The Practice of Innocence Found

Journaling and writing were the beginning of a process of unraveling and living in luck.
—Your Writer in the Fredericksburg Literary&Art Review

WE’RE SEEING THE WHOLESALE LOOTING OF AMERICA.

It was stolen. Against the overwhelming and bi-partisan will of the people.
—Medium.com

Reality is running ahead of our vocabulary.
—Louis Menand

Come and see the blood in the streets…
—Pablo Neruda

I was just nominated for best activist in the city – of course, I lost to Austin Pets Alive!, because we care more about pets in this city than we care about people that are affected by issues like police brutality.
—Austin Justice Coalition’s Chas Moore

If they keep pretending to be journalists, we’ll end up with someone pretending to be President.
—-John Lurie

Good Morning from the edge of Empire. I bet that if you’re reading this you’re like me–safe, secure and inured. I’m in terrycloth for Christ. Going For The Throat’s humble beginnings coincided with the Arab Spring. It felt like we we’re winning then or that at the very least the speed of this new media wouldn’t be tethered by the powers that be. In 2010 I hadn’t been on Facebook long, I was only friends with people I knew and I only used it drunk. It was what it was–syllogistic and insolvent and as creepy as you’d imagine from a burgeoning writer in his cups with an anger problem. I knew I could market myself as a writer even if I didn’t know that marketing often makes the nut of business. I honestly thought I could be a full-time writer. I still do but that’s beside the point. I thought I could write about myself trying to be a writer–post essays and poems, letters and creative non-fiction, some photographs of old typewriters and voila! I would appear to be a writer.  Because, let’s face it, in the hall of mirrors of the New Century, things are what they appear to be. Just ask Donald J. He’s the master of it. He’s duped large swathes of the population and could sell out the once greatest country in the world on skin color. He’ll call Haiti a shithole and take away your healthcare in one master stroke of media manipulation and partisan oligarchy–just like that and faster than you can tweet racist! or sign a petition to impeach.

This post is a case for not giving a fuck. My conclusion is we lost. We lost this media first and last. I’ve got no dog in Presidential politics. I don’t believe in American democracy to be frank and it’s a real thorn in my side. If I believed I might try and affect change. The truth is I haven’t been alive long enough to cycle through 6 and 2 year terms of the Senate and House of Representatives. All I know is who I voted for in double aught and buck (2000). It didn’t make a damn then and only spurred our country into 13 years of war and a lionization of The New Dumb–a heavily armed group of jingoists who supposedly got the current administration in office.  Meanwhile, W. is a war criminal who lives on a pension while painting in his Austin studio and going on book tours and brandishing his winning idiot grin. If you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop it was thrown at him in Iraq and if you feel safe you can just leave your shoes on in any security line in America and see how fast that gets you boarded on a plane to anywhere else.

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
and I’m neither left or right, I’m just staying home tonight
–Brother Leonard Cohen

My apathy doesn’t make it easy, Good Reader.  Nor am I acting like I don’t care. At this point it’s no longer an act.  I’m powerless to affect change and so are you. If you really want to shake ’em up then I suggest you put your complaint into the work and organize. Get off the network. You are yelling at yourself. The Boss was right, authenticity is a hall of mirrors. They have caught up to the media. They call MLK a hero but he was murdered in Memphis. They killed Malcolm X and the Kenedys but sent our boys to kill Quadafi and Saddam Hussein. I don’t know why I even try, to be honest. Why post anything about it? Why should Going For The Throat get involved? I guess I’ve always been after a journalistic dream but slowly coming to realize that without school, without any time at establishment papers and publications, and most of all without any concern whatsoever about the end of the world–I am not, nor will I ever be, anything like Hunter Thompson. This blog’s been a way to stay sane. You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall. The truth is I’m lost, but we all are, and in writing it and having you read I realize this, and am suddenly found–not alone but together, not crazy but mad in the most rage-full and blessed way–we’re lovers and we’re fighters. If you’ve been with me this far, or if you’re just tuning in, I know you are a romantic like me and that what we want is simple and that the blue world is rolling right over us but mostly—we’re just inured, writing in robes on Sundays, sipping espresso with honey and getting it down and trying to feel better about it all ending, somehow. Maybe not. That’s where you end and I begin. Here. On these pages, using this media. Festooning columns of words into a rampart, mouthing and getting off 600 coffee soaked words at a time. Well what a long, strange trip it’s been, eh Sister?

I’m getting off social media. It’s a cancer and mind control and I’d like to enjoy the natural world while I can–before it’s enveloped in flame and the skies get choked with tar and waterhead racists accost us in bulk store parking lots as church steeples rise and the streets run red with blood. Take To The Territory is stalled in production. I’m due in to the ABAC to take a driving test on the Vandercrook#4. Snakeswilleatyou is closing in on the final design for the cover and your patience, good Reader and Supporter, will be rewarded this year.  Expect 2 publications from Yellow Lark Press as well as a series of broadsides coming out in 2018–a gift for all of you who purchased September back in the heady days of 2015. Besides your support, 2015 wasn’t much better, to be frank, and I’d rather have the tempest and furious grind of these end days of the American Century than the smug and copacetic seasons in the Year of the Wooden Sheep.  I got sober then and lost most of my friends–or, should I say, found my true friends shortly after.  Thank you.

Ab irato,
Trainer

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Splendid Isolation III: Silent in America

You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place.
–Edward Snowden

We’ve moved operations to the bedroom and setup a makeshift office by the window where we can smoke.   Our absence from this blog is no different from the absence of any outrage or protest from citizens in the Land of the Free.  What came downwire 5 days ago is some very dirty business, terrifying enough to make even the most paranoid conspiracist seem rational and sane.
We can deal with the recent revelations that America isn’t much better than China when it comes to protecting the privacy of its citizens in one of two different ways.  We can get wise, slowly move up the ranks of American democracy and ultimately become a government of, by and for the people.  We can take it to the street and protest while assembling the new party.  It will be a thankless struggle and it will take years.
Or, we can just let this whole thing blow over.  Get back to work.  Carry on with our punchdrunk lives and continue sleeping while the nightmare continues.  Shrug while the United States of America tightens its grip of Empire and the New World Order finally comes home to roost.
My money’s on the latter.  Life’s too good here in the states to be bothered by what the big bad government is up to.  Pass the pitcher of margaritas and turn up the corporate rock.
I’m kinda diggin this global warming thing
-Steve Earle

It’s hot out there and I’m tired.  We lost this battle on a dark day in October 2001 when a President we didn’t vote for signed away any rights we still had to our own privacy.  We lost it a long time ago and there is no turning back.  Obama’s a shill.  This country is fucked.  To think that just 15 days ago your flags were flying so high I couldn’t take a piss without it getting on your patriotism.  What do two dumbshit Chechnyans have to do with the reams of information the US government is collecting from our private lives every day?

We are no safer now. Abroad. In our own country.
-from the Philadelphia IMC’s Wire 

…the most crucial issue of our time is the regulation of information.
-from Splendid Isolation II, The Unemployable Journalist

I am saying that I told you so.  Let it crumble. Let it fall.  I’m perfectly happy up here in the high rooms, stupefied all day Sunday with a beer hangover and a hardon.  Go ahead, raise your voices and show your outrage (on Facebook), as we sink down into a life lived&handed over with ever diminishing returns.  Welcome to the Chinese Century.

See you in Hong Kong motherfucker.