Beautiful Friend

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.

Introspection Blues

The book deal was a losing proposition. If I told all I’d be fired before it hit the stands. I had to keep it all in until I was ready to go. I needed to get a grip and pull it together. Find a quiet place to write it all down and eviscerate the lot of ‘em.
–When The House Burned Down

Where’s the nitty-gritty Jim Trainer?
-A dissatisfied fan, complaining about the whiny nature of these three posts.

Last week Austin was the center of the rock&roll universe. Everyone in town pleading, “Don’t move here!”, but not me. After 2 SXs in a row I came down and now I’m here-typing on a MacBook Pro with the AC on, in a dead confederate palace on a quiet Monday night in Hippie Town.  My problems are few.  My problem is singular in fact, and ironic considering the opening of this post.  It’s a surplus of dissatisfaction but a scarcity of get-me-the fuck-outta-here.  Know what I mean, Brothers&Sisters?  It’s been a long time that I should be far from here.  I ain’t into complaining, it tends to yield the kind of posts she hates.  But I’m still stuck here, with my entitled candyass blues, and I need a way out and the only way is this-one word at a time.

A couple years ago I nearly had a panic attack while feeding my boss. I was 40 and I knew I had blew it. I haven’t shook that feeling, good Reader, and that could be the Wisdom. Whether the right time was 8 years ago, when I blew into town in a Hyundai 4-door with 2 guitars and a laptop, or 22 years ago, when I boarded the R3 back to the suburbs after being granted a reaudition to the University of the Arts-is irrelevant. Like the Buddhists say, the next best time is right now. That feeling has got me shook. I’m paralyzed. This post may be right up there with the ones that she hates, but, we’re here for the Wisdom. Right Brother? Sister? We check in with the venom and out with the Wisdom. We’re emotional alchemists and it’s our ire that takes us higher. The Wisdom is I’m scared to live my dreams.

I knew it when I saw Bonnie Whitmore on stage last week and I feel it every time I see Cory Branan. I’ve been holding out and holding back, doing like they do, taking what they’re giving cause I’m working for a living. I don’t think it will ever be enough. I’m going to have to wake up, though-when every impulse bids me to shut down. From the parroted news squawking at me from social media, to the zombie hoards out there on the street. It’s a phony world. It’s twice removed. I burn through it like hot iron in a sea of plastic. I climb the fire escape. Back to my room. That’s when my damage starts. Too much anger sitting here. Writing this.

Too much anger and pain and resentment and all the rest, without a drink to forget about it over, without a cigarette, my constant and burning repose for over twenty-seven years. It’s been a long time that I should be far from here. See you on the east side Motherfucker.