The Coarse Grind: Part 33: A Rat by the Tail&The War of Work in America

by Jim Trainer

It won’t be hard to help, out there in America.
—Author’s Afterword, Keep Bleeding in the Anno Finem: 10 Years at Going for the Throat

Well. ‘Tis I, your grizzled pilgrim and acolyte of Personal Journalism, living my best American life—unemployed and shut in, without healthcare and sick. None of that matters more than Art to me but now the book is done and I’m alone. It’s quiet tonight on Castle Hill but the rain is depressing me and I hate the lull and the thoughts born of it.

Eight readers and I culled 62 posts from the over 640 written since November 2010 at Going for the Throat. We curated and line-edited a 139-page book of prose and Keep Bleeding in the Anno Finem is in the can. I’m happy with the collection. It’s true to form. In turns crude, funny, iconoclastic, and full of pain. Even better it’s bottom-heavy and posts from ’19/20 dominate the collection. Your new stuff is always your best stuff it’s true but also—I’m a better person now. Not just from 10 years of growth, hairy and live on the World Wide Web. But from the reflection that came from hashing the thing together and anyway hard at work doing what I want to. Doing what you want to is a hard dollar in the Year of the Rat, but presales have so far paid for 2/3 of its publication. That’s a nice conversation starter with your parents or your old Boss, if you talk to them, but I don’t.

I wrote my way through and now I am here, with nothing on the dais except watching my bank account and talking on the phone. The fact that I got fired for writing the kind of blogs that appear in Keep Bleeding doesn’t make me proud or even feel better about writing. I feel better while writing and so I could be thankful for my termination if I wasn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul while I wait for the mail. Besides, as much as I love the sport of it, 10 years worth of blogs would be horrible if all I’d done were shit impressions of Hunter S. Thompson.

I was 2 drafts and 8 days behind when I suddenly and for reasons unclear felt like a sellout. Why should I? Dead broke and sick isn’t selling out, is it?! When you’re as real as you are your street cred is never in question. And when you’re a practitioner of Personal Journalism you just write about feeling like a failure and admit you think about hanging from the ceiling as often as most people think about Netflix shows. Suicidal ideation isn’t real, dummy, but it’s a great excuse to get rid of the most loathsome of authority and too-honest poets on your staff. Which isn’t to say I didn’t do a lot of good at my last job. I worked at the street level, helping folks build resumes and handing out free day passes for Cap Metro and ask you—how could blogging get any better than that? I felt like a sellout because I thought I’d try and pass my Work off as literature and as such adhered to the Chicago Manual of Style.

Eventually I went for flow so the collection is a bastard of street poetry and reportage formatted into paragraphs, and all the while trying my best to see the narrator as a hero. That’s not so easy when a lot of what I wrote about was suffering depression and being misunderstood. All the more when that same writing cleaved me from a cubicle and thrust me out into the wild. I stand by my Work, and the collection, its foreword and afterword and publisher’s note alone are some of my proudest writing. It wasn’t just turn-of-phrase though we both know it would have to flow—the best thing about these additions to Keep Bleeding is they are true.

The truth is a little higher than anger and maybe neck and neck with disappointment and the night is long when you don’t have to wake up in the morning. This Work is everything I wanted and everything I wanted it to be, and I’m only left feeling like I should’ve wanted more. If I hadn’t have just wrote my way through I might’ve affected greater change. The fact that my writing got me fired was a dumb coincidence and a little bit of luck coupled with a lot of ignorance that power-without-authority only banked on in the Year of the Rat. I’m no Martin Luther, I just got caught unaware but the truth is that while engaging you your enemy is blind. Your enemy is blind to their own enemy and without luck anyone can get caught unaware. Oh well. I’m not feeling vindictive but it’s only Tuesday and I’d be mad if I wasn’t sick and waiting for my unemployment check.

I sold a pair of Nearfields to Little Brother and once this thing is wrapped, I’ll live off of 5 years of book sales. This could ring as victory and it probably does but that only buys me a month at most. The trouble isn’t that I spent close to 3 weeks working on Keep Bleeding from dusk till dawn. Neither was it that through the creation of this collection I’ve seen my hero and he wasn’t that great or heroic at best.  At worst I used writing as my medication and magic and it got me through and will continue to, one $742 per 14-day window at a time. It’d be simple to corroborate with you of my own particular bad brush with power-without-authority and easy to call out the inept and slavishly corrupt. See that’s where I went wrong for the last 10 years because while I was taking shots at the man, he was bankrupting us and watching us die.  

MAY THE YEAR OF THE OX BRING YOU GREAT FORTUNE AND HAPPINESS

AVAILABLE FOR PRESALE AT 20% OFF at JIMTRAINER.NETwith promo code “Die laughing.

 

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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4 Comments

  1. All brushes with power-without-authority wear down the brush bristles. So many of us have felt the trauma of writing about the pain and suffering produced by an indifferent society. Majoritarian worlds piloted by individualism over collectivism, spectacle over material reality, profit over people, planet, and peace. The pandemic shows us this with the death and suffering left in its wake. The masses keep bleeding, keep sacrificing. One could do much worse than use writing as medication and magic.

    • My man. Your comment means the world to me. Trauma, individualism and pain and suffering are another day at the Office ain’t it. Thank you for reading, Renoir, and for your kind words.

  2. Hi, Jim. I appreciate reading your post, which was heartfelt, honest, and honed into the reality of everyday life under mainstream naturalized neoliberalism. Thanks for staying “real.”

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