I'll go in up to here, it can't possibly hurt
all they will find is my beer and my shirt…
—Tom Waits
Theodor Adorno famously wrote that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. Except that’s not what he wrote. What he wrote is somehow more condemning and fittingly not as poetic. I’m a poet even if I don’t write poetry, which isn’t an excuse, but leads us to the reason for this missive. Despite my claims I’m not a journalist though, personal or otherwise.
I’m a culture writer, a role typically afforded the famous and anyway connected, i.e. personality hires who’d have a readership if they wrote poetry, journalism or pabulum. I haven’t written any poetry since April and as the worm turns I wonder if Adorno would approve. I’m taking the rear with my culture writing, and I do it for our morale, using the connectivity of the internet and funded by blue collar work.
But who cares?
I can’t say I do. These days the discipline of writing, applying or interviewing for inadequate paying and inflexible jobs, and even getting out of bed wears me the fuck out. It’s a trauma response perhaps but the word trauma is tired, too. Armies of culture writers, poets and otherwise look-at-mes have scolded the creative impulse in me to retire early and get up late. These days I don’t take pleasure in anything. My joy is my cat but he doesn’t pay the bills, fund this publication or have any concern for my writing career whatsoever.
I thought I could keep this thing going, for us and The Fight, but the truth is I’m having a hard time wanting to live, if the days are just a Kafka-esque slog earning Sisyphean day rates as a failed creative under passive-aggressive night managers who have avoided being creative full-time for a dollar or two more an hour.
Country simple, the poetry I’ve been sharing on Substack was written years ago. My personal journalism bleeds on under a banner of Nazi-sympathizing platforms with a subscription model that has neutered the underground and flooded the zone with amateurs and mawkish peddlers of ego. I was inspired to learn that
has only 14 paying subscribers but 1,765 free ones; and she got 944 likes, 218 comments and 175 reposts on a piece about Taylor Swift.
I’ve been rewarding my supporters with letter pressed editions from my catalog and migrating this newsletter to my website. I’m taking to heart what the Boss said about your ticket being your handshake and that the only thing that matters is what you bring when the lights go down.
I’d love to only traffic in real and tactile connection, if I could only leave my apartment. I’m still paying off the last time I went on tour, robbing Peter to pay Paul, doing radio and donating plasma til I’m out of the red and I can get back out on the road.
You’re receiving this because I know you, intimately or otherwise, and I can’t wait to stand before you, breathe the same air and look in your eyes. The rest is just conjecture and ruin. HTBAS is still published monthly and this Friday’s edition will be a write up of Anti-Imperialist Greg Stoker’s appearance on IN THE CITY, my news and information program on community radio.
All I require of you, Good Reader, is for you to read on, come see me at the show or drop me a line sometime. I’ll be continuing to do this for us, but ginning up my own morale by staking the tent of my dumb and mean life far from the mercenary eye of the curation age. Lmk if you hear of an armed, working-people’s rebellion or else need help cutting their heads off in the square.
Keep in touch.
