like a daydream or a fever…
My friend died of complications due to drug use last April. I flew home to bury him even though I’d just wrapped an East Coast jaunt with Philadelphia’s Psalmships. I was back home in Texas when I found out, up to my elbows in the 10 pages of the CORE grant application. How many of these deaths have I had in my life, the seemingly senseless kind, since I graduated High School almost thirty years ago? Too many to count. My friend was dealing with some darkness I didn’t know about, in ways that anyone from my hometown is familiar with. It seemed like there was an overdose every year after graduating high school, but we’re all getting on. You’d think that dying of an overdose would be unlikely at this point in our lives. These kinds of tragedies should’ve sorted themselves by now, shouldn’t they? A self-inflicted death is shocking no matter when, I just thought we were over that, commissioned and engaged with our own lives, lives we built from out of the grips of small town America. He’s gone now and it’s tragic and we’re all to follow him down to dust but even if we make it, we’ll all be turning our chips in after 12 summers pass.
The parroting and bluster of outrage culture by news media and the consumer, and even the inane and droll posting and reporting from our own lives, fame worship, enthrallment with the ego above all, War, murder, the post plunder of post-industrial America, any and every self-realization and unkink of our personalities, our families, our husbands and wives and children we’re giving this world to—none of it will make a damn when the world temperature climbs. Yet we go on. I do. I get in my car every day, drive to the shop with my serving whites hung on the suicide handles of a 2009 Honda Element. I bartend corporates, serve the rich and deliver up to thirty lunches to Hill Country. The older I get the more I understand that it’s all in service to myself. I’ve less illusions about that than ever. I’m in it, this hulking machine lurching ever forward to the days when the oxygen in the very air we breathe will be at a premium. I’m working for the man and that man is me as giant masses of ice buckle at the seams in the warming winters and the sun burns on above us closer than it’s ever been before. I’m not sure what I’ll do with myself this summer or how I could ever live down doing six thousand miles to the southern tip of the Eastern Bloc and back last year. I know I’ll have to get my shit together, whatever that means, but it will no doubt involve capitalism and reprising my role as a wage earner and tax payer to the sinking Empire of America but don’t too wise—once it’s gone it won’t matter. If I’ve got any salt left I’ll take it back overseas, work just as hard but live well with the Dutch or as an English teacher in Vietnam, upping my blues harp playing and Yoga practice as 12 summers pass.
Morose, eh Good Reader? Cynicism is a copout and it’s all the rage. Between laziness and futility what’s the difference? If there’s fighting in the street and you get the call, will you answer? Would you have stood down the armed guard at Kent State? Take a firehose to the face, police dogs, tear gas—or would you do it their way? Would you knock on doors and canvas the dying towns in the too-hot spring? Will you organize and get on the horn and get heard? There may be no difference between cynicism and laziness except this—the cynic knows it’ll come to no end so he’s paralyzed. The lazy doesn’t care if it will but he’s just as immobile and anyway it won’t matter by the time 12 summers pass.
JIM TRAINER’S POEM OF THE WEEK
JIM TRAINER’S LATEST COLLECTION OF POETRY AND PROSE
//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
[…] a headache. DJ Diane’s voice soothes me, but my comforts are a diminishing return as the global temperature climbs and the world mourns a monument to the biggest pedophile ring in modern history. Now […]
[…] THE COARSE GRIND AT INTO THE VOID […]
[…] THE COARSE GRIND AT INTO THE VOID […]