Better Than Drugs

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR:
Due to indescribable and excruciating lower back pain and a relentless work schedule, Jim Trainer was unable to provide you with his latest criticisms of the US Gov, the NFL and the vapidly insipid music industry. Upon hearing of his troubles, and as his his editor, I summoned him at once to my Office in San Francisco, where he spent four days smoking Jimson Weed in the morning fog before returning to bed to watch Hunter Thompson interviews. Despite his efforts he was not able to adhere to his semi-daily schedule of providing you, Invaluable reader, with an 800 word commentary on “the way things should be”.
Rest assured, thanks to days of salty honey on the breeze, accidental, true culture in the streets,languid sun-walks and a decadent bed always beckoning, Trainer was able to enjoy deep healing. He was able to heal and rest up and is now back in the Pearl of the South&grinding it out. Please accept this blog, written just before he left for California, until Jimbo can get back in circulation. Thanks for understanding.
-Elsha Storm
The Editor
San Francisco, CA

Better Than Drugs
Waiting For the New Journalism, Seeking Refuge in Apathy
by Jim Trainer

I don’t cook, I don’t clean
I don’t have the energy for the scene.
I don’t got no car,
I don’t worry about the price of gasoline.

What a life, eh Brother? I’m out here on the roof (where else?) and the view from this vista is grand. There are 2 crews down there on the street working. The city is building another turnaround, just up the street from the mansion and the site of their last renovation at the corner here. They spent 9months doing the one out front and it was pure misery, brother. 9monthhs of waking up to a cement drill or, if I couldn’t sleep, seeing them gather around their trucks in the blue morning; them down there and me up here-the laborers and the ex-laborer.
In fact I just submitted a poem to Apiary Magazine chronicling my time as a crew chief in North Philly. That was some hard fucking work Brother, but the 90s were different. Aho back in the sanguine endays of the American Century you could make a buck 20 drilling crete for two days a week. You could get by, providing you kept your Barista shifts at the neighborhood coffee shop and they’d still run you a tab for coffee, groceries&smokes.
An old friend and aspiring writer wrote me recently, asking if I’d be attending our 20th High School Reunion. Besides a resounding Fuck no. I told her, and not without hubris, that I have no use for nostalgia and no use for the past. Am I holding on to past hurts? Do I still hold a grudge against certain meatheaded upper classmen who were at that time the Kings of the Fucking World? You bet. And it’s way too early in the evening to get catty, gentlemen, so, fuck it. I don’t wish nobody harm. And that’s the truth.
You know I love ya. If you don’t know that I love ya than I probably don’t.
In fact if you aren’t in my life anymore you aren’t a keeper, but you’re probably living the life an ex-Football playing choad deserves-cush-job, once-hot wife, spoiled kids, and in perhaps the most comic turn of events, supporting the nazis of the UD police force in their efforts to keep “the element” off the streets of our podunk hometown.
that town’s as good as gone
-Payday

Even though the youth is gone, and the good old days, I’d never wish to be anywhere but right here, right now. For true. The back gives out. My smoking cough has taken over my laughter. It only hurts when I laugh. The ladies have stopped paying visit (although that’s my choice mostly, bramacharya). But even in my fat&decaying state I prefer the present. I don’t wish to go back, but I do wish it could be the 90s again. When the economy was booming and the media didn’t bother you with the details of our dirty little wars and dips into theretofore unheard of countries like Sarajevo.
In the words of the late, great John Lee Hooker, in the 90s everybody friendly, even ol OBL, ODB and GHB. Aho. Good times. Shittty music, but we still had our underground.

Wishing for the days
-Minor Threat
Yep. Guess I’m a little nostalgic after all. I don’t miss being a laborer though. That’s a hard dollar Brother.
Which perhaps brings me to point. I don’t care about the US Gov being shutdown. I don’t care about Breaking Bad and I could give two fucks about Miley Cyrus. Also, your spirituality really gets under my skin. I don’t care about High School and I don’t care about punkrock.
Shall I break it down for you, good&cherished reader, country-simple?
Ok. Will do. And if you’re with me this far you understand that I am not talking about you. WE are talking about THEM, in the fine Irish tradition of warming ourselves with misery, better than whiskey-Ok, onward.
The problem is not with government. In a democracy, the government is of, by and for the people. Any problem you have with the government is a problem you have with yourself. Yep YOU.
The problem is not with the ruling class. The problem is that the ruling class are some of the best paid citizens in the Land of the Free. The problem is with the rich, and your sullen, defeatist acceptance of the shrinking middle class. You don’t read Going For The Throat to rally. There is nothing political about my writing. Aho.
I don’t lose any sleep
worrying about the state of the economy
-Circle Jerks, I Don’t
Don’t ask me about the economy. Leave it to the pros. Quit clogging up the social networks with your commentary, as if it mattered to anyone but you and your friends list. Keep watching tv and fantasising about millions of dollars made in meth deals or legions of zombies corrupting your way of life. Quit commenting on the music industry-it likes the attention and it’s nothing but boardroom rock&bullshit pop music that won’t be remembered 20 years from now save for maybe at your highschool reunion.
Just leave it to the pros. That’s what I do. Read Paul Krugman or Noam Chomsky.
And take it to the streets, Citizen. Brush up on your Amer Natl Govt and include as many folks in Your Party as possible. This distinction between Repubs&Democrats? I call bullshit. That’s their game. Ignore the detractors, don’t watch the fucking news. Get on the Gandhi trip. It’s either that or eat the Rich. And by that I mean eat the Rich people. Whatever you do, do not post things on your timeline that I will have to suffer. I can’t take it anymore. And come Sunday, read some more of Brother Don Bajema, why don’t ya? He’ll be posting a new chapter of Too Skinny, Too Small every Sunday until the Super Bowl. Which is great news b/c ever since I declared my boycott of the NFL, Sundays have been a real drag. Aho. I’m hard pressed to find anything intellectually stimulating or fun to do at week’s end, when the whole country goes numb behind a blue wall of television light.
Don’t get me wrong, I care about your opinions. Your concerns are mine brother. Which is why I implore you to get informed and become the media. Write your own blog. I will read it. I will support you. Think your position through, clearly illustrate it in a clever and/or way that is pleasurable to read. Do something besides getting up on your Facebook soapbox.
I get it, the site is a self-fuck, 6billion people thinking out loud and talking to themselves. On good days Facebook is better than the New York Times and closer to street level than The Business after a soccer game…on bad days I delete you and on worse nights I even block you. Facebook has its perks. But I am transitioning out. Now watch him dissappear. I harbor ill-will toward none, save myself, but this much madness is too much sorrow. I must willfully isolate myself and not talk for 3 days. I must get on a plane and forget about my troubles for awhile.

Brother Don Bajema’s Too Skinny, Too Small on Going For The Throat every Sunday until the Super Bowl. F the NFL. F the music industry. Eat the Rich. Go for the throat.

Who Will Judge the Righteous?

PT I
F the NFL

Who will judge the righteous?
It’s a fair question.  Am I right, brother?  That is, assuming you’ve measured up.  You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and you’ve stomped boot to face of any weakerthan on your way up because you’re a winner and you’re not a pussy.  You didn’t piss your pants on the first day of Kindergarten and you drank beer like a Roman around bonfires in High School and you bro-downed at the Frat House while taking advantage of dumb girls in College.  It’s high time you were rewarded for toeing the line of American masculinity, so sit back and enjoy the game.
Aho it’s football season.  Now you can really work out, jam those buggers and crush the enemy.  Get lost in bloodlust behind a blue wall of television light, drink and cuss and fight before you head to bed on a Sunday or Monday night, and sleep like a baby throughout autumn in America.  Ah, the game.  With its lines clearly drawn and an identifiable enemy to be conquered and humiliated.  Thinking back over your entire life, there was always the game.  Except for that dark and confusing week in September of 2001 it’s been business as usual, let ‘er rip and shutup honey the game’s on!

I don’t watch football anymore.  The last game of pro ball I watched, or listened to, as it were, was the opening Sunday of the 2011 Season.  It wasn’t the unending misery or sorry excuse for a pathetic career of my hometown Eagles that queered me to the NFL either.  Many of my homeboys have solved that problem by defecting to less dismal and dysfunctional franchises like the NY Giants or the Dallas Cowboys fer fuck’s sake.  Aho

The last time I listened to the game was on the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks.  Commercial breaks were flooded with ad agency spun sympathy for the victims and first responders of 9/11.  It appeared that the NFL had sold ad time to the pounding of a tired trope-one that subliminally equates any dissent of American Hegemony with the murder of 3,000 innocent people.  You know, that old patriotism-or-treason trip.  I’m used to it.  But when I’m inundated with it, and it’s crammed down my throat on a Sunday afternoon 10 years later, and after all that time thinking I was safe behind a wide wall of apathy and listening strictly to liberal radio, I get upset.

The NFL and its sponsors were wasting my time with maudlin attempts at blind patriotism and otherwise dancing on graves to hawk wares and further the bullshit business-as-usual of consumerism.  Meanwhile my own country was quagmired in three senseless wars that, as the truth slowly started to slither out just 10 days before, were not moral, righteous, nor even humane.

This schadenfreude of manufactured consent was grossly disrespectful to the dead.  I was suffering from my own loss suffered that same rueful Autumn 10 years ago, and I’d be good and goddamned if I’d let a company like Budweiser or the NFL tell me how to feel about it.  It got worse after commercial break.  Even dumber things were happening down on the green and on TV.  There were cops&horses, flags out the yin-yang and the National Anthem sung by Lady Antebellum fer fuck’s sake.  All under the proud banner of a
customized NFL 9/11 ribbon and the official NFL 9/11 logo.

These were mawkish efforts at best, willful ignorance and an “odious exercise in corporate branding” at least.  It made me sick and I haven’t listened to a game since.

And now, as the war drums start to roll and a poisoned toad like John McCain can be heard on liberal radio and John Kerry drones on and on with some of the best paid men&women in the country on the Senate floor, debating the morality of murder, theirs or ours, and by ours I mean you&me Brother-what could this be but Autumn in America?
I thought we put down that pig of a man with stumps for arms last November.  I thought the only thing neocons would be getting out of the American people this term would be book deals and spots on Fox News at best and a dirty, shameful place in the history of the greatest country in the world besides.
As far as the Dems go, John Kerry must be the biggest shill of a man, perhaps better remembered as a dove not so very long ago, on the Campaign Trail and at the onset of all this madness.
I thought the President of the United States stood for something besides getting the Latino vote and an easy ticket out of Chicago.
I thought I could remain grossly apathetic and I thought my old man would still be around and we might watch a few more cursed Birds games together over cheesesteaks&Marlboros.  I thought we’d always have the game.
I was wrong.
This changes everything.
-Tool

Make no mistake, those who are busy deciding how best to blow another trillion dollars in a war far away will not be the ones fighting it.  You really want to see Congress get along with the Forty-Fourth President of the United States?  You really wanna see some action?
F the NFL, let’s go to war.

And 10 years from now, with your middle class and your Fourth Amendment gone, your highways jammed with suicide bombers and the news clogged with religious nutters stroking a hardon for the end days, you can enjoy another henous instant replay of American history brought to you by the NFL.  You deserve it.  You’re a winner.  Why should I care?  I’m a baseball fan.

LET’S GO PHILS!

I will switch channels when the NFL glorifies the military and DHS.
I will gently dissuade anyone thinking of joining the military.
I will not listen to prayers for the military.
I will not listen to the military or war being raised up from the pulpit in church.
I will not talk to people who worship the military.
I will not say the Pledge of Allegiance.
I will not salute the flag.
I will not stand for the National Anthem.
I will not vote.
I will not listen to the voice of any President.
–Switchblade commenting on Truthdig.org