The Coarse Grind: Part 10

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Whatever happens to you, you put it on a page, work it into a shape, cast it in a light.
—Denis Johnson, “Triumph Over the Grave”

Good Reader you are my sustenance. These long hours on the sinking throne have queered me to the point of estrangement. I am talking about writing, of course, or craft—but I can’t think of a lonelier one than writing, which for me is its great and lasting appeal. Self-mastery is this: espresso roast coarsely ground, cooling with honey beside me as I write in the stillness of an early winter afternoon.Outside the carport the world does what it does and beyond it the highway—they go where they go. Paradoxically, writing you affords me the high joy of Solitude. I’ll gladly pioneer within and sail the seas of Self with you beside. I’m reaching me through you and now that we’re together again I can relish this deathly quiet and the dreadfully uneventful way the November light seeps and oozes, oily and grey, across the floor to the south wall of this room. I know that out there is murder and war, poverty and worse and that out there is conquest and passion, high stakes and revelry—but I can opt out of it all punching these keys with my legs up in these end days of the New Century. In here my complaints are few and fact is we’re together again and isn’t that nice?

It’s incredibly selfish of me but I get wounded out there, and it’s gross and entitled. People to me should be fuel—they see and resound in me and propel and inspire me to the peaks worth getting to ain’t it though. Or, they can suck the living marrow out of every moment and feel like a course of radiation I need recovering from, innumerable hours on the loveseat or soaking in the piping-hot steaming water of a cinnamon salt bath. None of this is helping—just as the case for me caring about the world at large seems to get lost again and again, year after year. It’s hard to care. Too many of us don’t know the use of solitude and I can’t fault them, I mean, besides writing I barely know how to take care of myself but they can go on living, day to day, with little resistance or dysfunction and seem to be perfectly okay with Life even if they’re a terrible drain to be with and a minefield of confrontation to tiptoe through. Well I’ve gone off-rail, I didn’t want this to be about them, or me and how selfishly entitled I am, and incredibly privileged, to afford great swells of anomie and relish hours spent typing on a MacBook Pro in the final days of planet earth. Good Reader, of all this and more I am aware.

By the time I finally figured out that weekly was the correct publication schedule for the blog, I’d already had a default plan how to fuck off the other 6 days. I’ve written this column in fits and starts by which I mean I started out at The Coarse Grind like a meteor hurtling and filled editor Phil’s inbox with parts 1-4 immediately, and had drafts of others, plus the pieces I wrote for the PLOG in 2014. Now I crank ‘em out by luck which means I don’t know how but I do. Writers tell me this is writing but I don’t know. I set a goal of publishing a collection of poetry and prose every year and have come through, 4 years running. 2017’s release was 6-months late but I’ve a real life example of what not to do now—which is to say that if I don’t meet my artistic goals I am reduced at once to the twenty-something know-nothing jerkoff I was on the streets of my hometown, smoking spliffs living with my parents and plucking on an old bull fiddle to Tom Waits and John Frusciante songs. I figured out how to live my dreams but it’s only a deathly fear of failure. If I don’t make Art then I’m a failure. is a great motivator, better than an alarm clock and inspiration you cannot deny. The problem is not getting shit done but once it is.There’s an ax, wound back, in my mind, like some medieval device and it’s hanging there above me everywhere. This ax will come down if I don’t do what I say I’m going to. So you see, accountability too is barbed. If I announce my plans, on social media mostly, then it’s real and it’s real because I said it was and if it doesn’t happen then I’m a loser who doesn’t walk his talk and only a wage slave, slumming it in a garage apartment in the Live Music Capital of the World, afraid to make it in their world because I’m sensitive and living hurts my feelings. So you see, the problem with this kind of motivation is—once a task is completed I retire, slink back and slovenly regress into a consumer and a capitalist, watching YouTube in my Ugz bottoms with a bag of Trader Joe’s chocolate covered peanut butter-filled pretzels. In short (too late!), I set goals and I achieve them but they are the bare minimum. The blog was my answer to depression and sexual frustration but I only crank it out and get back to being depressed and sexually frustrated until it’s time to post again. Though I suppose that’s where this column comes in, different animal that it is.

My fifth collection of poetry and prose will be out this month. It’s my 4th through Yellow Lark Press. By the time I’ve released ten collections of poetry and prose there will be ninety-six Coarse Grinds and over six-hundred Going For The Throats. Of course it’s problematic qualifying with quantity, that’s the gist and thrust of this month’s Grind, but it looks pretty good adding it up like that. You can assume that’s 96 afternoons I’m not playing with myself and 624 sessions I’ve spent on The Work not being depressed or mired in lust and at death’s thrall. At that point, I could promptly tell Depression, after kicking it in the balls, it don’t own me, which is true on these afternoons investing in the inner life and crafting columns of black-ink words like turrets on a white page. The problem is these numbers gloss over the fact there are 356 afternoons in the year and depression could rightly and probably will say what the fuck have you done? (besides sleep 2.920 hours, and eat for 159, hang with the lady for 424 and read—well, I guess reading is part of this thing and taking in something other than what they’re shoving down on us, that’s beautiful and crafted and not online, should never be a waste of time . . .) This missive was meant to let you know I still got a monkey on my back and it can feel like a treeful, we’re all mad here but . . . I’m going to keep on pushing. I just wish I could harness the fire and drive of compulsion without failure’s crushing blows and a dearth of self-worth hanging in the balance. Until then let this be your beacon. I’ll be waiting for you to sound back. Life is hard and depression sucks. These demons may be why we create to begin with and writing beneath an ax is better than not writing at all.  

Part 9



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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