The Drifter Presents Mississippi

“I’ve been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.” – Bob Dylan

They were sitting on the steps of William Faulkner’s grand old mansion, just the two of them. No one else was around.

William Faulkner himself definitely wasn’t around, at least not in the flesh, since he’d passed out of this mortal coil about twenty-eight years earlier. The mansion, Rowan Oak, was now owned and operated by the University of Mississippi, not too far away.

If you don’t know who William Faulkner is, it’s okay. For the purposes of this story, all one needs to know is that he lived in and wrote about the U.S. South across the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949/’50 for doing so, AND HE RICHLY DESERVED that prize and any other prizes you can think of.

Local wags who knew Faulkner in Faulkner’s own day had dubbed him Count No ’Count. It meant Count No-Account and it was intended as a slur against Faulkner because he generally ignored everyone else in the town both before, and after, he became “famous.”

There were some people in the town that he liked.

But he was a sensitive soul (you would have to be in order to produce all the great writing which he produced, up to and including getting yourself awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature four years before Hemingway himself did, which really pissed off Hemmie even though he rarely admitted it, although he did admit it sometimes, especially when he was in his cups).

Faulkner was a sensitive soul, and he had discovered that most people, one way or another, insulted his writing, even when they were trying to compliment it.

And that is a hard fate to bear. Even for the guy who wrote “The Bear,” one of the greatest novellas in English of all time.

In France right now, William Faulkner is as popular as France’s own Marcel Proust and as Edgar Allan Poe is. Even in the South, on his own home turf, Faulkner’s fame cannot come anywhere near to touching what he has achieved in a separate nation far across the seas.

Although I’ve never been there in person and never will be there in person, most likely, I still say (because of Faulkner, and Poe) long live France! (Sometimes I feel like I must’ve lived there in a former life, and now I’m just an exile; both of my grandfathers were French Canadians recently transplanted to the USA.)

…

The main character in this story was twenty-two years old at the time this story takes place; and the other main character was twenty-three.

It, or they, were a he and a she, or a her and a him, and though they both thought they were completely “grown up” at the time (of course), neither one of them had any idea how young they still were.

The year was 1990. No one on the Planet, and by that I mean no one on the Planet at all, had any idea how much the world was about to change in the next few decades.

But only young people of any era would’ve ever done what these two did next.

They went around to the back side of Faulkner’s house, broke in through a window, and climbed into the old mansion that still had most of the original furnishings in it from decades and decades ago when Faulkner and his family had lived here together.

The act of breaking into a decaying plantation mansion that had once been an utter ruin which Faulkner purchased for five hundred bucks in the 1920s and then refurbished, over decades, all by himself, did something to the young man and the young woman who are this story’s heroes.

Before they knew what was what they were rolling around all over the floor in Faulkner’s former dining room and then they rolled under the dining room table together, there on the thick carpet, luxuriously glued to one another, making out.

Back then they still loved “making out,” which meant kissing, hugging, holding, and exploring each other for hours on end without even going “all the way” sometimes.

When they burst forth from Faulkner’s house again a few hours later, both of them were so full of health and life and youth and happiness that they literally were glowing (people had told them more than once in the bars that they literally had a visible aura) with strength, joy, confidence, fearlessness, and a full-on open-hearted appetite for whatever the world had in store for them.

…

Which is not to say that they were always perfectly happy with one another, at all.

For instance, she had been far from perfectly happy with him a few days ago when he almost drove the car straight off a dock into the ocean and killed both of them. Accidentally.

They had driven all the way down to Mississippi from Chicago because they wanted to see William Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion. But once they got to Oxford, Mississippi, they realized that the ocean itself was only a few hundred more miles away, after all.

So without discussing it for more than five minutes, they made the impulsive decision to skip over Faulkner’s famous haunted mansion for now, drive down to the ocean and check it out, then swing around and head back to the mansion tomorrow or whenever.

In 1990, everything they needed for this road trip was inexpensive and affordable, including gasoline for the small, fuel-efficient car they were driving, diner food, cheap motels, cigarettes, music tapes purchased at truck stops for the cassette player and, of course, alcohol.

But he’d been driving too much at this point. She had helped out with the driving periodically, but he did ninety percent of it. And he had been driving for so many hours now without a real break, that he suddenly realized he couldn’t even figure out how many hours it had been. She was sleeping in the passenger seat. He rubbed his bleary eyes and lit another cigarette and continued to drive. He took a swig of the cold, stale coffee he had at his side and stubbed the cig’ out in the ashtray, accidentally burning his index finger. As he was doing so, he looked up to notice that THE OCEAN WAS RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF THEM AND THEY WERE ABOUT TO DRIVE OFF AN INDUSTRIAL DOCK STRAIGHT INTO IT, meaning the dark, pounding waves of the ocean. He had been circling around trying to find a better road and he’d known they were in the ocean’s vicinity because he could smell it but there were no towns around and it was blackest-night cloud-dark and he was a Northerner who’d never even been to Mississippi or any other Deep South state except Georgia and Florida for that matter.

He SLAMMED on the brakes and the car stopped with its nose right over a thirty-foot drop straight down into the black ocean water, the salt waves nailing the sides of the drop and spraying up over the hood of the car.

She was jerked forward and stopped by both the seatbelt but first his arm which flung out rightward to protect her. Yes: his arm was faster than the seatbelt.

After she almost murdered him about seventy different ways, she finally snuggled into his shoulder and let him continue driving on into the night in the other direction.

…

On the way back north to Faulkner’s haunted mansion the next day, they took another detour and went through the Delta so they could see the place where Muddy Waters and all the other Delta blues greats like Mississippi John Hurt and hundreds or thousands of others are from. And they saw that the Delta now looks much like the Delta did then, and that every time two roads cross one really does think of Robert Johnson who made a deal with the devil at the crossroads so he could play so good. Homeric Mississippi is, by far, the poorest state in the Union and it is also, far and away, the place (if you had to choose one place) which has produced American music itself. Not only Muddy Waters but also Elvis Presley are from Mississippi. Without Muddy and Elvis, no rock and roll as we know it, without rock and roll as we know it no Beatles, without the Beatles no ’60s, without the ’60s no world as we know it now. Mississippi is the underdog, the lowliest one, the slave state of slave states, the most insulted and injured of all the states, the one place that looks more like Africa than any other state, too. And from here has come the one and only art form America ever truly invented other than the cinema and the short story (Poe again), rock and roll, of which rap and hip hop are only developments, extensions. As so often in life, it turns out the lowliest one is in many ways the greatest one of all, by far.

They rolled out of the Delta and back into Oxford, Mississippi, just as the sun was going down. Their mission now was to locate another cheap motel but first they spent a few hours that turned into a few more hours drinking, smoking, and telling tales to each other and others in the bars with the jukebox always being fed.

All the cheap motels seemed to have NO VACANCY signs a-glowing as they went out looking for a place to bed down for the night. It was past midnight by now, and she was worried he’d do something stupid like almost drive off the edge of the world into the abyss of night and chaos again. As they drove out toward the edge of town, both of them noticed a large, bright, white hotel lit up like something out of The Great Gatsby and with the bright-red VACANCY sign on.

They both walked into the lobby and literally were blown back in their tracks, stunned and terrified, when they saw what it was they saw, standing there in the lobby.

The four things they saw standing there in the lobby at first seemed like four creatures straight out of the Book of Revelation come to life out of nowhere. They almost looked like they could move, and like they were about to move, to pounce, that is.

It was four African lions, two males and two females, stuffed and kept in huge, massive, glinting glass cases.

The lions’ unexpected presence here made them so uncanny that both the main characters in this story suddenly felt like they’d entered Neverland and Wonderland simultaneously with their spirits jerked around into the sixth dimension.

Their paws were beyond massive. Their legs were so powerful it chilled your soul. Their bodies were so lean, huge and muscular that it was unbelievable. Their incredibly long tails stuck straight out behind them. The manes of the men were more impressive than anything humans have ever built and the faces of the ladies were so serious and serene that it was like being doused in holy water thrown in your face and eyes just looking at them.

The young man and the young woman who are the main characters of this story were crushed by the utter horror of the tragedy of these four lions killed and stuffed and stuck in glittering cases in the lobby of this Mississippi-Gatsby hotel. At the same time, the beauty of these creatures, even in death, even in this condition, was so profound that it was like entering a green primeval forest filled with sunlight to be in their presence, maybe even the Garden of Eden. And then they realized that the lions were in heaven. And then they knew that the four lions were angels.

The boy and girl, because they both had been transformed back into their even more youthful selves right now, both went around and around and around the four lions, again and again and again: studying the lions, talking to the lions, being terrified of the lions, being in awe of the lions, consoling the lions, asking forgiveness of the lions, reaching out as if to pet the lions, laughing with them, thanking them, praising them, then standing there silently holding hands and staring at the four lions. The sleepy desk clerk had disappeared somewhere when he realized these two were in their own little world and he didn’t care.

But then the desk clerk re-emerged and the two of them grew up again and were twenty-two and twenty-three again as they got a room, floated up three flights of stairs, floated down the hallway, found their white room, unlocked the white door, floated into the white room, and peacefully attacked each other. She fell down onto the gigantic bed with all the pillows behind her head while stripping off her shirt and he fell down gently into her arms after peeling off his own shirt and the waves came and the private magic started all over again, a private magic that cannot be described and will not be described and could never be described and shall never, ever be described and that would result in the birth of healthy, glowing twins when she was thirty-nine years old sixteen years later at which time the private magic, that kind of magic anyway, disappeared from the earth forever, gradually and then suddenly.

Let me repeat that: it disappeared from the earth (from their world) forever. Amor fati, Nietzsche’s great concept, means (in English) love of fate and one real thing it means is that we must love it when good things go away from us as much as we loved it when good things arrived, whether we like it or not. All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed, said Walt Whitman. And luckier.

There are very many kinds of death in this world and one of those kinds is the death of your former self, and former selves, uncountable; but the ghosts of the past still live on in Mississippi.

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)

Saragun Verse: The Lament of the Failed Artist

(Dedicated to the useless gentrificationers of genuine pain)

Nobody wants to admit it
But we are ashamed of our past
‘I did not grow up poor in deep shit
And my fun parents made me laugh’

My happy childhood is the death of me
How dare my parents mock my artistry

Goddam daddy who didn’t drink
And mom who didn’t fuck the town
What was I supposed to think
When they failed to let me down

My happy childhood is the death of me
How dare my parents mock my artistry

Gramps didn’t stick his hands down my pants
Ain’t no hood profit in picket fence life
Credible people don’t stand a chance
Only the damned know how to bleed right

My happy childhood is the death of me
How dare my parents mock my artistry

(Artifacts of a past well remembered–both establishments these came from have been replaced by parking garages. The fuckers.)

(This is a neighbor whom I call “Da Blues.” He is a gregarious Russian Blue, his owner is very nice–but, for the love of God–do not dress your pets!)

(Pieces of the Twin Towers at The Evergreen Park 9-11 Memorial, Bremerton, WA)

No Person Is An Island by Dale Barrigar

“Now the flames they followed Joan of Arc.” – Leonard Cohen

Intro Note: The Reader does not need to know anything beforehand about the historical personages discussed in this text. Everything the Reader needs to know (for the purposes of this) is explained within the text.

When I die, if I ever do, I would like it to be, somewhat at least, in the manner of Susy Clemens and Jack Donne. I shall explain who I mean and what I mean in a moment.

First I want to say, for the record, that perhaps I would rather go more like Arthur Schopenhauer, the great German hermit philosopher, at least as I imagine it (based on the facts).

He sat down for breakfast in his mid-70s, which back then would’ve been like late 80s, at least, today. When his housekeeper came back in with his coffee (he lived alone, except for his housekeeper and poodle) s/he saw the great philosopher sitting there calmly in his chair, at the breakfast table, eyes closed, a smile upon his lips. The philosopher loved his coffee and the aroma of it always perked him up. The caretaker knew that the lonely, solitary and proud Schopenhauer had passed on when he didn’t reach for his coffee. “They” now call him the most pessimistic philosopher who ever lived. In truth, despite all his solitude and struggles, or because of them, the man had at some point turned into one of the happiest people who ever walked the planet, even though he was blatantly rejected by his own mother in front of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe himself. Schopenhauer could even compete with Buddha and Lao Tzu in that way. You can tell it from his late writings.

Suzy Clemens was Mark Twain’s oldest daughter. She was the one “most like him,” and the one he consequently fought with the most. She wrote a biography of her father when she was in her teens. She inspired some of his most memorable literary creations, if not some of his best work, such as his novel about Joan of Arc. He often compared Suzy to Joan and he almost felt like she was Joan reincarnated, and sometimes he even believed that literally (almost) she really was Joan, reincarnated. And she acted as a literary critic and editor for her father’s and for other’s works. She also wanted to be, and studied to be, an opera singer, which was like wanting to be a rock, pop, or rap singer today. She was often highly competitive with her father, believing that he could be (and often was) a windbag who took up too much air and too much space in the room. While everyone else was in awe of his overwhelming presence, she thought he was acting like a jackass at least half the time.

When the family left for Europe in 1896 (dad was big-time broke again and needed to make $ on a lecture tour), Suzy-Joan stayed behind, at the age of twenty-four. She contracted spinal meningitis. She spent her last days in a literal writing fever, creating a 46-page prose poem by hand that is terrifying, brilliant, and prophetic, by turns, and, with its stream-of-consciousness form, sometimes sounds like an early version of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, which wouldn’t even be written for another two decades. She wrote so hard and so fiercely during her final days here on Planet Earth that her caretaker (even lots of poor people had “caretakers” back then) did not think Suzy was even aware of how sick she was. She wandered around the rooms of her parents’ mansion and she hung out in their gigantic bed, the bed posts of which were angels. She remembered playing in this bed with her younger siblings when they were kids. She wrote, and wrote, and wrote some more, until her feverish fingers were worn out, the disease she was suffering from literally driving her on. She was possessed, driven, totally focused, a laser beam of the heightened writing mind, lost in her own written world. Eventually, after a few days, she collapsed into a stupor, then into a coma. She passed out of this mortal coil while sleeping. She was gone before her family was able to return to her across the Atlantic. Mark Twain had many good times from then on until he himself passed away in 1910. But he was never the same. No: he was never the same.

It was often said at the time (and has often been said in the centuries since) that there were two John Donnes. The first one was Jack Donne, the young rebel, satirist, lover, partier, drinker, soldier, practical joker, scholar, wanderer, sometimes ragged “man-about-town,” and poet. The second was Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a center of London, great metropolis, largest city in the world at that time. Jack Donne did not want to become Dr. Donne, the Dean of St. Paul’s. But back then, when the King wanted you to do something, you did not say no. You could resist, if the King was fond of you, as this King was fond of John Donne. But in the end, you gave in to the wishes of the King or you had your head on a pike eventually instead. Donne was a survivalist, and he gave in to the King’s wishes eventually (after plenty of resistance). He didn’t want to end up like Sir Walter Raleigh or Christopher Marlowe, i.e. head removed or stabbed in the brain through the eye.

Later Donne realized that the King had been right about himself, and he himself had been wrong (about himself). Sometimes other people know us better than we know ourselves, even the King in some cases. Because Dr. Donne became famous in his own day as one of the greatest preachers not just England but all of Europe had ever produced. His sermons were hours-long, dramatic, driven, riveting affairs. Many men and some women gave hours-long, dramatic, driven sermons back then, but few were riveting like Donne’s were. He had attended the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays on a regular basis when Shakespeare still lived. Let me repeat that: Donne regularly attended the original productions of Shakespeare’s plays (such info as that requires pausing and brooding and marveling over, not glancing at it once, nodding the head, and back to scrolling the phone). Donne had learned the value and the techniques of the dramatic monologue and the now-famous soliloquy. His sermons became modern-day religious soliloquys that grappled with God as if God were not in the next room, but right there in front of him and everyone.

And everyone could tell, and knew, that Dr. Donne was dying as he climbed into the pulpit for the last time to deliver his final sermon. The fact that he was paler than a ghost, emaciated, and with hands trembling were just a few things that gave it away. This was also a man who’d recently posed for his own effigy, a statue that later disappeared into the basement of St. Paul’s before being returned to its pride of place a couple of centuries later. That is a cautionary tale about the reputations of great writers.

His last sermon was called “Death’s Duel.” In it, he ultimately extolled the figure of Jesus Christ, and said that if Christ could show us how to die, then the least we could do was die like he did, which meant (for Donne) bravely, fearlessly, or staring down the fear, conquering it. In certain gnostic texts, Jesus says, “It wasn’t ‘the real me myself’ who was crucified.” By this, he meant that there was something more in his spirit that rose above the mere body, far, far above the body. Socrates and Plato also believed the same thing.

Suzy Clemens and Dr. Donne both believed their illnesses were visitations from the Supreme Creator. Neither of them wanted to die, and they both struggled against it until their last breaths.

But also, for them, to them, and within them (this was what they believed), HE had finally arrived to take them home.

HER POEM: Suzy Clemens’ final, long, modernistic (before modernism existed) prose poem was partly addressed to a famous Spanish opera singer of the day, Maria Malibran, a figure who was very much akin to Lady Gaga, the best of Taylor Swift, and/or Amy Winehouse in our own day.

Here are seven sentences from Suzy’s (quite literally) death poem, a death poem that is riveting and even liberating, but not depressing. She wrote herself straight into the next life (or the eternal silence, whichever one prefers), literally; the lethal illness had been like an inspiriting drug:

“Greatness has no need of shunning.”

“She must give ear to these things not reluctantly but gladly.”

“They will inherit the greater darkness to come for this is retribution not vengeance.”

“She is a queen of God’s light but I am a queen of his darkness.”

“You cannot escape his creations.”

“The universe is united.”

“Love governs all thereby.”

Dale Barrigar

Poem 46 by Dale Barrigar

The following poem was composed by an old-man mystic with long white hair and a long white beard just before he disappeared into the mountains, for good:

“When the Tao prevails in the land /

The horses leisurely graze and fertilize the ground. /

When the Tao is lacking in the land /

War horses are bred outside the city. /

Natural disasters are not as bad as not knowing what is enough. /

Loss is not as bad as wanting more. //

Therefore the sufficiency that comes from knowing /

What is enough is an eternal sufficiency.”

This poem (#46 from the Tao Te Ching, see End Note re: the translator) was written 2,400 years or so ago, and it is as urgent and relevant now as the crumbling, fumbling, brutal, half-assed empire we see all around us right now in late June, 2026, when it will soon be the 250th b-day of the good ol’ United States of America. For the record, over two million people are currently incarcerated in the USA right now, the largest prison population of any nation on the Planet.

I reside in the middle of the country, which is to say the center of the nation, in more ways than one and to say I have an ambivalent relationship with Uncle Sam (personally) is the understatement of the century so far.

When it comes to the dreaded subject of politics these days, in many ways I follow one of my lifelong idols and heroes, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, who railed against figures like Tricky Dick, Ronnie Rayguns, and the lethally boring George Bush/es from his well-known hide-out in the mountains of Colorado.

Anything but “politically correct,” Dr. Thompson was also anything but a Republican and he often saw the white man as the pure demon that is depicted in Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, and The Great Gatsby, among other books penned by white men who were not afraid to critique and even attack (in writing) their so-called own kind.

My own hide-out is in an urban adjunct of Chicago on the second floor so I can see them coming. I don’t have a gun in here but I do have a large, wolf-like dog who knows karate and his two best friends. You will have to take all four of us out at once if you’re gonna get us.

Our current president is Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the George Bush Squad all mushed together and inflated to legendary proportions and with generous helpings of Nero and Mussolini thrown in. He is all that and more and he is even bigger than that in many ways, in truth. America has built him all on its own and he is utterly gigantic, like a hulking skyscraper, or like the Incredible Hulk who has somehow turned inexplicably orange instead of green (it can’t only be the make-up). You can also visit (no joke) the (online) Trump Store, which has made many, many millions of dollars during his presidencies selling things like gold sneakers, fake Bibles, three-thousand-dollar watches that were made for three bucks in China, and other wonderful items, like a guitar with bald eagles on it – also made in China. Many presidents have been lying pieces of shit, but never before have we had the privilege of having an actual snake oil salesman in the White House, until now.

You get what you deserve, that is, what you vote for. Profound ignorance rules the day as well as a certain FUCK-THIS (and fuck-you) attitude that comes from being treated like shit for so many years. (I admire his energy even as I am made nauseous by his motives and motivations.)

All I can say right now is that giving Donnie, aka the Fat Don, all the attention is everything of what he wants and nothing of what he deserves.

That goes for those who hate his guts as well as all those who love him to pieces.

END NOTE: Thank you to Charles Muller for his wonderful translation of the Tao Te Ching, 2005.

Dale Barrigar

Sixteen Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

They say Sappho may have been a kind of prostitute, at least some of the time. They say the same thing about Mary Magdalen. I can believe it, although I can’t say that I know it. If they were prostitutes, I know they did it with the same flair for originality with which they did everything else. ’Nuff said on that topic.

Because I don’t know if Sappho was a prostitute; but I do know that she said this:

“It is the Muses //

Who have caused me /

to be honored: they /

taught me their craft.”

Survival is the first art. You can’t create art when you’re dead, at least not here. Many artists have not created any real art because they have died inside. They have let the world kill them; or they have handed the world the sword it needed to do the deed. Survival is the first art, the hardest art, the longest art, and the last art of all. Without it, you simply cannot get anything done.

Learning the craft is the second art. Reading and writing must be mixed with equal parts real experience or it ain’t worth (and it won’t ever be worth) shit.

The third art is doing it. You find out that you thought you were doing it all along but you were not doing it all along, and far from it. You were doing what can be called “getting ready to do it.” Which is just as crucial, because you can’t do it eventually without the proper preparation.

Staying alive; learning how to; and doing it right when the right time arrives.

Never question The Muses, even in those moments when you know (somehow) they’re full of it. They are holy, and that’s all you need to know to keep you going, even if you enter the phase of “afterglow,” which is the fourth phase (if it ever comes) in which you can’t exactly do it any more but now you can bask in it. Many who think they are “going” are really just stuck down in the herd muck; running very successfully on the hamster wheel, as it were and is. It takes balance to stay on the hamster wheel, but it isn’t going anywhere. And that is nothing against hamsters; it is only to point out that they aren’t lionesses and lions. And it is absurd to pretend that they are. Even in a fake mane – he’s still a hamster. Even at the highest rungs. Even in the White House (or anywhere else they tell you is important, like the end of the hall where your boss resides).

END NOTE: Endless thank you/s to Mary Barnard (1909 – 2001), who made the translation of Sappho used in this commentary. Her translations possess an Emily Dickinson-like intimacy and idiosyncrasy which must also be contained, in a different way, in the fragments of Sappho.

Dale Barrigar

18 Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

Sappho says this:

“Now, while we dance //

Come here to us, /

gentle Gaiety, /

Revelry, Radiance, //

and you, Muses /

with lovely hair”

The MOVEMENT in all sections of the poem is always to something new, from something that is fully defined. Progression, development, fulfillment, all in eighteen words.

The “dance” can be likened to what Nietzsche said about his hero Zarathustra, that his walk was a dance, that his walk was so lively that it recalled a dance and could be likened to a dance and that he danced that dance and walked that walk whether he was in town or out of it, once he had become himself, that is.

“Gentle Gaiety, Revelry, Radiance,” recalls Charles Baudelaire’s command to “Always be drunk! On wine, poetry, virtue, or what you will, but be drunk!” The wine itself isn’t important; the drunkenness is, an injunction which has inspired many august souls from Rimbaud to Dylan Thomas to William S. Burroughs and Bob Dylan. The wine itself (or the drugs, or the love) is never more than a means to an end.

And the end is THE MUSES, who are the ones with lovely hair.

Sappho and her cohorts all believed in the literal existence of “The Muses,” that is, they believed them to be gods, i.e. transcendent forces worthy of worship, eminently and ultimately worthy of worship, and therefore worthy of dying for, too, if that’s what it took.

They were only humans like us but because of what they believed and how they lived it, they may have been (among) the best of us.

Dale Barrigar

Nine Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

(Note: Whether he be DWB, Dale Williams Barrigar, Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar or never seen at the same time as the Drifter, we are pleased to show work by Dale Barrigar!)

Hello! The Tao Te Ching says this:

“Greatness entails transcendence. /

Transcendence entails going-far. /

Going-far entails return.”

“Greatness” here is a you-choose type of situation.

Whether it be in dispensing the milk of human kindness, creating art that will outlive your own time, becoming the most passionate football or Taylor Swift fan who ever looked out over fields or stage, or any other area of endeavor, greatness is up to the one who wishes to become great, entirely. When the definition of “great” is in the right ballpark, then the wishing-to-become-great becomes already-in-itself an aspect of greatness. Not all of us, and probably not even most of us, will truly be able to reach our so-called goal/s here in this life. That is as it has been, as it should be, and as it ever shall be, too.

The important thing is to have a goal that is NOT an end-point destination. The important thing is to want greatness, and to live like it. And to not let them tell you otherwise. Or if they do tell you otherwise (and they will), not to believe them. Giving someone a silent stare and then turning around and walking away is the greatest rebuff I can ever imagine.

“Transcendence” here means to rise above your worst self here in this world (and all that entails). If you’re looking to get to heaven in the afterlife, it should console you to know that all the major religions say (in one way or another) that the way to get to heaven in the afterlife is to transcend your worst self here, in this life. It’s akin to what the great psychologist Carl Jung meant in a mostly secular sense when he talked about confronting, and mastering, your own dark side. And for Jung, such behavior also led to modern spiritual enlightenment.

“Going-far” can be seen in the phrase “going the distance,” which means finishing the fight, finishing the journey, NOT BEING A QUITTER. No Quitters Allowed. And there is nothing to quit from when you realize that your goal is the way you live your life every day, NOT a specific destination like winning a prize, making a million bucks, becoming “famous,” or any of the other ephemeral and illusory trappings that are pushed so hard by our Consumer/ist Society, where the Almighty Dollar is the one and only real religion. It simply isn’t true, at all, that only the rich and famous are worth anything.

What it means to “return” is up to you to decide. And the decision, once made, should never be final.

The word entail = that it has to be there, that it cannot not be there, and that if it is not there, the whole thing falls apart. And at that point, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world – your world, that is. Your own private world, which is where it all begins, and ends, now, yesterday, tomorrow, and forever. Never let The Algorithm tell you otherwise!

END NOTE: Thank you to Charles Muller for his wonderful translation of the Tao Te Ching (2005).

Dale Barrigar

The Girl in the Dark Glasses by The Drifter

“So shall I live, supposing thou art true…” – William Shakespeare

Himself (or he) and a few of his drunken writer friends left the bars and ventured out in the daytime, over to the sprawling apartment complex on the edge of town known as The Woodpile.

It was known as The Woodpile because it looked like a gigantic, sprawling, castle-sized, small-medieval-city-sized pile of wood with corridors, stairs, doorways, windows, alleyways everywhere and it housed a wide assortment of souls, from the folks who used to be known as Welfare Mothers to poor struggling students from the university to Welfare Mothers who were poor struggling students at the university to shady guys who sold many kinds of drugs, including ganja, aka weed, which was the reason himself and his few drunken writer friends had decided to venture over there and visit The Woodpile. Later they would branch out into more hardcore pharmaceuticals which is also part of this story but at this point they limited themselves to marijuana and the ever-present cigarettes and alcohol, which were always and forever the main attraction. The drugs were always a side avenue, a mode of further exploration, but never the center of the rodeo, at least back then. None of it was ever about escaping, and all of it was always about seeking; or, it was only about escaping if the escape entailed seeking. If you were only going to leave him a single thing out on the trail it would’ve been the cigarettes he would’ve chosen (and coffee) because of the way he believed they affected the writing mind, that is, enhanced it. Eventually he would quit because he didn’t want to go out gasping for breath if he could help it and he got sick and tired of emptying ashtrays and chasing down the supply – but that day would be a long time in coming and nothing in this world is ever permanent.

The Woodpile also had a pool and she was there at the pool and one of his friends knew her because she was the girlfriend of another friend. They found themselves then at the pool and she laid there all calm in her chair in her bikini with her sunglasses on, her toenails and fingernails painted bright red, and looked up at all four of the men.

The other three were standing there trying to talk to her but it was him, the only one of the group who was ignoring her, that she focused on. He could tell she was staring at him from behind her sunglasses. At one point, she silenced the rest of them with a wave of her hand with the cigarette in her fingers and her drink in the other hand, and said, “What, doesn’t he have anything to say?”

He didn’t, and they got their weed and left The Woodpile and he didn’t see her again until a few weeks later at a Vietnamese restaurant. It was the same group of drunken-writer-friend people with a few new folks thrown in and she was there with her boyfriend, sitting right beside her boyfriend at the large table, and ignoring her boyfriend and focusing on him (the main character of this story) again. This time, she was also wearing her sunglasses, even though they were inside the low-light restaurant. And she wore her sunglasses throughout the entire meal which also included (of course, of course) a ton of drinking, unto the point of sloppiness, spillage, and even someone/s falling down.

And then the third time he saw her was a few weeks later on the steps of the university library. Once again she had the sunglasses on, but this time it was just the two of them.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself now?” she asked him.

He didn’t but he gave her a look that told her he was interested in who she was and right after he gave her that confirming look he realized she already knew he was interested, and then he realized that he’d already known she knew it a long time ago.

He was a graduate student in the creative writing program, twenty-seven years old, but he didn’t really see himself as an official student in the program (even though he was one); instead he saw himself more as someone who was there to overturn, and/or upset, everyone’s apple cart (if he could). (And because he didn’t know where else to go perhaps.)

She was a twenty-two-year-old graduate student in psychology who would later tell him that her main goal was to sell out, write a book, and make it onto the Oprah show. And he never knew whether she’d been joking about that or whether she’d been serious. Probably both, which is why I don’t ask her, it often occurred to him, although he was never sure about that as he was never sure about many, many myriads of things with her.

The year was 1997 which means, among other things, that it was a time when people still went to bars to talk to each other and swap stories, not just scroll on the phone and stare at generic, advertising-laden, too-colorful, corporate sports being loudly broadcast on massive screens covering every single wall in the place.

He was at that point in his young marriage where he knew it was over and his wife knew it was over and it was SO over that he wasn’t even sure his wife wasn’t cheating on him, and some of him didn’t even care too much. In the not-so-distant future he would discover that she was indeed cheating on him but by that time it didn’t matter quite so much either since he, by that time, was now cheating on her as well.

The fourth time he “ran into” the girl in the sunglasses (he always thought of her as a girl somehow, even though he knew very well she was a woman too) was at the bar called Harry’s Uptown which was a place where university drunks hung out, along with other assorted riffraff and ne’er-do-wells of the I-love-the-booze-too-much-and-I-love-it-more-than-a-comfortable-homelife-with-the-wife-and-kids-or-husband-and-kids variety.

He had become restless lately, very restless, and he spent most of his time at night driving around shady areas of the town and out into the Great Plains that surrounded the town drinking and driving.

He did most of his drinking in that fashion lately, and it was rare for him to go into a bar in the last few weeks, very rare. Then he walked into the dark bar and she was sitting there at the bar, by herself, wearing the sunglasses.

As he walked in, she looked up at him and stared straight at him with the sunglasses on, even though it was past ten o’clock at night, and even though the bar was a dark one.

Despite himself, he was terrified, which is not to say freaked out, and his impulse was to turn around, walk out, run for his car and get the hell away.

But his stronger impulse was not to leave and he walked in, went around to the opposite side of the bar, sat down, ordered a beer and a shot, and lit up a cig’, pulling the ashtray over toward himself.

She was sitting directly across from him on the other side of the bar, a half-empty beer and an all-the-way empty shot glass in front of her, a burning cigarette between her fingers. And she was wearing the sunglasses and she was staring at him.

Then she gathered her things together, and with a burning cigarette and a half-full beer bottle in one hand and her purse and some other items in her other hand, she came around the side of the bar and sat down right next to him.

She smelled so good he almost fell off his bar stool. The combination of whatever it was that made her smell so good swept over him like something only a powerful goddess could conjure. And he thought of her as some sort of powerful goddess starting right then.

That was the exact moment when she took off the sunglasses.

Her eyes amazed him even more than her powerful, positive odor like a wind from across foreign seas.

Deeply dark and brown, and almost black, with long lashes, and myriad lights and shades in them, he suddenly saw that she was a seer, she was a seer who could read the souls of humans in the sense that it would be very hard to pull the wool over her eyes in any kind of meaningful way, at least for most people, that is.

Her hair was long, dark brown, sometimes black.

Her skin was an odd combination of olive-colored and exceedingly pale. It was like her skin color was two colors at once, light olive-colored and pale, deeply pale, so pale that you wondered why it was so pale while also feeling as if it bowled you over in its smooth, perfect olive paleness.

She had a way of holding the burning cigarette between her fingers that was unlike the way he’d ever seen anyone else do it. And she never stopped smoking, not even while in the shower. There was an ashtray on the bathroom sink next to the shower.

Looking at her eyes from behind the shades for the first time, there was an utterly uncanny Already-Know-You feeling that he’d never felt with anyone before, although he would feel it a few times again with other people in the future he didn’t know about yet.

Before very long, it became necessary for them to hide from the world, for a very wide assortment of reasons.

One of them was his wife, whose boyfriend was also looking for them so he could tell his girlfriend (the main character’s wife) that he’d seen them together.

Another reason was her boyfriend, who she wanted to cut it off with and had mostly done so except she hadn’t quite been able to bring him the news yet in a way that was fully convincing for him and so we better avoid it at all costs.

Another reason was a famous writer who was a visiting lecturer at the university this semester and who’d seen the two of them together, and also gotten drunk together with the two of them and several other writers more than once. This famous writer was a slime ball con artist who wanted her and he (the main character of this story) did not trust him one iota and was able to imagine all kinds of horrible things he might do.

A fourth reason was the girlfriend of one of the drunken-writer friends who knew he (the main character) was married and who also had a crush on him. In a drunken phone call one night when his wife was out again and with Bob Dylan’s Desire on the tape deck in the background, she threatened to tell his wife the whole story (and his wife did not know the whole story, at least not yet and, it would turn out in the long run, ever. The main character remains as wily as Huck Finn – because he has had to).

Another reason was the entire Psychology Department and the entire English Department at the university. It was a big small town or a small big town and a lot of people knew people who knew other people who knew people who said things about things that had absolutely nothing to do with them at all. Both of them, meaning him and her, were paranoid to begin with and this situation that had gotten completely out of control made both of them super-uneasy. It had gotten out of control because they’d fallen in love, genuinely, deeply, and for real.

And so it became necessary to hide out in a shady motel on the edge of town much of the time.

The year, as stated previously, was 1997 so shady motels were affordable, as were diner restaurants, cigarettes, and alcohol, four key, and indeed essential (at the time) items.

The shadiness of hiding out in a shady motel somehow led directly to other forms of shadiness, the shadiest of all being Sigmund Freud’s favorite drug of all time (except nicotine): COCAINE. (At one point SF almost believed it could almost be a cure-all for everything; and he took it for many years as a cure-all for all of his own things.)

One of their all-time favorite pastimes together in the shady motel was to read the works of Sigmund Freud out loud to each other and then discuss (while smoking and drinking, of course). Later they graduated to Carl Jung. And sometimes threw in philosophers like Nietzsche (Zarathustra) and Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling). And sometimes pulled out the Gideon Bible from the nightstand. They did not consider cocaine and the Bible to be mutually exclusive. Rather they were seen as sublime enhancers of one another. The coke made the book glow and the book gave everything a reason. And this synchronicity matched their exalted relationship.

She knew a guy and so it was always her who went and got the coke. Also, that was the way things often got done in his world, he told himself. He was a helpless passive observer and it took other people of more competence and perspicuity to do the things he couldn’t manage on his own. He barely knew what a bank account was and he didn’t remember where the coke dealer lived. He handed her a handful of money, took a hit of his cig’ and she took care of it while taking a hit off her own.

So she was the coke-getting person. But one night, after she went out to get more, she didn’t come back.

He’d saved a few snorts wrapped in a little piece of paper and he had the typed pages of a story he was working on to hang out with so he wasn’t jonesing much but after an hour had passed and she still hadn’t returned, he started to get nervous, folded up the pages of the story, and put them away. He always had a pen in his pocket, shirt or pants.

The year was 1997 and so, of course, ordinary people did not carry phones upon their persons at all times.

Back then, when someone disappeared, they disappeared plain and simple, and then they either resurfaced of their own accord (the usual mode) or they did not.

And after two hours now, she had not.

He walked out into the parking lot of the motel and then across a vast ditch in the night. The smell of the night air was so fresh all it did was remind him of her. The motel was literally on the edge of the town and he walked up a rise in the dark night and over a small hill and then he stopped on top of another hill and looked out over the utterly vast, oceanic spaces of the Great Plains in one direction and the Flint Hills in the other as they plunged on under the black sun forever or as long as the Planet lasts. At one point this place was a gigantic sea with sharks as large as whales chilling their bones. Now there were antelope, deer, hawks, golden eagles, rattlesnakes, coyotes, cattle out there in abundance and he felt almost as if he could feel the spirits of the animals everywhere flowing through him. The town only existed in the robust form it did because of Boeing Aircraft and oil and Wyatt Earp had once been the sheriff here, before he switched sides and became a gangster again. If she didn’t come back soon he didn’t know what he would do but he was starting to feel very, very, very, very, very desperate, and uneasy, now. He had continued to wear his wedding ring through this whole thing and while she never said a word about it, he sometimes caught her glaring in that direction.

She came back about an hour later. She was so wasted, so high and drunk, and wearing the sunglasses, that he was at a total loss, especially when it turned out she didn’t have the drugs, either, and couldn’t exactly explain why, despite all her trying. She was literally mumbling-incoherent now and before too long her babbling about nothing turned into less than nothing and she passed out in the motel bed, so crashed out that he kept checking her breathing just to make sure. She was breathing all right. And he could also smell it on her. If she hadn’t had sex with someone else while she was gone, he wasn’t standing in a motel room with her right now staring down at her sleeping while chugging another beer and opening his fourth pack of Marlboro Lights for that day (they always bought them by the carton on the Indian reservation before they hit the motel).

But in the morning with her smiling at him, he wasn’t so sure about the sex-and-cheating thing. And he kept telling himself that it wasn’t really cheating when you weren’t even officially together anyway. And he kept rehearsing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old ideas about Free Love within his own mind. Even if she’d been with someone else, what did he really care? But he did care. He didn’t want to care, but despite himself, or his self, he very much did care. Yet: don’t be such a square, he lectured himself, borrowing the worn-out terminology.

Seven or so years later he met up with their old drunken-writer friend Von Achenbach on Halsted Street in Greektown, Chicago in order to catch up, swap tales, relive old times, drink beers (and whisky) and chain down cigarettes.

Von had always known her pretty well and he now claimed with confidence that he had known the coke dealer too.

And he said that he had inside information. Which he was only imparting because he cared about the truth.

Because, Von said, she had been having an affair, or “a thing,” with the coke dealer both before and during, and also after, the thing she and he (the main character of this story) had had between them.

By that time he (the main character of this story) lived in Chicago and she (the girl in the dark glasses) lived in Miami. He was a poverty-stricken, “unknown” writer struggling to get by and she was already the acting director of the psych department at a well-known hospital down there, even though she herself was at least half crazy much of the time, like anyone in this civilization who is sane. And we must know that these few sane ones are few but do endure among us, even if we never see them.

He never asked her what the truth was and he never decided whether he really did or did not want to know the truth.

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)

Under the Bridge by Christopher J Ananias

Clinching dirty white handlebar tape. Hot magnolia breeze in my teeth. Peddling the yellow ten-speed, pumping, swerving, up a hill. Freewheeling down the other-side—the buzzing click-click-click—everything left behind for a while.

Do they even make ten-speeds now? I should have a little black transistor radio gray-taped to the handlebars with “Three Dog Night,” singing “Shambala” serenading the curious cows with their long eyelashes blinking over soft eyes, asking, “What is this life?”

The silver ripples in the distance. The undulating road swells, stretching in the summer fumes. I race toward the mirage, popping tar, but I can never catch it. What is this silver blur? Is this Shangrila?

I stop where the mirage was at the same distance it is now up ahead. For no reason I swerve right—right off the rocky berm. The fast whip of tall weeds cut into my bare ankles. Too much speed—a header. The flash of a creek. The yellow Schwinn lies on its side, yawning, getting off its rubber dogs for a minute.

The stench of slick gray mud sucks at my ragged Dockers. I step, unbeknownst, through a spider web—frantic swipes—it’s in my hair! Then I see under the bridge.

Christopher J Ananias (Photos also by CJA)

I Still Wither by Paul Tristram

(Note: This concludes our run of poetry by Paul Tristram. We hope to see more from him soon!–LA)

… when those mental Gallows shade the morning

greyer than the factory smoke of unfulfilled lives.

I saw an old man, shaking and sobbing

at the side of the street, one wrinkled hand

outstretched, downwards, at a Guillotine angle

… at the fresh, emotional roadkill there

“I told you that your ‘Heart’ would lead you here.”

Having a ‘Hole In Your Bucket’ is bad luck,

but, what’s more important is the… ‘Timing’.

“There’s only the ‘Cold Side’ of the Bed left!”

she screamed hysterically, again and again…

until everyone present ‘Frowned’ far too much,

and left her, to go and Learn how to better Manage

how to face their own internal Winter months alone.

You’re never selfish for Suffering,

unless you’re sharing it, trading ‘Ice’ for ‘Heat’

and draining the ‘Colour’ from another’s Welcome.

I never ‘Accept’ anything ‘Unpleasant’

… instead, I ‘Tolerate’ … like a Convict,

biding-his-time for the very first chance of Escape.

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Saragun Springs

Snarl at the Dying of the Light: Est. 2025 Seattle and Chicago

The Drifter Presents Mississippi

Saragun Verse: The Lament of the Failed Artist

No Person Is An Island by Dale Barrigar

Poem 46 by Dale Barrigar

Sixteen Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

18 Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

Nine Words to Live By by Dale Barrigar

The Girl in the Dark Glasses by The Drifter

Under the Bridge by Christopher J Ananias

I Still Wither by Paul Tristram