Confessions of a Jerkoff

The following post was written the Sunday before last, while in the midst of feeling like a failure.  

“You get your story and you hold onto it, and every time you tell it, you forget it more.”
-Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog

There’s nothing ironic about writing this at a Starbucks in downtown Austin while they play The Beatles.  The Beatles aren’t my favorite and neither is this coffee shop, but I’m left alone here.  It’s perfectly copacetic and American.  No haircuts, no 80’s music and plenty of space between me and the only other customer in here.  The Beatles are too terribly cute to resonate with me and my junkyard mind, but it’s not insufferable, certainly nothing earphones won’t fix and heaps better than the hipster coffee shop near the mansion.  I can never work there, can barely sit there without choking on good vibes with the urge to kill rising.  Which is all strangely prescient, being that the intention of this post is to demonstrate what a jerkoff I’ve been, and that in a slovenly state of mind even the universe can conspire to distract you, fuck you off and prevent you from getting the work done, if you let it.

The months following the publication of September and my return from Portland haven’t exactly been stagnant, but things never passed the speed of agony.  I’ve been busy but not busy enough.  I’ve kept up with gigs.  I did a book release at the mansion, performed for a packed house and sold some books. That week I appeared as the guest on Writing On The Air.  I was Chicon Street Poets featured reader in March and played their year anniversary as well as their presentation of Popsicle’s Departure 1989 by Maydee Distefano.  I was a featured reader of Blood Jet Poetry Series in New Orleans in March with great poet and friend Bernard Pearce.  I played a short set at the first Story Barn and my monthly gigs at the Airport.  I tagged along with fellow poet Brian Grosz and writer Kent Grosswiler Jr. for Writer’s Roulette and Spokenandheard at Kickbutt Coffee, and I opened the Ice Cream Social at the end of April.  I’m playing House Wine Thursday and then heading down to Houston the next day for Songwriters Roundtable Vol 8.  I’ve been able to support my community and made appearances at performances by Grosz and local favorite Nathan Hamilton.  I’ve been out to see Ebony Stewart read at the Bedpost Confessions‘ book release and also Testify semi-regularly.  I went to Joe Gray‘s first show on Wednesday and been listening to my homeboys on the Broad Street Breakdown.  I wrote poetry and posted a poem every day in April, kept that going throughout May.  I’ve had some poems featured in PoetryInk‘s 20th Anniversary Anthology as well as a tribute to Lamont Steptoe, and spoke and read at NSFW: Poetry For Wankers in May.  I’m sitting on about 10 new poems and hope to have them submitted by the end of June.  Meanwhile, I’ve submitted “You’d Be Alone Here Too” to the No Extra Words podcast and hope to get some stories together for submission to Backyard Story Night and Testify before we hit the road for upstate NY in July.  Lastly, I had some work appear in the Fredericksburg Literary and Art Review and am thrilled to be featured in The Waggle Magazine again.  In my interview with Chicon Street Poets I mentioned that I hope to break into twelve new markets by 2017, including Boston and NYC in September.

If you think that I’m tooting my own horn, you’re goddamn right I am.  At the request of my therapist I’m doing away with thinking that I am not an Artist.  It was my mantra for a while- twenty years or so but who’s counting-but thanks to the professional help of a good therapist, I won’t need to think that way anymore.  Also it just ain’t true.  Point is, it’s become terribly necessary to toot my own horn.  Remind myself.  As much as I feel like a jerkoff, I’m still getting work done.  I’m not moving at the speed of my heroes and I may never.  The only way a little light’ll get in, and the only chance I have in this chase, is that I voice it, here and to the universe.  That even with the proof of shows and print and interviews and performances, I still feel nowhere.  And even though I’m not nowhere, and am in fact somewhere, I know I could do so much better.  If I can’t rightfully say that I’ve beat depression, I’ve certainly won the round.  I haven’t smoked a cigarette since December and I hardly ever have the urge to drink or drug.  The difficulty is this yearning for otherness.  I’m stable.  Clear.  And utterly boring.  This way of feeling reminds me of similar crossroads in my life when I knew I’d have to perform-do work or die.  I can only imagine that this time I’ll be able to hit unimagined heights.  I’ve got sobriety and health on my side.  A stable gig, money saved and lots of time.  I hope to see you on the road, good reader, and the next time I get up I plan on jamming this fucker all the way home.

IN CASE I FORGET TO WRITE

there’s no one back east
could imagine life this easy
up west 6th in May
come the big legged
high-skirted women.
with a pair of canvas black shades on
nobody will even look at you
if there’s trouble I haven’t found any
except my own and I’ve solved it
I’m up early in the morning
drinking decaf and doing yoga
and I drink cold seltzers on the sawdust
in the rockabilly night
my only complaint
it might be too easy
down here in the Pearl of the South
but it sure beats waiting by a payphone
at 18th&Callowhill
as the cops circle back
and the wind chill climbs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LIVING BY THE HIGHWAY

the crews haven’t stopped beeping
since April 2012
the city is growing, they’re building their towers
into the sky
tearing the John Falk Library down
and spreading boutiques out into the barrio

if you ask me my problems I’ll tell you few
never had many but a great one and now
at 41 the beast is tamed
I drink decaf in my underwear
in the big leather writer’s chair
despite this city’s prostituting
and New California land grabbing
there’s always a high snap to the air
in Texas in the springtime

there’s a road that blows through here
straight to where Blind Lemon was born
through frontiers of desert
and straight off California into the sea
many great men and women have passed through here
finding for a new road
mixing it up with the fates
putting their hands into the wind
eschewing the doom&dredge of a conscripted life
and bucking against parents&teachers&peers
who were doomed

doomed to lose, doomed to resign
doomed to only live and die
it’s why I’m here, at this outpost in the unproud South
in the savage land

now that the Rottweiler of blues
sleeps a little too soundly at the gate
and sprites of my fancy all blew away
into orange canyons of Colorado and
Saint Jack’s blue&grey California
and as the New Century, The America
builds its towers on my back, steamrolls over
graves of the individualist, the true pioneer

I like living close to the highway
I like to think one day
my road’ll jump up and rope me
Woody&McMurtry&James&Stewart
will lure me, the irresistible molt&call
of the proud highway
the good red road
when they come for me I want to be ready
to take the path with a heart.

 

 

End of Thee Hated Roadtrip, Lost&Found in America

The road was not fun. The mountains were not fun. But we made it out and down.  When we pulled off the road on Wednesday, that placard of the state of Texas up on the highway, just this side of the Texarkana line, was like a vision. The wastelands of Arkansas gave way to rolling plains with cows sleeping under trees. Those crazy, lazy browns and the heat&the drawl of Texas was welcoming me with open arms.  A somnabulant southwestern “breeze” was blowing.  It pasted my balls to my leg and opened my eyes dry&wide.  It was good to be home.

The trip sucked, for all the usual reasons, but that wasn’t the worst of it. I was plunged into a bad dark up on the mountain, which could only be the grim&undeniable reacquainting of the self with the self.  My time up in the mountains was like the part of a Stephen King novel when his protagonist has really gone off the rails. I could see no end to the drunk rain and when the sun finally showed itself in Hewitt, the boss told us to load it up and head for the border, only to get popped for weed on the Canadian side at dusk.

Sunday I was stuck at the BP in Five Points, Nashville, waiting for a cab and Facebook messaging a girl back home. She’d been reading the blog. She’d been feeling my pain. That somehow someone out there was reading-registering my blues and following these mad chronicles of heartbreak in America, well, shit-it’s really touching, to tell you the truth. And it’s Art.  Aho and good goddamn.
I’ve been feeling like it’s time to retire this blog and I was especially feeling that way out on the road.  I would read over what I’d posted and hate life even more. Aho even the work wasn’t enough to carry me through and, greasy and despondent in some hotel room in Malvern, Kentucky, I would curse myself for not being able to write through the misery; opting instead to watch the most horrible television, jerkoff and go to bed. But this story ain’t over; rather, you’re still reading it. And, just as I was deriding myself for not having the discipline of Papa or because I never put in the hours that great writers like Jason Woolery do, the blog’s views spike up to the second biggest day in Going for the Throat’s history.

My point is that she was feeling me. And you kept reading. The blog’s got up and started walking; your steady trickling of views is what pleases me, no matter the road or consequence. You’re reading and my pain has been received and transmuted, framed and stuck on the wall for us to marvel or laugh at on better days. Better days are coming, brother.  You can count on that. Even as that deathead crowns the horizon and the Man takes a pound of flesh for a pound of gold, we’ve got each other, and isn’t that nice?

The high wind up north is really something. Up Vancouver or Niagara way, the north wind bids you to keep travelling on, keep going. I remember walking the streets of Vancouver in the fall of 2008. I had just bought the woman I was living with back home a black dragon Kimono robe, in Seattle the night before. The thing made me hard just looking at it, picturing her in it. When I called to tell her I had bought her something special, she told me that all my “shit” was packed up on the lawn. It would be there and ready for me to move out when I got back to Philly, she said.
(That never came to pass. She had moved all my shit back inside by the time I got off tour and was back in Hostile City. There it sat in the living room, still packed but no longer outdoors.  I loaded it up and headed down to Texas.)
Besides that rueful telephone call, what I remember best about that incredible fall day in Vancouver was this feeling that I could keep on walking forever, leave the guys in the RV behind me, keep going North and never come back.
I was feeling that way again a couple weeks ago up by the Canadian border. The north wind in Niagara was blowing through and I felt like it could carry me on and blow me away. We had just got pinched at the border for the old man’s weed. It was a disaster on top of the nightmare that the trip already was. I was thinking felony and no more trips to Tulum or anywhere outside the U.S. I was thinking a lot of things but mostly I was thinking what I would tell the Canadian border guards should they sequester me in a small room for questioning. I would absolve myself completely. I would tell the truth. They’d cut me loose on the streets of upstate NY and I would ramble. Leave the job, taking only what I could carry. Goodbye President XII. Goodbye workingman blues. How could it be any worse?

One learns survival by surviving.
-Charles Bukowski

Jimbo’s back.  I have lots to tell you and share.  Friday is letter day at the Office and I want to hear from you. Send me your address and I’ll send you the things I write when I can’t write-letters. When inspiration is lacking and the body is wrecked, I look to you and am renewed. I wrap up a day’s work with a walk through the garden, past the rainbow Kale and Neapolitans, through the pride of Barbados and to the tall blue mailbox on Rio Grande, and I send out my love to you.

Please keep reading.  You’re keeping me alive.
w/ Gratitude,
JMT

Your Writer at the BP in Five Points, Nashville TN

Dave Grohl, South By Southwest 2013, Blues&Trouble in Paradise

Neurosis-it’s what’s for breakfast. Doesn’t help that the whole town’s on vacation and the whole fucking world is on Austin’s doorstep for the 27th Annual SXSW Music&Media Conference.
The construction crews on Rio Grande haven’t missed a beat. They’ve got some clever machines, including one that sounds like some kind of mechanical pick-axe. It chisels me from dreaming, it chisels me awake. My mornings usually begin with me fantasizing about climbing onto the roof of the mansion with a rifle and taking Mr. beep-beep-beep out, and the rest of his crew too.
I’m stuck on repeat, creatively speaking, and I’m just as neurotic about a poem submitted last Friday night as I was the last time I posted.
Uncle Dave Grohl will be delivering the keynote address for this year’s SXSW, at 12noon CST.  I don’t know how he could possibly hold a candle to last year’s address by the Boss. Bruce Springsteen’s Keynote Address for SXSW 2012 is one of the finest moments in the history of broadcast media. I strongly encourage you to listen to it sometime. The best thing about it? The Boss knows that all we are ever doing is standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. He never comes across as self-important or some hot shit rockstar. He talked about Son House and The Animals for christ. Other than Grohl’s work behind the kit, I’m not really impressed by the man. His work with the Queens and of course Nirvana are fine examples of hard rock drumming at its finest. The Foo Fighters on the other hand, are fratboy fare, nothing we haven’t heard again and again, repeatedly since punkrock’s incorporation. If his recent AMA on Reddit is any indication, this should at least be interesting. Bound to have more resonance&depth than his band-of-Dads’ sappy post-hardcore horseshit.
As far as SX is concerned, before day’s end I’m bound to see Freedy Johnston, The Joy Formidable and end it all with a little nightcap east side.
It’s impossible to get anything done around here with the whole town exploding and shit happening in every abandoned bus and bank lobby in Hippie Town.
And besides all that craziness I can’t get over the fact that I submitted a poem  that I am not proud of to an Anthology . I guess that’s life, right Brother? Some of us shack up in the high rooms with a bottle of champagne and rue our Artists’ plight while the streets are filled with Gilligan’s Island rejects wearing wristbands and drinking from plastic cups and jamming to the Foos.
Meanwhile the rest of the world’s awash about the appointing of another kiddie feeler as the head of an ignorant, hateful and dead religion.  1.2 billion people can’t be wrong, can they?

Between trouble&the blues, how will we ever survive?  See you on the streets motherfucker.  Rock and Roll can never die.

We live in a post–authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history; and at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that still matters.
-Bruce Springsteen from his 2012 SXSW Keynote Address