The Coarse Grind: Part 11: Year’s End Blues

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. . . thoughts inside my head get lost inside the haunted house . . .
—Ryan Adams, “My Wrecking Ball”

for Shanti

The Year of the Cock’s been beheaded. It’s run to ground after last throes running round the barnyard spurting blood up to the sky in a fountain. Chicken Little is dead and the sky has fallen down. The pundits yap and yammer, but underneath those tired tropes and yarns on the wire, and beneath the heads of steam and blather from the President and Congress, is the reality we’re all being fed. It’s all a line and will be until journalism prevails and otherwise propaganda and sloganeering. In far less ominous tones, the news is only entertainment. We’re the worst part and by we I mean you and me, Brother. Sister. We’ve taken to this complicit role stationary. The News and outrage culture is how we distract ourselves. The world is a cold and dark place where the rich get richer and the poor are stripped of healthcare or die in a border jail, and we watch it all from a screen.There are more perfect exemplars and warriors of true journalism than me out there to go at it—this diaphanous and quarreling mass, and pull out whatever spark of truth can be garnered from the New Century. Even when no truth is gleaned, the work of these great intelligences is to our benefit. What I mean is no answer is an answer and that’s heaps better than what the masters want us to hear. It’s all a line they’re feeding you while they’ve got one hand in your pocket and the other on the strings. I’ll leave politics to those who do it well and I’ll stick to the inner life, report on the strange and grisly turns I’ve been taking in the Night Kitchen and otherwise report on the findings of an intronaut, if you will—let you know I’m still struggling and the struggle is real.

I’ve lost someone dear to me but nobody died. She didn’t move away or find somebody else. The truth is, she lost me and it was to depression. This column and posts at Going For The Throat are approximately a highlight reel and I’ve no compunction about that, either. Victories should be celebrated. Especially for lifetime sufferers of a depressive disorder. Negative self talk can reach debilitating levels, can run round and rampant in the mind and make you ashamed and feel awful about the past while leaving you in no shape to do better. Depression is as real as a black hole—it's got no bottom and the quality of its darkness is in worldly tones.Everything seems real until it’s not. You think your feet are on the ground until you realize you’re falling. I’ve mastered nothing and gone nowhere if, at the end of the day, with five collections published, I can’t discern when laying on my love seat for five days is a bad choice, or even a choice at all, and anyway what I prefer over the sweet, laughing company of a woman I adore. Loss is our greatest teacher here and I’m writing you, today, December 30th, just before the New Year with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. There’s a world map, screwed to the wooden fence in the carport, I can see from here. I drilled in the bottom corners at an angle so the screws wouldn’t jut out into the neighbors yard and scrape the snouts of their mutts. The result is the thing is getting blown out, sagging and waterlogged and the world is slowly sliding into the mud of the drive—getting heavy in the rain and anyway heading for the ground.

I don’t do Best Ofs and it’s not because I’m too cool. I’ve had, in turns, my head in a hole between listening to new releases from DOG Power, Winter Dust, Eddy Dyer, Protomartyr and re-releases from The Sweetheart Parade and Archers of Loaf. I haven’t read enough to rightly consider myself an informed writer. Anxiety and depression won that round. I wrote about the same beat and track I always pander and putter and I’m thankful for the work. The bottom of this tentative-at-best offering of The Coarse Grind has dropped out. I feel the familiar racked and curling fingers of dread, pulling up at me from the gut, phantoms very real and eager to swarm and strangle out any good feeling I’ve found writing this and spending this time together. Whatever. I’ve written my way out of depression enough times to consider it a career and work towards that end in 2019. I’ve become the columnist I always wanted to be, however different this beat is though. Uncle Hank‘s out there like a punk rock Twain, stalking the territory with a camera and restless mind. Doc Thompson banged on the doors of high offices closed to the people and he got in with a keen attention to detail and the utilitarian wisdom of an outlaw. Papa just reigned in his own way, deep in the solitude of his radio nights typing and his genius was the simple yet profound line. At least that’s how it looks from here.

I’ll never know the affliction these men suffered and they’ll never know mine. We only have their highlight reel, as sturdy and useful and joyous a torch that it is. They’ve got their blues and I’ve got mine. I’m still breathing and better. I’m still putting out work into the world. To read back over these columns is to know at once how vital those beat dog hours were, clinching on the day labor/night writing circuit. How bleeding and cutthroat it had to be which of course is overwrought and romantic and perfect for the written word—point is, looking back and all we can glean is vainglory. We forget the pain and as well we should. But not completely if only because our pain won’t forget about us. It’ll rear and choke out what we thought was our life. It’ll kill the rooster and chop off his head. If I could sum up why I hate formulaic essay-writing it would be the closure it offers and that I need so bad. See, this is where I continue my beheaded Year of the Cock metaphor into a pithy homily about chicken soup or sucking the marrow out the bone. Truth is, this year, Art has won the round and I’m happy and proud about that and in great appreciation and awe of you for helping me make that happen. Something else has won though too, and that’s depression. It’s made its presence known, set me to rights, sure, but not before it took someone I hold very dear. This of course is for you, Good Reader, and to another year pulling our heads out the oven and for her—whom I’ll have to treasure in my own private and solitary way, alone.


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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