Jim Trainer

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.

The Coarse Grind: Part 40: Last Request From The Office Of Jim Trainer

If you would like to know the fastest, simplest, and most certain way to get as many customers as possible using Facebook Ads…then this will be the most exciting message you’ll ever read.
—KING KONG, “the most ruthlessly effective platform for rapidly scaling businesses on planet earth.”

Punk’s not dead, it just sucks now.
—Graffiti in the Men’s Room at the 9:30 Club

Go suck Abbott’s dick, you fascist loser.
—Editor Phil

How’s your epoch? If you’re reading me chances are you know enough about nuance to eschew extremism and leave the hyperbole to the pitch and big sell of platforms and influencers. The Information Age is dead, curation is now king and even Bill Gates can’t read this article without having to claw through a click jungle and be mined. The Coarse Grind is dead, too, and Into the Void, but what we stood for will never die. Writers are like the gang of hoboes at the end of Fahrenheit 454, down by the railroad tracks and walking on with a novel in their head and canned goods in their sack. What’s more, what’s happening virtually ain’t happening in the real world, at least it shouldn’t be, and we ought to take back this media and better—give ‘em something to report on. See you on the streets, motherfucker? Now more than ever. I am sick of being sick, with a 2-pack habit and a motel tan, entertaining myself with unfiltered opinion and worst of all suspended in the ever-present of the internet, where photos from 5 years ago are a click away from everything I’m reading and “experiencing” right now. There is no present without a past, having a digital record of every moment of our lives means that time as we know it isn’t really passing. Nothing dies so nothing can live. There’s a cost to living and there should be. Death is the motivation of any writer or performer worth his salt. Doing it for chicks and fame yields the kind of notoriety you can get from King Kong and a pair of tits on Instagram. I’m urging you to take to the territory, Reader, whether you want to or not. Neuroticism is all the rage and we’ve got to rattle our chains. Unless you’re happy being pasty, with a downsloping libido and Lexapro script bumping Spotify hits through a cigar box-sized Bluetooth speaker.  

When I got off the road in ‘00, I was offered a residency at a tiny bar above an Ethiopian Restaurant in West Philly. I told the barmaid I’d have to be paid in whiskey and there could be no time-limit on how long I spoke. Those 8 months reading at Upstairs At Abyssinia were like what Brian Eno said about the Velvet Underground—“[they] didn’t sell many records, but everyone who bought one went out and started a band.” Readers and artists featured at that sweaty series went on to Portland and Japan. We worked in radio and publishing everywhere from Antigua to Hong Kong. But even the result of our efforts at the end of the American Century aren’t why. We did work then and it inspired us to keep working. Poetry got drunk those nights and sobered up for decades after. The RNC came to Philly that fall and a small and piggish man sunk us into forever wars after winning a cooked election. Did we make a difference, reading into a guitar amp and banging on the table in a 1-bedroom apartment converted into a bar, 5 blocks west and 7 blocks south from where protestors were raided and unlawfully detained in busses for nothing more than building W. puppets and blood red-spattered protest signs? Don’t know but we raged and came and told it and laughed about drinking Gin&Catatonics, having sex in the ladies room—and waited all week long for Sunday night church with Yours Truly, incanting and orating and passing the mic to You.

This isn’t about the past and there is no future. I wanna see you, Reader, feel you and hear your words, experience the body of you far and away from where the mind of some mogul or generating platform dictates culture and has the unmitigated balls to tell us who we are. Truth is I’d wanted for a bloody revolution for most of my adult life. I still do on most days but what happened on January 6 was not it. Whether you like it or not, Trump was the punkrock candidate and whether you see it or not punkrock as we know it has passed. Tattoos on cops should tell you everything you need to know about the underground and it ain’t just punk either. In the years since Nevermind, technology leapt and the culture fell.  Devices and the medium are so interwoven and, more than the thread, have become the event. I don’t want to be indoors anymore, Reader. I want to see the seas burn and fall in line running Nazis right out of town. Mostly I wanna hear them tell it because the kind of shit they’re running with deserves a punch to the throat. Come. Meet me. It’s one of our last summers here together and I want to fight and fall in love. They can’t take the streets, at least not every one of them at the same time, and they’ll never take our voice. Let’s rant and run and yell awhile. The bad news is it’s over but you got to figure now we’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s pitch a tent on Ted Cruz’s lawn. Let’s get on the air! The summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street. There is no better time to come together and kick out the jams than the end of the world.

Vox populi vox dei,
Trainer
AUSTIN TX

 

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THE COARSE GRIND’S NOT DEAD

The Coarse Grind: Part 39: For The Road

That corrupt motherfucker.
—President Barrack Obama

I believe this was actually part of the plan, as crazy as that sounds.
—QAnon John

..there’s no cure for exile except to love 
every city as you would your own…
André Naffis-Sahely

The crowning glory of the writing life is that by recording the moment you can reflect, and look back, and see how far you’ve come.  You take your glories in the Final Century, even if this week’s victory is a decrease in screen time.  We’ve caught up with the medium, and now we move and cycle through our thoughts and reactions like rats at a screen.  My specialist recommends a sun bath, 15 minutes on each side.  He said the sun actually shines through your blood and cleanses it some.  Think about that next time you’re on a bad Facebook jag or stuck in a long thread on Twitter proving your point and taking you nowhere. In a contest of fools just surrender.  Idiots might rule but the powers that be curate it.

In the 38 columns I’ve penned at Into The Void, I haven’t used the term “fake news” once.  Because a romantic nihilist like me knows—everything is fake, and not just the news but the faces on all the players, their politic and any hard stance as a “sovereign being.”  The only thing that’s real is death, comrade, and it’s all too real everywhere except where we sit, safe in our opinions and bathrobes sipping tea.  Politics take on a whole other meaning in Palestine but the narrative these American nutters run with is “don’t trust the government,” which of course was the narrative provided by the government.  What I mean to say is Steven Crowder can go fuck himself but I’d be fucked if I tried to engage him and his people, especially while real people really die at the hands of a U.S. client state in the Middle East.  The New York Hardcore scene asserts that if Black Lives Matter they can throw a party for 3,000 of their closest, mask-free friends.  Nutters won’t get vaxxed and they don’t believe in the ‘rona anyway, so what do they believe?  It would take a Doctorate in Behavioral Health to sort it but you don’t have to be Danielle Cole to realize it’s a fool’s errand trying to reason with a blind contrarian who supports a government that would make it impossible for punkrock and the survival of any independent Artist in this country.  Fuck them and free Palestine, and praise be you’ve found some wiggle room in the bloody torpor of the Last Decade.  I feel better than the last time we visited but it’s touch and go and I’m feeling good I’m gonna run with it.

The Coarse Grind is dead.  Into The Void is pulling stakes.  I’ve been crushed with a middle-aged blues and find no comfort in the digital mediums I once thrived in.  It got strange posting these screeds and columns right next to a pair of tits and any confessional look-at-me rogue posting on the freest media known to man.  We could publish and tell it and we’d have a voice but all we’ve done is repeat the lie and slander.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of it.  Maybe not the lie but braggadocio, sure, and slander all but kept the lights on at Going For the Throat for a decade.  The anger got me sick but by then I’d been consuming enough of the overly-personalized narrative and nutter discourse that I’d have split anyway.  Personally I wondered what kind of writer I was, really, if all I’ve done is shoot from the hip and spout off angrily like everybody else.  Felt like the scalpel-eye of David Rakoff was looking down on me, telling me it was too easy; or maybe Truman Capote was dismissing me the way he did Saint Jack when he flippantly quipped “that’s not writing, it’s typing.”  I’ve had some time to think about it, Reader, and my thoughts found a true north where they often do, in the profound example of Henry Rollins.  Uncle Hank just had to get it out.  Writing for him was an act and a performance of sorts.  Performance, too, for Rollins was the great transmogrifier and change agent he needed to feel better.  He did it to feel better and despite my complaint about fuckface nutters and sometimes feeling like I’m only yelling into the void, writing always makes me feel better.  There’s a poetry to our decline and besides—death and graft and greed are hard tropes to live down as a personal journalist in the Final Century.

What the fuck have I gotten myself into, eh Reader?  I’m at 755 words but only stewed a horrible broth of self and general loathing, regret, dread and a weak attempt at prescribing my own artist’s code. These have been the dark thoughts that have prompted my reprieve from posting every week, and now even from this column.  But without the Work I am nothing.  I haven’t been writing, except for poetry and it’s all about lost love and suicide.  I suppose I found my stride once I took all judgement off my work and no longer looked at it as a product, or writing as a noun, and realized it’s just what I do.  I put it in a frame and feel better, proud even, once the fucker is nailed to the wall.  My name is Jim Trainer and I’m a writer.  I self-publish, too, if that matters and I think it does.  Books are as important as anything real is in the post-truth age.  I could talk about publishing, at a show or party maybe, and I could talk about writing (the verb) all day.  I’m not Rakoff, or Thompson, or even Henry Rollins.  But I write like they did, to get it out and feel better.  When it hits you, Reader, well that’s gravy.  I can’t thank you enough for entertaining my rage and filigree for the last 3 years at The Coarse Grind.  The real hero is Editor Phil ain’t it, for putting me on and reading me, giving me ink and the space to work out and jam that bugger, pen it til it bleeds and then cauterize and end it, snap and pat.

Back in 2005, I was living in a 2-bedroom house on Jeweler’s Row in Philadelphia.  When I heard Hunter Thompson died I came home but the place was dark.  The roomies had moved out and the bannisters tore from their moorings.  Wall to wall the floor was covered in sticky stale beer and freon, and the CO2 of expired fire extinguishers.  The furniture was gone but in the kitchen was a keg of beer in a roughneck, so I poured a tall one and lit a Gauloise.  I read the Rolling Stone tribute to Hunter, cover to cover, by a stove light drinking flat Yuengling in a cold, empty house.  It was 2005, which looks culturally high as a mountain from here ain’t it.  I wasn’t drinking to get drunk but who knows why I ever drank.  I didn’t need it to get fucked up.  Things were about to get really fucked up and stay that way.  I didn’t need to get drunk.  I was high on the language and rage that man wrote with, his music and wisdom, his street-talking panache and humor.  It was rock and roll.  His work went for your throat until you could take it all into the brain pan, then he let go of the tourniquet and as the blood flowed back up to your head you could only marvel at how horrible and funny and doomed we all are.  It was poetry, it was alive and it rose from where he lay on his kitchen floor, dead from a self-inflicted shotgun blast to the head in Woody Creek.  It reached me as the bloody tide of history rose and this country sunk into forever wars, rank jingoism and corporate culture.  It was dark then.  It’s darker now.  I don’t suppose Thompson made a difference, or Rollins or Rakoff.  I’ve no illusions about the crouching specter of our doom, but they helped me.  They wrote, as I have.  My name is Jim Trainer and this has been my work.  Thank you.

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The Coarse Grind: Part 38: It’s Too Late to Wish I’d Been Stronger

My sky’s getting far,
my ground’s gettin’ close
My self goin’ crazy,
the way that it does…
Townes Van Zandt

Middle age is a motherfucker. All you haven’t done won’t inspire you anymore, as it’s slowly relegated to the dark pile of all you won’t do either. I wasted my youth in the thrall of unimportant things. I don’t believe most of the dumb shit I did then, but these days I fuck off the morning and wait for the night to pass. Maybe I’m depressed. Oh Reader, let me tell you I am depressed. I’m unemployed. I’m not making the best of my time, perhaps I’m still in denial that I’m gonna die, but one thing is for sure and that is I only have so many years left. I’m wise. I don’t make the same mistakes. I move efficiently now and take it inside but I’ve never mastered myself. I’m nowhere near where I thought I’d be if closer than I’ve ever been. I’m caught between knowing I don’t do enough and never taking credit for the work that I do. I fire off at deadline and slink back and slough off. The sun beads down the darkening blue and I’m horizontal because I’m too anxious to work. Ironically I’m too preoccupied by the things I want to do to actually make strides towards them. The steps I am taking and the small victories I clock won’t pass muster with the slavedriver in me. Does any of this make sense? It does to me. Perhaps it’d be better to illustrate it with an example.

I have a collection coming out at the end of the year. I write it, a poem every day. Rather than solicit reviews and blurbs, and pitch pubs and bookstores, I smoke and spend hours on YouTube. I guess you’d call that rest. But come December I’ll be pulling double-digit hours for days on end just to get the thing out. It’s not nothing. But it ain’t great. The hard part about it is it’s how I’ve lived most of my life. In the dark or blinding-white. Laid out or working past collapse. The trouble with middle age is knowing it hasn’t paid off living this way and feeling like it’s too late to change. If you’re still wondering what the fuck I’m on about, I’m talking about the Work, or the career, and being an Artist and anything other than what my I perceived my old man to be, or anyone from the hated hometown. I’ve put out a collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, every year since I turned 40. I did it because I was horrified at who I’d become at that age, that I wasn’t any closer to the Rollins-Thompson ideal than when I dreamed it up as a kid. It was a similar crisis to the one I heretofore describe, except now I’ve no motivation to use the heady fear-of-failure I used to get me this far. I suppose I could but I can’t. My health is demanding I slow my roll and the cost of healthcare in this country deems I should buckle down and sell out some, or at least devote most of my energies to a 40-hour gig with benefits. I tell you I think about a suicide more than I ever have and I tell you that because you know me and I’m stubborn. You won’t have to worry about me taking myself out. As sensitive as I can get, I’m strong as a bull when it comes to my own pain. Sure, I’ll hem and haw about it. Cry and piss and moan in blogs and columns, but, I’m still here. The problem is the wondering why ain’t it and anyway having to reboot the system and find for a whole other motivation for staying alive and creating Art.

Bummer, eh Reader? Sure as shit right. The collective psychology of any sentient being in the Final Century is boiling down to a resolution not to kill yourself but wonder, every day, why. By “sentient” I mean any of you reading this and nodding along, anyone tired of being angry, and anyone smart enough to never be satisfied with the simple hooks of our leaders, their cheap punditry and easy hate. In a word—US.  What all this has to do with middle age and Art, final days and the raging rants of a hopeless poet is that I’m making deadline but I don’t know why. I’m making Art, a discipline that’s ingrained after years of poetry, letters and blogs, and it’s cast out into the fray. I’m glad of the connections I made. Proud of the stacks of 5×7 collections and reams of irredeemable essay-writing I’ve done over the years. But I only come up for deadline and am otherwise locked into a bad continuum of anxiety-depression, regret and dread. I suppose I’ll continue doing what I set out to because what else? I hope to find for an ever more viable platform and I’m having some luck with Patreon. I feel connected to folks there. I know they wanna be. By and large my days are null. I don’t write at Going For the Throat. I’m weeks behind on Letter Day. I get fired up at the glass doors, burning down an Export A, alight with ideas for broadsides and zines, 4 more collections in the next 4 years, gigs in Columbus Town, Hostile City, The Great White North and Holland. Then I come in. Pull closed the sarape. Sit down at the desk and pen the day’s poem. Stare angrily at a screen before I shut it down and lay on the couch to try and forget about the dream, wonder how I’ll go on without ever making it and live with the fact it was probably my own fucking fault.

The Coarse Grind: Part 37: Off the Masthead

I return to the deceased, to meditate on them as if they still live.
—Carol Muske-Dukes

Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned.  Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can affect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness … then what are we to do?
—Charles Bowden

The river can not go back.
—Kahil Gibran

All the accoutrements are in place.  I’m at the helm of the great ship of this desk.  The steam rises in graceful wafts from a ceramic mug of mint tea.  The blower man has blown on.  The congested sky through the window churns.  The phone doesn’t ring.  But I can’t write a thing.  Everything in the world has wound ignobly down and the silence in the office is total, if laden with dread.  I thrive in silence and find for my own distraction away from the congress of the madding world.  I don’t believe in war and hate the Police.  I’ve a raft of complaint that I only live with and wait out the days.  It’d be easy to get political here, or angry, but it wouldn’t change a thing.  We’ve been waiting to hit rock bottom too long as the devastation reels and the theatre plays on.  I’m inured and sick from the consumption of myself and traumatized at a window to the world on a computer screen.  My energies are sunk, my digestion is bad.  I’m wound tight enough to snap, and do sometimes, buckle and regroup only to fall victim to the same roaring anxieties.  But yet I can’t write.  It’s a sad state of affairs but nothing I haven’t survived before.  The hard part ain’t that I’m not writing but that I’m not a writer if I don’t.

It’s a crisis of identity and an overdue confrontation with the self, coupled with the crushing hopelessness of living down the Anthropocene, that have rendered my weekly column to a diary.  There’s no consequence to those words, and maybe not these either, but the kicker is wondering if there ever was.  Senator Cornyn wrote me on police reform this morning and as a thunderstorm rolled into Texas last night, I closed the video of two cops choking a mentally ill man to death.  What could I say to the Senator, that he’ll hear anyway, and how could I relate anything to somebody who kills for no more an arbitrary reason than law?  My break from the discourse is almost complete.  I don’t engage the nutters.  At this point it’s ok to just let someone’s half-baked and self-important attitude endanger another, rather than drive myself mad trying to convince them otherwise.  I’m past being blue about the world and just take it inside.  My mental health is touch and go, go mostly and so I man the reserves.  I pull back and don’t engage.  Was a time I could’ve wrote through anything but hopelessness is in the marrow now, the anger is toxic and I must abstain.  Though I guess I am writing through this brute and final stage of despair ain’t I, if at the feigning compulsion of what drove me for so long—a deadline.

Deadline was the goal and not the work but I tricked myself into working because of it.  I’m not compelled by it any longer and I’ve no reason to write and therefore am not who I set out to be.  I’m just here, a malfunction within a catastrophe.  So ends the decade on the fringe as your correspondent of the interior, working the beat of mental health talking “no bullshit no filler about the writing life and the joys and hardships of being an artist in a world that doesn’t care.”  I drop the canvas and brush and oil and walk out into the void.  The void is me, surrender isn’t easy and hardly feels voluntary.  There were glories in outlying and the years I spent writing for its own sake, but foregoing almost everything else has rendered me bereft when the words stop coming.  I worked the worst jobs and I hardly engaged in the bloody plays of capitalism and company culture.  The benefit was that I saved my mind and the wild veldt of my psyche was completely mine to explore.  Through writing I was free to share what I discovered there.  But now I’ve nothing to come home to.  I avoid this desk and am lulled into oblivions of depression and the barely-bearing witness industry of social media.  The world is gone and the American empire and its hegemonic actors prepare for another great war.  Ecological scarcity and its terroristic response, and the violent lie of an individual and free self is generously regarded as discourse.  I never cared about the world.  I was only living through it and now I am through.  I made it through this column though writing about not being able to write isn’t a victory.  Or a paltry and hollow one if I find myself at the end of these 815 words right back where I began.  The tea is gone.  My cup is empty.  The phone is starting to ring.  I’m a writer without anything to write, disassembled and locked out without a word of hope or reason why.

The Coarse Grind: Part 36: Inside

I am a panther shut up and bellowing in
cement walls, and I am angry at blue
evenings without ventilation
and I am angry with you, and it will come
like a rose
—Charles Bukowski, A Report Upon the Consumption of Myself

How’s your epoch? I reckon you’ve been touched by the Final Century and even these last decade blues, whether you’re destitute or dead and gone or in my case only shut in and living the same gamble trying to get these words down as the rains come in and the phone doesn’t ring. The storm crept in quickly, as far as I could tell behind the sarape at the glass doors, and now it’s dark in here save for a lamplight and this screen. I dreaded this post like I do most and writing at the Throat even more so, as I’ve no anger left or ballast and tire of writing on the consumption of myself. The anxiety of writing here isn’t so bad. It’s a good kind of nerves, and not just because I’ve got an Editor to please. I think there’s some historical and journalistic value to The Coarse Grind, at Going for the Throat, too, but I don’t seem to care as much and resent feeling like I should when writing those posts and blogs. This is the real shit, country simple, and the rain coming in was a good sign, the dead phone too. I think I can make it, Reader, get it down and make some kind of sense out of the deluge of blood and nonsense we’ve been getting pelted with since that ponce took office and his jack-jawed family of whores moved in to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Never mind the Syrian civil war, the 10 years that hard science has us sustainably left and all the wars and terrorism sure to spring from that dark prediction. Today I’ll be attempting to make sense of the wonky years since the sanguine days of Obama’s rule, though even using his Presidency as a reference is fraught as he ushered in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, continued the surveillance state and otherwise flapped a different wing of the same bird.

Besides, I can’t make heads or tails or even a damn about politics the way Saint Mike can. If I was hiding out and licking the wounds of a hard life suffering a Major Depressive Disorder before Trump then imagine what my life looks like after—waking up happy it’s raining on a Saturday, with no plans to go anywhere or see anyone all weekend-long. I would say this is how bad it’s gotten but really the effects are about the same. I can’t say I’ve less faith in where we’re headed but, now, instead of arguing I walk away. Nope, I don’t argue online and I’d be hard-pressed to comment on anything on the socials anyway. It seems that Twitter and Facebook have become our action, which is sad and dumb. It’s another of these thorny truths ain’t it, more slime from under the rock that crass plutocrat turned over in America—a democratized media only polarized us or maybe showed us who we really are. I can’t with any joy say I’m thankful to discover less than half this country are full-on crankcases with their own set of facts and a fully-stocked gun closet, though I am glad to see them, their fuck faces, and know where my enemies live. Point is a free media hasn’t made us free and the light of reason could be as bright as the sun but none of these nutters would see. I’ve had a hard time reasoning with myself, that maybe I was polarized and could only be maligned with the silent majority. It’s still not easy, Reader, believe me, but—it’s infinitely better than arguing or going on with a bleak worldview that’s robbed me of joy, lovemaking and even regular bowel movements.  I’m not happy but I wasn’t happy before. The key for me is working on my happiness from in here, inside. My contentment and sense-of-self have zero to do with some haircut on the Art scene’s posts about George Floyd being a criminal and repeated like a dumb mantra for the mean days of his small life.

I don’t know what I’ll do without anger. I feel myself unmoored without it and, to be honest, floating away from my weekly at the Throat. Since I only wrote because I felt like I had to I might not write at all. That’s about as sad and privileged as it gets for me. I don’t see much difference in outcome, though, whether I was yelling up the mountain and shutting down crackers on the social wire or writing you this rainy morning in April—punchdrunk and living down the last 4 years with a questionable libido and raging PTSD. Country simple the introvert is going deeper. This misanthrope is tightening an already-tight and concentric circle. This much craziness is too much pain. I know things are turning. I see it every day. But I’m not in a rush to get to the show and party or ever be welcome back into the human fray. Negativity is the new positivity, Reader. There’s less to rail at and vales of time are uncovered by surrendering. Take it from me or don’t but I’m going deeper within. There was at one time maybe a glimmer, and I believed in punkrock and thought with this new journalism we could finally make a change. I’ve still got a light but I don’t believe in a greater good anymore. I’ve got today and this tea beside me, these keys at this desk and a bright-grey gloom coming in through the office window. The rain is still coming down. Let it rain.

 

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The Coarse Grind: Part 35: Lost in the Kingdom

THE FOLLOWING POST WAS WRITTEN ON MARCH 5, 2021

The difference between your reaction to everything being wrong and nothing at all isn’t much. In either case you do the next thing, and the thing after that, in a succession of duties and prompts that are our lives—whether you’re paying attention or not. I tend to pay attention when I’m in trouble but when the coast is clear I can’t focus at all. The immediacy of Art as a medium, and the fact that I always felt like I was born to trouble, drew me to writers and creators who performed like their lives depended on it. Turns out they did, in most cases, but whether or not they were in The Shit I certainly was, and I came to the reading and the show. I came into the bookstore and pulled it off the shelf. It’s hard not to take being misunderstood personally, which of course fated the discovery of visionaries and poets writing from the outside and who I consider my allies to this day. I’ve come to view being lost as my true direction and this wisdom came with a price. Everything fell away and I don’t miss most of it but it’s always a gamble breaking from the pack. Lucky for me and the artists in my cadre, sticking around was only a rank suffering, so even if I never found my way I knew I’d never find it listening to my parents or profs either. Anyone who could take it and hang was suspect and my pain was a mark on me. I felt too much but still couldn’t be happy. This hasn’t changed but after long decades on the outside I’ve found contentment in my own strange conquest and prize. It wasn’t about being right, even if it feels good after being so maligned among settling minds. These days knowing I was right brings me no comfort as all I saw was the doom and forfeiture of the USA. I could’ve done more and that’s a burden I carry but with everything being wrong I’m set to rights, at the desk and right back where I started.

I only wanted a world of my own. I took my lumps thinking there was something wrong with me and even though I now know there is, there’s something far worse that’s been happening, and dark and ruefully coming to a close. We shouldn’t have killed people and we shouldn’t have tolerated a culture that worships death. Avoidable tragedy and horrible graft, war and starvation wages rage on. The only thing that’s changed is that we’re inured. We’ve total access but simply don’t care. We’re hemmed in and locked down in the system and at 46 years of age tomorrow I don’t think we could change it now anyway. You know the deal. You watch the news. Strident and progressive change continues only to get rivaled and checked. For every brilliant turn of science and technology there are swaths of the population denying it. The church says if you have a choice between vaccines then choose Pfizer or Moderna, as Johnson & Johnson’s formula is derived from the string of cells of an unborn fetus that died almost 40 years ago. The Governor of Texas is reopening the state on Wednesday as new and wild strains of COVID bloom. State Rep. Marjorie Greene mocks shooting victims in defense of gun control and a raise in the workingman’s standard of living is stalled in mock debate and obstructionism. The white-eyed vireo darts closer to me even on unseasonably warm mornings and despite plumes of cigarette smoke blown out of your Writer in the court. I’m not telling you to give up but I’m past wondering. I’m not waiting for stability or a return to normal. I’m at the desk sipping mint tea and would kill for an espresso with white sugar. My phone rings and goes to voicemail but the inbox is full. The last time I answered it was the office of my GI, calling to collect on my doc’s fee to perform my colonoscopy, after already collecting $900 a month for the procedure itself. I rant and rail here, because it’s what I do. I write about dastards and curs like Greene and Abbott and about fighting to get out of the hometown only to get shut down by the same ignorance in their ranks. I’m not even telling you to give in. But I am. This much craziness is too much pain.

I wrote from the hip and my seat here when I wasn’t busting my balls working for the man. I’ve a body of work behind me written catch-as-catch-can. I found a little glory and even magic at this altar and at these keys or the type. Used to be I was only reporting in the middle of my own ruinous reel and volleying between the self-talk of a parasite or a God. I know now what’s really wrong and how to change it and it’s my own seasons, my own daily ablutions and pitfalls. I eat a slow breakfast and I try to quit smoking even as the world we know gets blown right away. I’m not wondering or getting mired in if only; I’m a columnist and a poet whether or not you see me at the AWP or if I get paid. Beyond the trellis and wood fence, rich kids whine and play as a dark climate gathers somewhere in a shroud, crouching and ready to strike. They don’t know it’s the end but I do and I’m in here at the window getting it down neat and fine—because it’ll make me feel better and I said I would. I’m going to keep doing what I said I would and whether it’s out of love or spite I’ll do it more. I’m getting myself together and finding ways to cope other than writing 600 words a week in incredulity and rage. I’m not angry anymore. My trouble was always wanting more from the world and expecting others to act as good brothers and sisters, that we wouldn’t wage war and we could live and even thrive if everyone had peace and clean water. Of course there were other things working me, bad habits and the karma that fostered and spurred them on. That’s the kind of trouble I’m dealing with and working on what’s wrong with me is how I’ll spend my time. I’m moving toward my love whether she’s there and waiting or hasn’t even showed up to the ball. Of course this makes me part of the silent majority ain’t it, not holding any banner or putting effort into making a change. I don’t much like that either but I’ll be working at it, as much as I can, inside.

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The Coarse Grind: Part 34: Seeking Refuge in the Land of the Free

I am sick of this country. A thrust and a stab in the lower colon throughout the day, rushing me to the john to piss out my ass. A churning gut that ends the day’s work early, and lays me flat until I fall into a fitful sleep. I am sick of this country. The way they’ve hemmed us in and keep us at the brink of despondency and all too eager to vote in the next guy, whose platform and programs to save us mask the machinations of predatory capitalism. I’m sick of this country. Those of us who go along for the greater good and settle for a convenient morality. Make no mistake I am one of those people, who’ve gone along and traded blood for blood money to buy blood food, and take blood shelter, and condone and even perpetuate this blood culture. I was woken at 3:30 this morning and again just before dawn. I doubled up on Prednisone from a prescription leftover from when I worked full time and could “afford” palliative drugs and healthcare. The reporter on the morning radio knowing what’s right but wondering what’s right politically says everything there is to say. She said it better than I did when I say I’m sick of this country though that sentence alone could be the sum total of my work at The Coarse Grind.

I first got sick while driving a truck in North Central. It began as a painful and uncontrollable urge to go but, locked in to the route at a day rate, I held it in on long stretches through the wastelands of West San Antonio, Waco and Pflugerville. They were 50 and 60 hour weeks, waking every day at 4 and though it was better than what a lot of people in this country have to do for a living, I got sick and I never got better. I got a desk job, with healthcare, and I was helping the underserved. The corporate worship got strong there and it was demanded I go along. When I didn’t they combed through 10 years of blogs and deemed my opinions on mental health detrimental to the organization. I tried to hold on, and bear the brunt of fickle and vengeful protocol, for the healthcare but they made even making health appointments difficult. The job I tried to keep for healthcare only made me sicker. Driving a truck in a country who’s minimum wage was frozen and suffering authority-without-power is just the way things work in this country. Blue collar work should come with healthcare and any budding dictator like my old boss at the desk job was only emboldened under Trump, and obviously allowed. Now I write and live off donations, look for writing work and collect unemployment. I still suffer whatever’s wrong with me but it’s not exacerbated by grueling work and garbage people. I found a way to be free but it’s month by month and tenuous. It could and often does go sideways and my whole life would be derailed by a hospital stay.

The permissiveness and cheapening of human life, American exceptionalism and the Western idea of strength—from the day the Imperialist ponces and rapists of the new world stepped foot to shore to today—February 3, 2021, the weak are only conquered, the working class enslaved and entire ethnicities of people all but forgotten, lynched and put in cages or murdered. I could go on and on about the ruling class and maybe add a contemporary twist of the middle class and their new ways of containing us, born and bred at market, okay with War and murder and disease as long as it’s someone else, coupled with the technology to satisfy our morality enough to see it but without the discomfort of being there. I could go on but I won’t. You know the deal. You’re reading this I know you’re with me and I can’t tell you anything. As for the rest I never could. I designed and lived a life on the fringe, suffering them and their soundtracks in the supermarket, their rallying around inane entertainment, faux culture and weak rock and roll. That doesn’t mean I’m not bought in or that I’m any better but I built a refuge in the writing life and it got me through. I couldn’t suffer the literary establishment, never had the appetite for what’s considered poetry but the truth is, living in a bachelor’s bunker during war time I didn’t have the attention span. It was fight or flight between tyrannical and black-hole bosses, double-digit shifts humping food and flatware for rich and corporate parties and getting back to the 4-walls, stripping my uniform and sitting down, here, at the writing desk. It was a couple decades of war and I got the work out but living this way has wrecked me. I’m shut-in with colitis, have had to stop drinking coffee and even the stopgap of nicotine to curtail its raging symptoms will soon have to come to an end.

For years I perched myself somewhere, smoking triple-nickels, drinking black coffee and burning angry screeds. I wrote letters, and poetry, and true-to-life missives of a beat romantic and dark emissary.  I lived on the fringe and readjusted. But as the epoch of the Final Century is whittled down to the Last Decade, and as they took our radio and gave us technology, and as we gave our lives over resigned to living on a screen and they paid us the same thing they’d been paying for 11 years but only demanded more if we wanted to be healthy, fed and in 4-walls—the fringe has all been but cleared off. They came for us and got us, the middle class. The poor are only getting killed off and worked to death. If this sounds zealous or overreaching then the reality of over 300k dead hasn’t really reached you yet. Christ. There I go again ain’t it. Railing the way I’ve done for most of my writing career, coming through with the kind of searing and righteous anger that makes me feel good or important for the time it takes to craft this column and when garnering your likes and views. Make no mistake we were together and if you ever felt I spoke for you that’s more of a payment than I could ever hope for. It’s been lonely on the fringe and having to avoid more and bigger segments of the population and everybody from false internet prophets to the silent majority I came up with in the hometown. Because it’s been lonely, you finding and reading me has given me a kind of currency that perhaps you got, coming across a column that calls it at the street level. I’m going to need you but the rails and justified anger, the redemption and resolve that came from framing the bad news and fuckall of living here have only hemmed me in.

I’m sick of this country but I’ve got to get better. Decades of war time have weakened me and I’m not well. The writer who wrote you of swinging from the ceiling may as well. If there’s another me, somewhere in here, I hope he’ll step up and make himself known. I can’t fix what’s broken. I’ll have to bide my time on the thinning fringe and get better. This much craziness is too much pain.

Join Jim Trainer, and a stellar cast of luminaries, writers and musicians from around the world, in celebrating the release of

KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:
10 Years At Going For The Throat

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February 12 2021
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The Coarse Grind: Part 33: A Rat by the Tail&The War of Work in America

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.  

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The Coarse Grind: Part 32: Keep Bleeding In The Fine Dierum

I’m sorry I took that trip.
—Austin Mayor Steve Adler

The guy had sort of pinned me to the wall and was glistening with maniacal sweat and talking some freak speak about what he was going to do and his stuff with how John was interested and he was going to get in touch with John Lennon.
—James Taylor on running into Mark David Chapman, en route to murder John Lennon in 1980

He won’t be afraid of the destructive act:
half the house will have to come down.
This way he’ll grow virtuously into wisdom.
—Constantine P. Cavafy

Hello, Good Reader! Oh and hello, deadline. As much as it’s been historically maligned a deadline has been my writing’s best friend and anyway as good to me and my work as you, Good Reader. You read me and for as much as I’ve gone through just to get this off to you the goal is simple, if not easy. Without you I’d have a diary and without a deadline I wouldn’t have either.  Without writing, well—I might still be in the big chair, sick and beat down, terribly early on a Saturday, scrolling to Morning Edition until the girl starts with her club hits, and a thumping beats through the wall worse than the Mexican construction crew I have to suffer every other day of the week living here. This, as we know, ain’t the half, either. My ill health and failing vision, and my God this depression. Truth is it’s why we’ve been OK with the dissolution of the world and encroaching maw of predatory capitalism and that’s because it’s already bad for us depressives, ain’t it. It’s always raining here so never mind a pandemic and wealth divide cleaving swaths of the population and ushering the rest of us through the chipper blades of history. We were born for chaos ain’t it. Born to trouble and suffering enough to know what calamity is and anyway how best to learn the lesson, take our lumps and go home. Maybe not. I mean I am home and the club hits aren’t so easy, a soulless and dull hammer through the wall like it’s midnight in Prague. I can write but the effort to get even 2 sentences down produces the kind of stress and bad vibes I seek refuge from in writing. I’m going for the throat and coming through with the Wisdom ain’t it. It requires a tomb-like quiet and if this bitch keeps it up a pack of triple nickels, just for old time’s sake. She’s a nice girl but her music sucks, I heard smoking cigarettes is good for colitis and anyway I can’t call it or figure how the Hell I’m supposed to cull and edit 67 posts into a collection and wrap the design in 5 days let alone come through with this column in time for Editor Phil to schedule it to post live tomorrow—Sunday morning, December 6, 2020 in this Year of the Rat. Unless, of course, I start smoking cigarettes again.

Wow, OK, those 411 words were to say The Coarse Grind and your Good Readership has been very good to me. Maybe not the craft of writing if it took me 411 to say what I could’ve in 21. What will Editor Phil think? I don’t know and as mentioned, I can’t call it. I’ll leave the good writing to Phil and Rob Kaniuk and get back to bloviation and anyway writing from my ass the way through. Writing as an event that used to take cigarettes and hash and sex and booze to somehow endure sitting down and concentrating on. Writing live has superseded all that ain’t it and I will never live down the thrill of it either. Blogging and penning a column and aiming straight for your heart. Then again, poetry has always been just that, a precursor of the internet and direct line that everybody from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Bruce Springsteen has enjoyed. Just ask Billy Collins. In this regard I’ve always written live and the fact is sometimes life can have you so mercilessly in its vise you need someone to bleed on and bear witness because if you don’t make it you’ll have lived in their hearts ain’t it, and what a gift it is too. I don’t mind taking the long way or, much to my hated Prof. in English Comp II’s chagrin, writing essays about nothing. The world needs writers like Phil and Kaniuk, don’t get me wrong. If there’s a cleaner bone than a Cormac McCarthy sentence or Raymond Chandler passage I haven’t come to it but I sure love getting there. Besides, I knew what this post would be about on one of my many painful sprints to the john. I’m sick but you knew that, Good Reader, so it behooves me to know what I’m gonna say before I sit here and try anyway. Ignore the music through the walls, snap off the good wisdom of Scott Simon and, shrouded by the gun-metal sky through the wide window at the writing desk, begin. I need to know before I start in case my ill-health takes me from this column to that porcelain temple of pain.  Yikes. Anyway…here it is.

It couldn’t go on like this, though it has. There are limits to how the Earth can provide for her children. Never mind there’s a surplus of resources and food and we could’ve all worshipped our own Gods (or listened to our own bands, hail hail Rock and Roll!), for centuries and in peace. We could’ve enjoyed a spirituality of seasons like true and Beautiful Pagans, the Earth doing what it does flawlessly and we as witting witness to its gorgeous tumult and glory. Kids could grow into their vision and not have the optimism beat out of them before they can drive a car, and they would never be sent off to War. Wars would be fought by the aristocrats and rulers who started them. Jackboots, too—what the Hell. Those science-denying fundamentalist stalwarts of tradition seem to need conflict for their own edification so why don’t we send them in, if we have to, they can all fight each other. Of course War should never be anyone’s reality and certainly not mine though if everybody’s got a chance to thrive I don’t see what function War would have in this idealized world I heretofore describe. You may say I’m a dreamer. Or a romantic nihilist when I take the helm of The Coarse Grind and again, to you, remind—it’s too late, Good Reader and I know we’re all more than distraught about it. Though we’re not up in arms either or putting heads on sticks and that’s because we think we’re the exception. A nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and indebted our charmed and inured lives or at least assured our survival. Well. We’re not. We are not assured our survival. I don’t think so, Janice. In fact we’re not going to make it either. There’s too many of us and so this is a great clearing off. It’s tragic and flatly incomprehensible, sure. By design, as biological organisms, everything in us is programmed to avoid our own end at any and every cost. The worst part isn’t that we won’t avoid it. The worst part is we still think it won’t happen to us. So I’m going to bid you adieu, Comrade, and enjoy this coveted newsday that our Saturday mornings have become. This is the end Beautiful Friend unless I see you next month and in which case I’ll post up at this desk again joyfully, to remind you—and say, Proletariat and friend, Good Reader Goodbye.

THIS DECEMBER FROM YELLOW LARK PRESS
KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:
10 Years At Going For The Throat

The Coarse Grind: Part 31: KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM, 10 Years at Going For The Throat

Just killing myself for what I’ve become and all the shit I ain’t…
The Bad Vibes

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them.
—Matthew 18:20

10 years is an incredibly queer unit of time. Queer as in strange, undefinable and anyway not qualifiable with the emotional metrics used when looking back and summing up. I’ll take it and how I feel has, much to my Black Irish Father’s chagrin, ruled the roost ain’t it and at least could come closest to summing up the last 10 years writing at Going For The Throat. I wrote because I was in pain and I was in pain because of who I was versus who I thought I was supposed to be. I worked it out in writing and somehow got closer and anyway had a column of words at the end of those sessions that in the WordPress’ WaPo theme looked just like a newspaper to me. Second to that self actualization-through-self loathing trip was a fascination with words and at least how columns of words and poems looked–printed or typed, there on the page. I can’t speak to others’ hobbies or interests. Mostly mankind is, as Lao Tsu put it, eaten away by little fears and giant fears swallow him whole. Point is a blog post, published and posted up, nice and neat in black ink and in a white column, or the punched out letters on a white sheet yanked from out an IBM Selectric II in the lamplight thrills me in a way, and really scratches an itch and anyway I’m enthralled with just the power that emanates from text on a page, regardless of what the fuck it says. As far as my little and giant fears, they simultaneously drive and are held at bay for the length of time invested in the creation of a blog post or poem and certainly while writing a letter to you.  You’re part of this, too. In a queer way I can thank my blues but outright and without compunction I can thank you. I’m a performer after all.

Writing live kept me interested for 10 years, Good Curator, and in my line of work 10 years is what they call a stretch and anyway a good chunk of time that I was but only watching through this lens of field reporter, essayist and personal journalist. It’s true I’ve had to get vague and jiggy but it was fun. I’ve also been outright, called them on their shit in full faith I was always worse to myself in writing and that was the most fun of all. I built a wall around myself on those pages, which as it turns out is not good for the craft. It’s not good personally either but all I ever cared about is Art so fuck ’em. I could’ve benefitted from not getting bothered by their antics and I’m sure there were a lot better ways for them to spend their time than fucking with Jim Trainer and getting roped in to proving or disproving what a total shit I or my late, Black Irish Father always thought I was. Live and learn. I could not reflect on how bad I’ve been in writing if I’d never written. And I’d only come back to the well, and be sitting, here, at another desk in another apartment 10 years later and punching down these black ink words if I was inspired and, as an emotionally overwrought Pisces with Daddy issues I’m only inspired by love or hate.  Transmission too though, and in many ways therein is the real thrill of media for me. The currency of writing live trumps feeling or at least carries it away ain’t it.

It’s why being a DJ on a college radio station is the most fun you’ll ever have. Unless you find yourself in bed with someone you love which comes and goes (and luckily so). Transmission is everything. It’s why the Blues, why the Rock&Roll. Why the books of poetry and why a sealed envelope, with stamp and postmark, seems to vibrate and anyway open to us a world once we get that shit tore and folded out. Words and music and radio take to the ether, they supersede the moment and even the corporeal. Media is in the air and can change your life whether you’re in Bahrain or Minnesota. This digital media is troubling. Maybe the People never got their arms around it, but—we will. I believe in the People but better I believe in media. I’m not 100 on you but the ‘I’ is my trouble ain’t it? I been gripped with the fear, too, a steady steel bleat up through the gut when looking at over 142 posts chose for KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:  10 Years At Going For The Throat. It hasn’t been good this Anxiety, though it’s only a precursor to the exquisite torture I put myself through every year in December. Work’s piling up on the daygig, I can’t shit for hours until I’m in Office Max and then I just go in the aisle in my pants as my Uber cancels my fare and leaves me to walk home in the Texas heat with shit in my pants. Everything sucks and is kind of cool at the same time but I’m not gonna get into my own dumb and crippling peccadilloes, be they angry bowels or diminishing libido and going blind and broke with car trouble in the Last Decade of the Anthropocene. Art should supersede all that ain’t it, rise above the jibba-jabba and meet ’em on the streets and walk with them awhile. They’re with us, too, and, just so you know–there is no more lasting or potent cargo than what is in your heart Good Curator. Let’s make Art. Let’s kill it in our head. Let’s vote and write and put it all into the Work. It matters, more than ever, and it’s always mattered more than death itself.

KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM:
10 Years At Going For The Throat

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