The Coarse Grind: Part 19: Ab Irato

On one of my first days in the new apartment uptown I got in a quibble with my neighbor.  I don’t think I’ve used the word “quibble” my whole life but it’s fitting when mincing words with a twenty-something, Lexus-driving twat who likes to listen to music loud.  Who doesn’t, sure; but for some of us music is the medicine—we take it in doses and we feel better. For others it’s in the background constantly, a soundtrack to their neurosis and a barrage of bass for the renting sap on the other side of the wall.  I asked if we could come to an agreement about the noise level and the response was that I had moved into an apartment complex, uptown, and if I’d hoped for a “monastic existence” living here I’d do well to adjust my expectations. Long story short we had talked about sharing internet but we don’t talk anymore.  Far as I can tell my neighbor is avoiding me which is almost as good as not having a neighbor at all. It’s quiet here, mostly, but I’ve no WiFi and I’m drafting this in TextEdit and it feels as hopeless as you can imagine. I’ve become a connection junkie and I’m hooked. Simply typing into a doc, offline, is running headlong into a wall of dread I’ve tried to avoid by living a life in the Arts—even if I’m feeling a little better this many words in.  Yep I’ve made purchase and barring when the twat wakes up to trash country music next door, I’m good and on point and confronting the loneliness of a Writer without distraction. My phone is beside me but I’ve turned it face down. I’ve got coffee, dark roast of course, honey-sweet and coarsely ground. My problems are few living in Paradise but the truth is I’ve one great and grave trouble trumping them all. The fly in the ointment and elephant in the room is depression Good Reader and it’s a real mother. 

Depression dips life in tar. It makes it hard to even pick something up off the floor. I’ve a steady two-time rule, that is—if I have to try something more than twice I won’t do it.  This goes for everything from trying to hang my serving blacks to attempting to adjust my healthcare premiums.  Depression makes me feel like I failed before I even try so when the physical world resists I give up and live with the pile of dirty laundry in the middle of my bedroom floor, and without healthcare, rather than untangle my shirt and tie or leave another message with the operator and hope she calls me back.  I can’t lie, the black torpor’s been with me and hanging heavy ever since I left the longest and most cush gig I ever had as a live-in caregiver. All my needs were met there Good Reader and all my bills were paid. When I quit I sunk right back into the same shark shallows I was wading in when I got the job—I had to make a living somehow but the only thing I’d done in my life up to that point was bartend and shuck and jive.  I’ll spare you the grislies but hip you to the fact that my anxieties are now at full roar, pocking my sleep and fucking up my bowels. I am no doubt living down some gnarly PTSD from being homeless in my hometown, some twenty or so years ago and when I first confronted what I call The Problem. The Problem is how do I make it in a world I care nothing about? How do I contribute to a cause that isn’t my own? I knew I’d be a writer and I knew I’d play punk rock music.  But how would I pay the bills? I temporarily solved the problem by not paying bills at all but gave in, over time, and ceded to things like rent and car insurance and crowns on root canals. I did it the hardway and because sleeping in the park with an abscessed molar in the dead of winter is as traumatic as you can imagine. I never lived it down and I still haven’t found a way to care or want to contribute to this system we’re all locked into and suffering.  

I’m at a loss Good Reader and there’s a real and dire possibility I’ve lived my life in vain.  I suffered fools, tyrannical catering company owners and their young tattooed minions in the triple-digit heat, serving the rich Texas whiskey and pomegranate margaritas for $15 an hour.  I shucked luggage, pushed cambros and coolers in the hail and rain and did it all with a veiled hostility and unassuming smile that took more from me than any amount of lifting and lugging, scraping or pour.  I’ve been everyone’s everything with irritable bowels, stood in steel-toed boots for hours and drove copper into the dead Waco dust. I did it to support the real work but it’s got the best of me now and I can’t type or write poetry except in small byte-size doses, cute message-in-a-bottle verse that’s supposed to validate me as a poet and writer but only makes me feel phony and vain.  The 2 letters a week I vowed to send out is more like 6 every 6 weeks and over the course of a couple days. I tell folks, in these missives, I say If you’re reading this I made it, no need to send the EMTs.  I got this letter off so you know I haven’t hanged myself from the high ceilings of this $990 a month apartment uptown.  I fit in Art when I can, my cash and carry Pirate’s schedule is impossible to keep up with or maintain and leaves little to no room for AA meetings or Yoga class when I swing from 12 hours a week to 40 in 4 days.  I suppose the fact that the real work gets done at all is a victory but it’s a shallow one Good Reader and without release or physical exercise I’m cagey, vitriolic and dry drunk on white-hot anger, resentment and blue woe.  You bet I’m not happy even if knowing it’s the life I chose.  

Twenty years ago I got hired on as a laborer for $8 an hour in the suburbs of southeastern PA.  None of the guys on the job showed or offered me anything. They scoffed at me stuffing fiberglass into my Doc Marten’s to keep my feet from freezing and fired me when they found out I slept in the park.  I suppose this is better now with the AC on and bacon in the pan. I suffer like I always did onsite, and I take what they give around the clock in the heat and wind and rain. I make it back home here and face my own blues.  I festoon a column of these words and speak with a voice that took me a lifetime to earn. I can write a column on my own terms and in my own way and do so with authority—and send it out to up to a thousand readers every month.  They tell me I’m a writer and I’ll never get tired of hearing that, especially when they put the word great in front of it.  I’m not talking them down nor could I even try to comprehend how this column and my work actually helps them make way on their own barbed and savage road.  I can only get this off, this morning, before I pick up and iron my serving blacks and head out to the sticks in my Japanese car.  I can imagine what awaits me there and it’ll be even more insulting than the pay. The hard truth is my boss today will have a difficult time convincing me to care about being a wage slave and I’ll live down another shift and supposed to believe I’m lucky somehow.  I’ll make it home and flick on the lamp at the machine, turn on the typewriter and hear it hum—but be too worn down and full of hate to write a single line.

Ab irato,
Trainer

In 11 years global temperatures will reach catastrophic level.  Jim Trainer will release 2031 this December. Forty-six poetic ruminations on the end of the world through Yellow Lark Press.  Also from Yellow Lark Press, No Comebacks by Portland poet Will Stenberg. A poetic homage for each champion of American boxing, out this December through Yellow Lark Press. 

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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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