Shrieks of Paradise, Correspondence&Rails#18: “Ain’t it good to be workin.”

Jim Trainer
709 Rio Grande Street
Austin, TX 78701
512-203-6288

Editor
Raw Paw, The PLOG

10/15/14

Hello!

I am excited to pitch for your consideration as contributor and columnist for the PLOG. I am a 39 year old blogger, journalist, published poet, singer-songwriter and ex-Pat punkrocker.

When I started blogging, I simply wanted to exercise my columnist’s voice. I put myself on deadline. I forced myself to come up with 1,200 words, neat and fine, every day. With the advent of social media, it seemed that immediacy could supersede objectivity. I was thrilled. We could in fact become the media. I could write from where I was at, like all my journalistic and literary heroes had done.
Creative non-fiction was always where it was at for me, but I had no idea of the fount of inspiration I would uncover in the blogosphere. Here was a medium which I needn’t offer an introduction to the reader. I needed no back story and the main character was me. This was a boon to my writing. The fourth wall had come down for me as well. I would never have writer’s block again.

Current themes at Going For The Throat have been (but are not limited to): being a writer, the creative process, day labor, the struggles of sensitivity, rock and roll, current events/politics and literary criticism along with poetry and prose.

Topics pertaining to breaking through, pushing past your limits and getting to a place of habitual expression could be of great value to writers, would be writers, creatives and anyone seeking creative expression. Obviously this type of content would not be time-sensitive. I believe it would largely be adult content. While I never censor myself on my own blog, I am quite open to editing and creative input. As such, I’ve cleaned up the language in some of the samples offered below and offered them as published and in their entirety in the links as well.

I’ve had success supporting my posts with photos from Instagram. Facebook has been the main source of traffic to my site. I am always looking for ways to build and enhance my aesthetic, however. My grand vision is to be full-on, a one stop shop containing all forms of media. In the meantime I couldn’t be happier that I can continue to write on an electric typewriter and just snap a photo to present to the digital world.

Thank you for the opportunity to pitch this; and to the wonderful David Jewell for putting Raw Paw on my radar. I look forward to hearing from you and reading future issues of Raw Paw.

Jim Trainer
Austin, TX

attached&pasted below:

excerpts and links from

-13 DAYS
https://jimtrainer.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/13-days/
-On Poetry
https://jimtrainer.wordpress.com/2014/05/06/on-poetry/
-Interview with 1349
http://www.verbicidemagazine.com/2010/11/30/interview-1349/
-I HATE ROCK AND ROLL
https://jimtrainer.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/creamsugar
-Kingdom Found

https://jimtrainer.wordpress.com/2012/08/17/kingdom-found/
-Don Bajema’s Hero
http://www.philadelphiastories.org/don-bajema%E2%80%99s-hero
untitled (a poem)
https://jimtrainer.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/untitled-3/

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New blog up at Going for the Throat (http://tinyurl.com/nhkarx5) about gettin this rig unwound and finding work as a professional writer. Aho. #writer #writing #writingprocess #blog #blogging #PLOG #rawoaw #typewriter

A post shared by Jim Trainer (@goingforthethroat) on Dec 16, 2014 at 11:45am PST

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!

The ruse is up. Satya motherfucker. It’s high time to disabuse myself of my own delusions. Might as well do it here and in writing, which is how I come to understand anything anyway. We’ve been down this dirty road before. Today we’ll be dismantling my belief in change.
I been blowin it out with big boys of Lonestar and Sapporo. Same old story. Same old song. My blowouts now are pretty harmless, relatively speaking. In my late 20s and early 30s a blowout was a catastrophic event. I was bored with life and I had an anger problem. The light of day was painful then and my furniture was never the same. I was a madman, the madman of 10th Street and any friends I still have from the Never Ending Summer of Evil Kanevil are true blue. Their love has been tested brother, believe me.
There is no limit to the amount of havoc&destruction you can cause with the single-pointed focus of dying before the age of 30. After 30 I had no excuse but by then Hostile City was closing in on me. Whether or not I escaped certain death by leaving Philly it is certain that I was born again by the time I stepped boot to Texas soil. There is my life before Austin and my life after. I probably drank around 9 beers last night, starting with lunch and ending with a nightcap after dinner. I was safe asleep, in bed before midnight and other than feeling a little crispy this morning, I’m fine. This wouldn’t even be the beginning of a blowout back then. Also, bourbon. And coke. And xanax. It’s comical what constitutes a blowout now but I ain’t laughing.

I’ve hired a life coach. Our overarching goal is to help me make the leap to becoming a full-time artist. We’ve broken it down into simple, everyday steps. First up are my beliefs and habits about productivity. I should mention that my life coach is more on the spiritual side then the business side. We don’t discuss personality types or business models; we don’t tangle with newage (pronounced sewage) or any douchey-corporate terms and strategies. For example, one of her suggestions to increase my productivity is to sit and do nothing for 5 minutes every day. It’s a very Zen approach-to do more, do less. What Taoists call “effortless action” and what I call taking the longview.
Taking the longview is accepting that the rest of my life will be devoted to creating art. It’s a forgiving view and useful, too. Instead of trying to be a journalist, poet and songwriter today, I instead schedule a little time to write this morning, with a break in-between, then attempt some research and promotion this afternoon, blow it out on the Epiphone and finally end the day with some poetry tonight.
Aho. The longview. It’s what was so roundly missed for all those years on the dayshift as a raging alcoholic when I felt like I had to get it all done and now. Plus, it’s hard to plan on days you don’t know you’ll live to see (or that you so dread living to see you get fucked up anyway). Of course there are many reasons to carry on the way I did for all those years but that’s another story for another time.
All I know is that a piece like this falls so short of my journalistic aspirations it may as well be a long, more thought out&better written Facebook post. Christ, the entirety of this blog could be viewed as such and maybe the bastard Doctor is right anyway, blogs are passé.
Whether or not blogs are useful tools of the new journalism or merely bloviating scrapbooks, there is no question-I’m ready to take the leap. But until I can push through these issues I’ll be delegated to the roof with Dylan’s first album blasting down Judge’s Hill and flanked on either side by a cup of Megadolo black and a pack of Nat Sherman MCDs. Baking sessions on the roof with the keys burning the skin off my fingers.
I’m not saying this blog is on hiatus. Just that I need to figure some things out. Like a way to get off the roof in 110 degree weather, for example. I’ve reached my goal with this blog anyway. I have systematically dismantled writer’s block and put that bad bitch to bed. I know that on any given day I can sit down and screw it on, smoke and cough and scream and squirm until I have 800 words, neat&fine.
I have contemplated the mountain. I’ve kicked, scraped and fucked my way to the top. Now it’s time to take the longview. Look around, up&down the chain. Sadly, my daily sessions smoking&coming up with a missive for you have come to a close. I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore. It’s no failure of myself as an Artist. I’m no less of a writer. I’m just making a different decision-one that has terrifies me when I think about giving up my 20-year-old crutch but exciting when I think of the Artist that I can be.
Here’s to hoping some new way will emerge and I’ll be able to devote more of my time and more of my life to the fucking beast of writing, without being delegated to the roof and smoking like an AA member.
Besides, I’m as bored as you are with these blogs about change and self-help. At the very least we’ll do away with the by now, oft-penned and most hated apology blog. Hell, maybe even write about stuff that interests us. Over 4,000 people marched on the Capitol on Monday and it makes me proud to live in a town where folks are exercising true democracy. Not only that, but I just got back from the hometown with enough love to shut down any idea of opposition and shred anything in the way of living the life I choose.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a kinghell fun. I’ve had a blast catching up with 20 years worth of neglect of the craft of writing. These long hours on the sinking throne are never boring. But as the temperature climbs into the triple-digits, the rooftop ain’t gonna cut it anymore, Brother.
Stay cool pretty babies. It’s time to go back inside.

We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn
burn motherfucker burn!

Goodbye bravery.

I time every journey 
To bump into you 
Accidentally I
Charm you and tell you
Of the boys I hate
All the girls I hate
All the words I hate
All the clothes I hate
How I'll never be anything I hate
You smile, mention something that you like
How you'd have a happy life
If you did the things you like 
-Franz Ferdinand, The Dark of the Matinee

I come up from the boiler room. She’s turned off all the lights. There are candles burning in every window. The windows are open but the furnace has stopped blasting the room with hot air. She’s left no note. In the kitchen a sole lamplight is glowing above the type and made brighter reflecting off the blank white sheet in the reel.
I sit down. I crank the silver arm of the President XII, advance and return the reel. My hands are black with furnace grease. My breath is musty, wet&cold.  I’m still exhaling cellar air. I start typing. I begin…
…South Philly…by the sign of the cross on a Monday morning. I am overcome with complete and utter sexual exhaustion. I can feel her in the ease of my joints and in the cracked fascia of my arms and legs. I can taste her and the salt of our sweat. Catholic School kids make their way down the cold pavement in twos and threes. Church bells crack the autumn air.  I walk down the steps to the orange line and sink into another dream…
…A dark rainy morning at the shop.  Auggie and his weed.   Spicer cracking wise.  Led Zeppelin and Bush and Live.  Lightning out through the double doors and then thunder booming down the suburban sky.  The nervous feeling in the bowels of a 19-year-old kid, standing there, waiting for the storm to come.  He’s trying not to hope for the day off.  He doesn’t want to jinx it.  But he is hoping for the day off  just the same…
…Up on a high hill above Wheeling.  It’s just him&her and this connection of feeling between them.  She’d never be so old again.  He’d never be less bitter.  He had the rest of his life to wonder about the wound and the opening.  He was 23, wearing wingtips and innocent to his own game.  They pile into the van and bomb their way through Appalachia.  They’re coming home…
Then this, the blurry amalgamation of my youth in three memories.  I keep typing…
…the yard is filling with water.  It’s up to at least 4″ by now and me&my sisters can’t get inside.  The doors are locked and we don’t have our key.  Mom’s Nova’s in the driveway but Dad’s pickup isn’t.  We run around to the backyard and find the rabbit,  floating by the porch drain, dead.  His solid black eyes seeing nothing.  His paws stretched out, waterlogged and useless.
and then…
…He comes in, hulking and quiet.  The silence of the house is weighted.  It hurts.  There is a shame coming from an anger unexpressed.  I look into his room from the hall  and see him sitting with his freckled back to me on the bed.  He is sinking and silent.  Then I see her face,  giant, pursed, as she shuts the door.
this is much later and I’m 14 now…
…we’re at Dunkin Donuts smoking and drinking coffee before school.  We’re late for homeroom  but we’d make first period and slide right in.  At 8:20am we get up, slap 1$ bills and quarters down and make our way out into the working class morning.  We walk down the length of the counter.  I’m ready to explain to anyone in my way that what I’m doing is my own goddamn business and if they don’t like it then they’ll have a big fucking problem on their hands and a fight they will not win…
It’s the bravest I ever remember being, then this…
…the last day of 9th grade at Upper Darby High.  Someone’s playing I’ll Stop The World in the parking lot.  She’s coming out from the stands toward me.  The sunlight catches her hair, her legs, her eyes.
She’s incredible, gorgeous as always but not so much the cheerleader anymore.  There’s something softer in her eyes and sad.  Her movements have an openess to them now and she’s moving toward me with the unmistakable language of her budding sexuality.  I want to tell her I want her, that I’d stop the world and walk away with her, across the parking lot and across the street from school, through the cemetery and into summer forever.  See you next year, I say instead, and walk away.    I don’t find out til the beginning of sophomore year.  Her father died that day, in the parking lot, when I walked away with more conformity than the lot of them rallying  in the stands behind me and yelling into the hot open air.  Goodbye bravery.  

I rip the sheet from the reel and sit there in front of the President XII.  Goodbye bravery, hello Blues.

Celebrating National Poetry Month

People say I’m crazy. They have no fucking idea. I’m out of my balloons, as Bobby Lemons would say. Good old Bobby Lemons. The Mayor of 10th street. The years I spent in South Philly were a mad slipshod blurring of the lines between love&death. I was crazy enough to live there and I was crazy enough to leave.  Aho. I pulled stakes and closed a chapter of my life that will always  affectionately and ruefully be remembered as “The Never Ending Summer of Evil Kanevil.”
Now I live in Paradise.  Sometimes you got to rattle your chains. Am I right, Brother?

A little bit of madness goes a long way and a lot of madness goes nowhere fast. At this late stage of the game, some of us are taking our Crown while the rest are just taking shit. Oh well.  Had I not been there it would all be for naught and you probably wouldn’t even be reading this blog.
I miss the days of amour fou and ruin.  It’s amazing the things you can accomplish with the single-pointed focus of dying before the age of 30.  But then 30 hits and you take a look around.  There comes this feeling of gratitude.  You get to the top of the mountain and suddenly you see the chain.

This blog ain’t about being crazy on the streets of Philadelphia.  I’m tempted to touch on the particular and startling lunacy of a journalist who reports on the news with a story about how he couldn’t give a fuck about the news-but it only gets worse and I’ll spare you.  I ain’t goin down that rabbit hole.  I’m in a good mood today and it’s National Poetry Month.

My point is, after battle, after War, after trivial half-love and virtues that needed to be proven, we rise.  We discover a no more worthy adversary.  We find that despite our bitching and moaning and haggling and hustling down the beat ends of dirty streets, there really isn’t anything standing in our way.  I’m mostly speaking to those of us living in the First World (as if anyone else is reading this).  Whatever misery it’s been honey, and whatever was so heavy Jack, put it down.  Come take your Crown and sit with us  in the high rooms.
There’s room for us all.
-Hot Snakes

Rattle your chains.  Get free and die laughing.  Or, peck-peck-peck your way through the lead tumblers of the late night, like I do.  Send me a poem and I’ll post it.

Because fuck ‘em that’s why.
–Sicko

Put your motherfucking game face on and read some real killers this month.
–Josh Britton

We’re all mad here.
Best,
The Boy Bandit King