath the masthead of this column. I was getting by, which, for a co-dependent, alcoholic, anger addict is ok. It’s better than getting fucked up or shacked up or using precious bandwidth on folks who can’t even comprehend the problems you’re railing on. It’s fine and well, survival. It’s what we know but, to thrive? Like our heroes have done, to thrive is far from this day to day I’ve taken on—delivery shifts and YouTube marathons, sugar gorges and late, musty masturbatory mornings. As deplorable as the Gossip was, and as trite that I’d be focusing on someone else are the endings of these posts. They’re always wrapping it concisely, in a bow for bullshit. It’s contrite and positive and 20th Century Essay Writing 101. Don’t leave your readers behind in the mess and quagmire you’ve lead them down—lift them up Good Writer. I can’t anymore, Good Reader. I can’t lift you up. You’re on your own. We’re on our own. This is our world now. At least I’m not having to explain, though–backpedaling into sexist doublespeak that was somehow supposed to defend a heartbroken romantic on the edge of Empire.

Sometimes the best you can do is call it, a bad hand is a bad hand, as she used to say, and probably still does, in her happy married life far and away from me and my mawkish bullshit. See you next week, motherfucker?

bullet for the mourning dove

I’ve got a new pain
it’s just behind the shoulder blade
it could be worse but it makes writing even harder
I haven’t had a hangover in 70 days
and most days I make it past noon without a cigarette
I have breakfast now, I juice, before coffee
I go on break from the shift, from noon-3 everyday
and just before break I make the preparations
for a writing session like a kamikaze pilot
earplugs in, black shades on, curtains drawn
I fire up the coffee, dick around with my nicotine vaporizers
I ring the bell on my altar and say my silent prayers
then I take a toke of black hash, sit down
and get to it.
life is good, it’s easy and that’s so very hard to deal with
and there are certainly worse problems to have
I’ve got some hangups, some character defects
but nothing dire, the result of living like a drunk poet
for 20 years
and living under the heavy certainty that something heavy
is always waiting, and will come crashing
it’s hard not to consider those years as silly
and so regretfully wasteful
but what can you do but keep at it? so I do,
I keep at it, the clacking of keys into the afternoon
with a pain under my left shoulder blade
the worst most certainly behind me
savage in memory only
poetry was with me in the dire and air raid days
may as well bring it with me into this new age
days of typing quietly, with nothing being wrong
no real problems to speak of
except for one and he’ll be dead by dawn.

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NO MOURNING DOVE OUT HERE TODAY. THE POEM MUST'VE WORKED. NOW IF I COULD JUST COOK UP SOMETHING FOR THE CONSTRUCTION CREW. LINK IN COMMENTS. #voodoo #writing #troubleinparadise #selfie

A post shared by Jim Trainer (@goingforthethroat) on Jun 1, 2015 at 12:57pm PDT

Grim Jim’s Last Ride

I shoulda known. I’d had more fun in 3 hours with them than I’d had the whole Fall. What a bleak time, the Fall. Bitter yellow months chomping fistfuls of black time and smoking triple 5s. Not the best basis for comparison perhaps, but this night was special.

We were at Gusto, 48th&Burnet in Hippie Town. We decided to get another bottle of wine. We drank that one much quicker and then dinner was over. We were having tea up in the high rooms when Rach asked me to go out with her for some cold beers in the midnight w/Southern et al. We trekked over to Gourmand’s and waded through the thick bario night to get there. Once out front, some dipshit was drunk and Alex and another broad discussed how he had just texted her looking for a hookup but-aho, here was out front the bar, shithoused and stupid and talking to her. We went in. I ordered a water and stood there at the end of the bar with my hood up, glowering. I observed the crowd dynamic and theatrics sullenly. Then I ordered a beer. I shoulda known. Years of alcohol abuse have rendered me curiously sensitive to the stuff. That’s the thing about alcoholism. You’d think with your increased tolerance you’d be able to handle it better. The truth is you handle drunkenness the same way every time. That is to say, you don’t handle it at all. That’s what being drunk is. But with the increased amount of time and larger quantities it takes to get there, you’ve got more time to think about it and reason it out. But even the most seasoned alcoholic like me will find his senses muted, his sensibilities non-existent and a burning desire for confrontation, or at least something to grab hold of to stop the Ferris wheel from a-spinning.
I’ll spare you the details of what happened next and just get right to the point. After 2 hours of watching young people stab each other with conversation, rope you into one and suddenly ask you to step outside to smoke about it-I was only getting angrier and angrier. Shit. It’s nobody’s fault. Being angry with the misguided and unkempt and rude-the young-is like expecting to win a bullfight because you’re vegetarian. How’s that for a mixed metaphor? What do you want from me? I was drunk. And after all these years of doing it the hardway my emotional switchboard is all-wet and shorted out. You know what my problem is? Anger. Aho. Been my drug of choice for as long as I can remember, even when I was a straight-edge skinhead. Well I guess I always smoked but anyway, yeah. Fuck it. At least that’s what all systems read when I get shitty. Which I will get. No doubt about it. Alcohol is Jim Trainer’s rainstorm in a bottle. Instant black cloud. Now, get me drunk in a dirty shithole east side with a bunch of folks who don’t know they’re gonna die and it’s a recipe for catastrophe. So anyway. I almost came to fisticuffs with the lesbian who tends bar there and I’m not looking forward to seeing her again. I don’t do well with alpha males. I mean, I get it, you’re a lesbian-but, you’re still a woman, right? The fairer sex? The goddess? I’ve been wearing white tees and jeans longer than you’ve been alive honey. And I wasn’t hitting on your girlfriend. My comments to her were some of the realest conversation I’d had all night. I didn’t realize she was so shithoused but after standing at the end of the bar for 2 hours I shoulda known. When I finally opened my mouth and said what was really on my mind, and in fact it was the only positive sentiment I had come up with all night long and not only that but found the need to communicate it, and then you come up “swoll” as you say, pointing your 20-year-old finger in my face and judge ME? Well. Here’s the thing, honey. Alpha males are a conception of the losers. You know what tough guys do? They throwdown. They don’t talk about it. Would I react that way given a choice today? Probably not.
What would be your answer to that question?
Actually it doesn’t matter because by that point, my friends were thinking that I had an anger problem and I just needed to be dropped off and put to bed and THEY WERE RIGHT. I was up past my bedtime and I’ve been hit too hard, I’ve seen too much. You don’t grow up in Hostile City and reach the age of 40 without more than a few forgone conclusions about your own behavior when alcohol takes the place of sleep, let alone in a dirty ill-lighted room full of 20-somethings after midnight on the East Side.
Fuck it. Sorry doll. I am. I think you should take a look at yourself a little more closely but, that’s me. Live your life. I hope that if we do meet again it’s peaceful and we can reach an understanding. But it won’t be after 10pm. And that goes for the lot of yas. It’s the Year of the Pumpkin and March 1st was Piscean Independence Day. No more bullshit for this old soldier. And no more a whole lot of other shit, too.

The final and lasting danger is this contentment. All my heroes are dead. I’m going dark, while simultaneously going suit-and-tie guy with the career. I may write about my life but that doesn’t mean I have to live it all the time. Or live it down. Or give authenticity to my writer’s voice by drinking like Henry Miller and fighting like Papa. What a fool I have been. And I don’t mind apologizing for it, either. If I did I’d still be a fool. 39 will be a banner year. 2014 is the Year of Jim Trainer. The Year of Jenn Spransy. The Year of Maureen Ferguson and the Year of the Pumpkin. No more deep-cuts in the lust-smothered night, no more rueing of the sunlight and no more bitters for the ingenuine. I’ve rivalled the blues, and trouble cain’t touch this. After all these years I’m like a lion tamer, and my patience-once ever lacking-has found a new fount. I know what I’ve come for. I will have no use for my own heart when I’m dead and gone. I ain’t takin’ it wit me. I’ll be leaving it here, with all of you and hopefully years before I check out.

we may have caved to tempests of lust
and hid, shut out behind walls of resentment
-Ring The Bells

Thank you for joining me in this version of death we call life. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to do.
Signing off, this is the end of our broadcast day. This has been Grim Jim’s Last Ride.

Mountain High, A Writer At Large

And I will pray for her
I will call her name out loud
I would bleed for her
If I could only see her now

The landline on Lily Bay is in a dank garage, at a small desk by a grimy window. As I turn on the dim lamp in the corner I can suddenly see that I am the only source of light this high for miles. The rain comes down in an insistent sheet. Other than that it is dead quiet on the hill. Nothing in the woods that wasn’t huddled in some dry corner, like I was waiting for the phone to ring, the beer to run out or the rain to stop.
The first time I called someone picked up and said
Herro? in a mock-racist Asian accent. Eventually they hung up. After a few more tries I turned off the lamp and sat drinking in the dark with the rain pouring down. That was last night.

I was up by 5:30 this morning and I had 1,200 words down by 10:50. Now I write this post.  There’s nothing doing in town except of the Monster Truck/Kid Rock variety. There’s no television, no internet and only bad poetry to keep me inspired up here.
Most nights I read or get drunk…I found a copy of Raymond Chandler’s Poodle Springs and had a good night boozing with the old boy. He is absolutely one of America’s greatest writers; an outsider of the literary coterie but a giant as far as I’m concerned, and an inspiration for generations of Western Men like Charles Bukowski and me. Yeah, me.

It took me two days up here to lose the nightmares and I might not clear off the shakes for two more caffeine-riddled afternoons on the screenporch writing, white-knuckling it and hacking it out.
The evil in our hearts lurks waiting for the chance to spring upon us, when we are most vulnerable and w/o our usual devices of distraction. No cell phones or internet, no television and no women. Perhaps there is a poet somewhere loudly declaring that true love will never die. But not this one. Evil will live in our hearts forever. It is this dark mass that comes upon us in torrents while solitary and alone on top of a mountain, in a dark garage that smells of motor oil and compost. Somewhere too in our hearts is love, it’s true, but it is shrouded in the dark wings of love lost. This is Karma. All that we have done and had done to us is still with us. We can kill off that part of ourselves, join the walking wounded and march on like so many brave ones do. Or we can hang on to our pain, keep it alive and let it unfurl around us like smoke and bad prayers rising from the mountains of our isolation.

Bucolic grey clouds are moving in over Lily Bay, as persistent as iron, as I write this. The rains will bring with them the breeze. A glorious breeze that will bend the ginkgoes and rage through the screenporch. The thunderheads will take over the mountain and the lake will get flat as glass.  I’ll wait out the rains and ride out my blues.  It’s certainly better than spending a soaked night in a dark garage on top of a deserted mountain, waiting for the phone to ring.

The evil that men do lives on and on.
-Iron Maiden

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Cream&Sugar

“What song you wanna play maaaan?!”

The dude was everything I hated about everything.

“Hungry Heart.”  I said.  I had my longsleeve bleed green Eagles mock jersey on and a cup of Bud Lite.

During the “na-na-na-na-na” part I noticed a south Philly betty in a denim skirt and chick jersey dancing and making eyes at me.  Then she started saying, mouthing something at me.  I couldn’t believe it my rock and roll dream was finally coming true.  I walked out into the crowd towards her.  I tried to take her hands and pull her in close to dance.  I didn’t see her Bud Lite cup and somehow managed to spill her beer all over her stomach and legs.

“No!” she shouted over the D-bags botched chords.

“I’m so sorry!, I said, “I thought you wanted to dance!”

“No it’s ok.  I was saying you should TIP him.”

“Oh.”

Tip him?  For printing out chord charts of the oldies and playing his guitar in the parking lot at a football game?

Try playing above an Ethiopian restaurant in a bar the size of a 1br apartment for 4 years, Dave Matthews.  He should be tipping me!

I still wanted her though.  I walked over to the guy and pulled the ones from the night before out of my pocket.  I put them in his bucket.  He finished the song.

“Thanks maaan!”  he said.

I reached into the bucket.  I pulled out the ones with the sharpee messages on them.

“Look man!”  I beamed, pointing out “I fuck men” and “Jim is Gay” on the money.  “I’m Jim!” I exclaimed.  “I am Jim!”

Sometimes your own enthusiasm is all that stands between you and a hostile situation.  No one wants to get angry with you if you’re happy.  Even if they do your joy will often confuse them long enough for you to get away.

Me and Mark would literally bring the roof down at the Khyber that night.  It was a Hostile City Dance Party and our Guns N Roses weekend was far from over.