The Coarse Grind: Part 5

In the years before my death I was an antichrist . . .
– KJV

 It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids.
– HST

Well. The months have blown by, in turns sweet and savage, and the fate of The Coarse Grind depends on bringing you up to speed, Good Reader. I lost the job that made writing an impossibility and I found other work. The state awarded me Unemployment Benefits and I really took to writing then. I even got back into the journalism business. Take To The Territory hit the stands and then I hit the road. A week before I left, the state took my benefits back and now say I owe them $1,300. My month on the dole was incredible. I was steeped in the work and joyfully volleyed between this column, 9-or-so hundred words bi-weekly for The Flake News, at least 600 every week at Going For The Throat, and letters, of course, still on my iPad or stuffed into stamped envelopes in my road bag and ready to send. Wisdom is the marrow of life, it’s why we endure any number and kind of thorny to-do and fuckaround—we come through by wearing through, with pearls or cannonballs of wisdom and we know we’ll survive or die though nothing much will matter if we do. Not our striving, not our passion and certainly nothing we’ve learned will matter when we meet the dust. Until then, the wisdom is the why ain’t it though. Why you’ve blessed us at Into The Void and The Coarse Grind. You gave us the number one commodity under the sun—your time. And I won’t forget it. Readers like Michelle, who found my and James Kelman’s words precisely when she needed them most. That is Art’s true utility and it’s better than blood. All said the only Wisdom I can offer from the months that’ve passed since we last spoke is that I got fired and it was one of the luckiest goddamn days of my life.

I suppose my benefits disappearing as quickly as they appeared should mean that I’m yours again. I’m at the mercy of the grind and wondering how my Art will survive and I can manage to keep the muse by my side while I’m scraping paint off floors and serving Creole brunch in the Bywater. Another benefit of getting off the dole is the fact I can offer you full disclosure, which is all I’ve ever trucked, at Going For The Throat and otherwise. I always want to give you the real because their love is cursory and the world is flim-flam and the dream of a democratized media has wafted like a fart in the wind. The truth is simultaneously nowhere to be found and exactly what you want it to be. Dylan Roof found all the reason he needed to murder nine in cold on the Internet, and 63 million people continuously find a way to say they’re not racist while remaining completely racist. The Arab Spring has cooled down and it’s getting harder to be poor anywhere in the world. American hegemony and disaster capitalism should roll on through and put the pincers on the New Century. Anything triumphant about the human spirit will be eclipsed. It’s too late for punk rock and it’s too late to pretend. We’ve seen the wires and the magician’s drunk. They kill you out on the street and they kill you in school.

What does all this have to do with me and you and The Coarse Grind? The end of the world as we know it is the through-line, a thread of doom that runs from these cherished hours penning this column and hated days working for the man to you and your plight doing the same. The challenge of creation is a question of sustenance. My body is breaking down and my time ain’t long. I’m sore and unemployed and the exploitative employer’s market we been trapped in since the Great Recession has only gotten worse as the screws of authoritarianism more tightly turn. If I don’t find the right work I’ll die miserable like so many generations of Trainer men have, but at the end of the day I’ll still be writing it down—coming through with 6-900 words everywhere from a garage apartment in Wilshire Wood to CC’s in Mid City to a Brussels hotel room or Eco village outside Sofia.

I didn’t realize that not knowing what to write about, and not having a job or income, would be such a boon. Writing this has helped me realize some things. That still works at least. I still have my faculties. The long hours on the sinking throne can still yield some growth into Wisdom. Hard times here and everywhere have brought us close, Good Reader. They’ve brought us here and as grisly and heinous as this moment in time can be, it’s better than any pie-in-the-sky or fantasy life anywhere else. You bet. I’ll see you on the streets motherfucker. It’s where we’re at our most vulnerable and our hearts are pumping blood. As jaded and worn down and over the Facebook cognoscenti as I am, and as inured with world politic and disgusted and terrified as I can get by the Americans, I still believe in us. As long as we are writing it down our story is being told.The songs of the street will be ours when we walk ’em. Our love will be greater staring this 21st Century shitshow down. If they loot us and break us and they swoop in to usurp us then we’ll report on that. Run and tell that homeboy. He who is lost to this world is free to conquer one of his own.They can have their world but this media is ours. If the kids are united they shall not be divided.

Keep in touch.

Ab irato,

Your Writer,

Jim Trainer

Please visit jimtrainer.net for a hand-printed and perfectly bound copy of Take To The Territory, Trainer’s latest collection of poetry, out now through Yellow Lark Press.

• Author Details

Jim Trainer Author

Jim Trainer’s The Coarse Grind, a column on the creative life, has been published monthly at Into the Void. Jim was curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance—and publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, per year through Yellow Lark Press. “KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM” is his 7th.

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