I only know I ain’t gonna go back . . .
—Cory Branan
45. It’s a nice number. Mystically stacked if my rudimentary understanding of numerology is correct. A strong number. Even and odd. 4 and 5, added together equals 9 and 9 is a powerful number. 9 wants to be 10 and it’s this tension, this potential is where its power lies. I’m through the tunnel Good Reader. I’ve come to understand that the age of 45 affords me a store of wisdom, and I still have my health. Shitting’s hard. It’s been hard to let go. Especially without a cigarette which is how I routinely let go for the 20 years or so before I quit. I can’t fuck or maybe I don’t want to. Another great tension reliever I’ve forgone for the betterment of my health and/or well being and on most days I can’t call it though perhaps getting better is this. It’s hard and without much payoff other than the fact I don’t feel weak or addicted anymore. I’m certainly free of a specific kind of self-loathing that comes with the failure to quit smoking cigarettes. Also, I’m free of the colossal amount of bullshit I perpetrated or put up with just to get laid. In a nut that’s what this wisdom is, Good Reader. At 45 I’m not celebrating the life but glad I got one. It’s not free or perfect and it doesn’t feel as good as a bourbon at sunrise, cigarillos in the shade and anyway the complete and utter devastation that comes from fucking within an inch of your life, drenched in sweat and dead under her slow and spinning fan.
The life I’m living now is pretty close to what I wanted though I want more. It’s not celebratory, this ain’t the rage. I don’t feel valiant or heroic or that I’m striving and fighting every single day. Good thing too—that was exhausting. I’m probably living a more authentic life but saying that discounts everything I’ve done to get me here. To put it plain I thought I was living back then, and I was, but I bore that life out and discovered I wasn’t being real at all. Doesn’t mean I wasn’t engrossed or that I didn’t try, just that nothing I tried in that old life helped me deal with the person I am right now, sitting here, warts and all with depression shaking through every stroke and endeavor. The life I’m living now is a wearing through. I’m not striking out. I’m only waiting for whatever’s got me in its grips to let go. I’m not running out to escape myself. I’m right here and taken by the swell. I’m in my depression. I’m dealing with who I am and watching as the day blows by. The wisdom of 45 is knowing I’ve wasted so much time. Whether I was drinking myself out of being depressed or not, the disease got the best of me. It took my time and now, sober, its theft is in plain sight. I’m dealing with depression but that’s all I’m doing. I’m not doing anything about it but I’m poised to.
Poised to is miles down the road closer than drinking, being an alcoholic and otherwise leaning on a crutch and never walking on my own. I can’t demonize alcohol. Smoking cigarettes has its own channel on the broadcast day of my mind. What I can say no to is my need for an escape being pandered to and commodified. The alcohol and tobacco industries trade in the same thing that Facebook and the news media do. It’s all an escape and a distraction but even these aren’t in their own right the trouble or the problem. The problem isn’t escape, it’s coming back. Put it to you this way—how uncomfortable are you with yourself? Because Good Reader your self is the captain. Who you are, in essence, is what you were born into and what you’ve done with it. It’s your past, informing your future and in my experience, it’s pain that is the motivator. Pain informs. Pain is the map.
What I’ve learned from 5 years being sober is what I always knew: the pain of life is my own. We’re all in pain and that will save us but life isn’t a meme. You’ve got to live in your own pain. For whatever reason being trapped here always gave me angst and it was this angst I had to learn to use to get me through. I’m not speaking to the well adjusted. If you’ve got what it takes then have at it. We know that life will deal its blows regardless. I know you’ll suffer in your own way even if it looks like you’ve got it made. I’m speaking to those of us afflicted though, with greatness and tragedy. Both traits will make life feel impossible. There’s a great deal of psychic fencing to break through. You’ve got to break from the pack and get out into the wild and lonely are the free.
Being misunderstood can fuel a life in the Arts. But it can make you feel strange and isolated. That’s what being 45 is. At 45, I know I’m unrivaled. Saving me from sounding completely self-absorbed is that even though I’m unrivaled, the only 45-year-old spoken-word artist and poet with 6 self-published collections on a mission to double-down on a solo life in the Arts (that I know anyway), I’m also the only one here with my pain and experience, the particular and perverse kinks and dark peccadilloes that made me suffer and continue to when I think about the fact I made you suffer too. When I say I’m unrivaled I mean it truly and I mean all my successes, my triumphs and all my big fat fucking wastes of days and nights too, Good Reader, behind a screen and supine in the big chair, binging on infotainment and vanity technologies to no other end but to kill time and make it go away. By the way, these are the same bad habits that motivated me to drink, smoke, fuck and otherwise annihilate precious and priceless nights and weekends of my youth when I could’ve been building this thing. This thing is a dream I’ve had for my whole life to be media. Maybe it’s not so much a dream as a compulsion to the charge of being broadcast, across mediums, as a communicator or writer, singer, radio DJ, poet, columnist and personal journalist.
Writing here, and at Going For The Throat, is what I’ve always wanted and if not thrilling (which it mostly always is), it makes things right in my world. It unkinks and resets the frame and gives me a handle on which to grab ahold and otherwise hoist or thrust through these moments of my life I’ve been bestowed. An uncountable and diminishing stack of late mornings and afternoons. Only so many evenings, a fact that freezes me with fear and could potentially and paradoxically have me wasting another one in paralysis, inactive and inert. I want to go deeper and do it more. By it I mean the Arts and when it comes to the Arts I’m ready for 45 more. There’s not much hope of me finding and even accepting a life of togetherness with someone, a partner or family. I’m out here. Strange and isolated. All I want is all I ever wanted but somehow I let it get away from me. Depression got away with it tell you truth and it keeps getting away with it, too. Depression is everywhere like a den of snakes snatching bites off the apple of my lifetime. Put it to you plain, all I want is to sing in a post-rock band and climb up the rafters over the crowd at the end of a 80’ XLR, sit at the board under the ON AIR sign, broadcast and tell it and be heard, write it here and at GFtT and to run, cut, print and press 5 more collections of my own work and dozens of other writers I admire more, hit the road and come to your town, tap the mic beneath the hot lights and say . . . I’m Jim Trainer and this is my work.
2031, JIM TRAINER’S SIXTH FULL-LENGTH COLLECTION OF POETRY, IS AVAILABLE NOW THROUGH YELLOW LARK PRESS.
[…] …At 45 I’m not celebrating the life but glad I got one. It’s not free or perfect and it doesn’t feel as good as a bourbon at sunrise, cigarillos in the shade and anyway the complete and utter devastation that comes from fucking within an inch of your life, drenched in sweat and dead under her slow and spinning fan…continue reading at Into The Void. […]
[…] …At 45 I’m not celebrating the life but glad I got one. It’s not free or perfect and it doesn’t feel as good as a bourbon at sunrise, cigarillos in the shade and anyway the complete and utter devastation that comes from fucking within an inch of your life, drenched in sweat and dead under her slow and spinning fan…continue reading at Into The Void […]