The worst thing you can do is everything

Personal journalist laments the excesses of a life on the fringe

(This is a post by guest blogger, Jim Trainer.)

July 10, 2023

Truth becomes a martyr for the sake of the song…
—American Aquarium

30 hours of sex and cigarettes ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. When she picked me up in Westheimer it felt like I landed on the moon. As long as I was in her orbit I was all movement toward her but a day later I was back in Austin and spinning through cold space. Love as addiction, like anything as addiction, found me worse off than before our carnal sojourn in Houston. I didn’t know it then but a hot black mood of suicidal ideation would be borne of the chemical dump of us, and relapses of longing for a girl with 3 addresses and 2 names who, so the people in the back can hear, is unattainable. Sex as religion ain’t a bad thing, but like most spirituality, once you glean a view and actually make communion with something other than you, if you’re not equipped to fully integrate what you learned you’ll end up a spiritual junkie. Ask me how I know.

I followed her from state to state and across continents. She made her way down and we always picked it up where we left off. That is, wanting her so bad because she’d be leaving, the tension and hatred building between us and culminating in sexual exhaustion until she finally did. There’d be a new city every coupla years and the whole thing would start again. I hit her up last week and found her sipping noodles at a rainy vendor but otherwise undisclosed location. Told her I loved her but it was over. Her response told me everything but really what I already knew. You might learn more about someone at the end of your relationship than at the beginning but she was cold as ever, flippant and stoic as a statue. She was my drug, my muse, my paramour. I followed her through rigging yards and bohemian clap-downs but ended it at the desk what else.

When the sun comes in to to the office and the neighbors are done fucking around with their their gas-powered neuroses, there’ll come a still if pregnant and preternatural quiet. I’ll know I’m doing what I’s supposed to and anyway set out to, after sleeping in the park on Christmas Eve in the hometown, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Catskills, power-washing the pigeon shit off the bottom of I-95, being to every state in the lower 49 barring South Dakota and performing everywhere from GUATE to Haiku HI, I find I’m at the bottom of a dream, where it all started, some 20-odd years ago, waking in a a shore town jail and living down another terrible summer in Hostile City. The places (and her names) have changed but the walls of this cell are the same. I’ve come to an inevitable and irrefutable confrontation with the self.

I flick the radio on. I smoke another cigarette. I get up to look myself in the bathroom mirror. Gin blossoms and yellowed-crows feet, an indefatigable boxer’s grin beneath a broken Roman nose. I put out 8 books in 8 years, penned a half-million words at Going For the Throat, critiqued culture and annaled survival in the Anthropocene for various pubs and outlets. I’ve done what I set out to but the truth is I could never be alone. The weird pride I had at being a working poet and ladies man, consummate lover and devotee to the feminine, was a cover and anyway all building up to the innumerable departures from Planet Jim. While I was doing work and work got done, fucking them in ladies’ rooms and trailers and tiny-homes, I was nowhere , un-hitched and hooked on a dream.

The morning grinds and the nights club me into dank submission. I’m booking anew and setting future deadlines what else. Going out on tour to 3 cities where I’ll have to think on my feet, fly and cantilever through depots and boarding gates to hit the stage, get up under the hot lights and tell it, only to wrap it and come back home, to the desk what else, this seat and throne of unacceptance and self-contempt. Never home, ever arriving and always leaving. She, I’m sure, will be running too and in her own way. After decades she’ll be what she always was. Gone.