Month: August 2025

Howlin’ Wolf: Moanin’ at Midnight by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“You create yourself.”

– Ralph Ellison

If you want to get an idea of what it might have felt like to be near the Southern cottonfields of the United States prior to the Civil War, turn to your favorite music source, and play the song “Moanin’ at Midnight,” by Howlin’ Wolf, so often that it seeps into your bones and steeps your very soul.

Sam Phillips called “Moanin’ at Midnight” “the most different record I ever heard.”

Released as Wolf’s first single for Chess Records in Chicago in 1951, the B-side became much more popular for many years. It shows the way great art so often goes under the radar for months, years, decades, or centuries after its creation, and also how it so uncannily returns.

Chester Arthur Burnett of West Memphis became Howlin’ Wolf and moved to Chicago in 1953, which can thereby be named the first year of rock and roll.

In France, “Waiting for Godot” was premiering in a small theater to boos and gasps, reflecting the modern feeling of absurdity/ambivalent hope. “The Crucible” was opening in New York, reflecting the hysteria of the McCarthy hearings. Hank Williams, the cowboy Shakespeare, had just died in the back seat of his automobile on the way to yet another show. Charles Bukowski, Post Office employee and classical music expert, was 33. “Wise Blood,” by silent, brooding Flannery O’Connor, was one year old.

In “Moanin’ at Midnight,” in less than three minutes, with less than sixty words, and with one drum, one harmonica, one electric guitar, and one massive, utterly unique voice that could probably only come from a man who was six feet three inches tall and weighed 275 pounds, Wolf creates an artistic masterpiece that is also a human and historical document as valuable, in its own way, as the Mona Lisa.

The song is also a tale of terror that could only have been created by a black person in America before the Civil Rights Movement; and a story so universal it can rightly be said to belong beside one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or one of Robert Burns’ haunting Scottish border ballads about the continuance of love after death.

The ringing telephone in the song’s lyrics reminds the reader/listener that paranoia, anxiety, and deathly fear cross all boundaries in time and space. The knocking on the door in the song, like the knocking at the gate in “Macbeth,” reminds the hearer that IT is coming for all of us one of these days, no matter your race, creed, color, gender, opinions, or bank account.

Howlin’ Wolf’s moaning, humming, singing, talking voice in this song is so absolutely, finally, terrifyingly, consolingly uncanny, that it cannot be accurately described in words. It only invites failure to attempt to do so. Henry Miller called music as an art form, “absolutely sufficient unto itself” because it “tends toward silence.” If you’re alive, Wolf’s voice will give you the chills, and thrills, give you goosebumps, and increase your heart rate all at the same time, conjuring up some feeling from childhood you’ve never been able to name or live down. Play it loud. Play it very loud. Over and over again.

At the age of 43, after time in jail and the army, Wolf drove to Chicago for the first time in his own Cadillac, having made money on the radio in the Memphis area. Like Muddy Waters, he eventually moved to the Chicago suburbs, where he lies buried. He ran with fast women. He intimidated dangerous men. He lived with pit bulls. He wasn’t a man to cross the color line, he was a man to explode it or pretend it didn’t exist, depending on his mood, or who he was staring down at the moment.

“Moanin’ at Midnight” is a song that is almost part of nature. He was channeling a world as much as he was conjuring up THE world and creating it all in a picture whose psychology is so deep and profound it’s downright Jungian. He didn’t know how to read, they say. But he knew everything there is to know about the human soul. He was as much Jesus-like teacher from the Book of Mark as devilish blues musician from the Deep South. He was a professor of the blues and of life itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, Wolf played more shows on college campuses than anywhere else. His teaching was deep and profound, filled with consolations, challenges, provocations, and indelible gifts.

Frederick Douglass, a writer and American visionary who makes a fourth with Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, wrote of the slave songs, “Those songs still follow me.” It was long after he had bested the slave-master in a physical fight and escaped to the north, where he would eventually meet in person, and influence, none other than Abraham Lincoln.

Douglass also wrote, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” In many ways a far too under-sung, and even unknown, American master, and hero, Howlin’ Wolf gets the last laugh as his voice, spirit, and genius live on.

The Rolling Stones: Memory Motel by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

The Stones’ song, “Memory Motel,” from their 1976 album, “Black and Blue,” is an overlooked and underappreciated masterpiece. This story-song is well worth looking at and listening to again. And again and again. One of their very best works, it’s a shining, enduring example of the Anglo/English ballad tradition which was incorporated into the black American blues idiom and then re-worked again by white singers and groups like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, and later on to the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Van Morrison, and Eric Clapton, leading to crucially important artists of today like Nick Cave; Lana Del Rey; Taylor Swift (“All Too Well (Sad Girl Autumn Version)”); Snoop Dog; Eminem; Bonnie “Prince” Billy; Conor Oberst (of Nebraska); and Wilco.

These cross-cultural exchanges, sometimes violently resisted by mainstream society, were moral acts which led to more than just rock and roll, bending the arc of the human universe toward greater justice by vastly increasing integration and racial equity throughout the world. Real music isn’t just music, from Bach, Beethoven and Mozart to now.

“Memory Motel” is a song which connects everyone by exploring the gnawing ache in the bones of lost love and the passing of time which all humans experience, no matter their race, creed, income levels or gender. In seven minutes and seven seconds, in a song recorded in Germany, the Stones tell the tale of a heartbreaking, breathtaking love affair starring a beautiful, hazel-eyed, long-haired, wild-haired woman who grabs the guitar from the hands of her man; drives a green and blue, broken-down pick-up truck; and sings genius songs in a bar in Boston. The narrator is an equally brilliant rock singer on the road. The setting a haunted motel on a remote seashore.

Shakespeare’s Juliet, Robert Burns’ Highland Mary, William Wordsworth’s Lucy, Keats’ Fanny Brawne, Mary Shelley, and Byron’s half-sister Augusta Leigh are all somehow drawn together in this intense mini-drama told in the idiom of the English blues.

Long-haired, unshaven, shirtless, piratical Richards, holding a Jack Daniel’s bottle and a cigarette, absconds on the guitar and only sings for most of this piece, which means he’s bringing everything he can to his vocals; while long-haired, unshaven, checkered sport coat-wearing, show-biz Jagger pounds the piano keys as if they were a typewriter and he were trying to write an entire Emily Bronte romance novel within one song (bottle of Jack Daniel’s next to his ankle and his red socks on).

Richards enters the song half way through as a third character in a shadowy performance worthy of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s rival, establishing an emotional threesome in the song’s situational dynamics that lends a profound layer to this public closet drama. His voice continually praises the intellectual and emotional uniqueness of this special woman, never expressing jealousy or anger, but sometimes grief at her loss. The mainstream cliches about Keith are completely undercut by his progressive feminist perspective and his depth of emotional expression in this autobiographical story performance, which is heart-breaking, realistic and long-enduring in human terms.

(Keith only sings co- or lead vocals on a double handful of Stones tunes. Almost every one of them is one of their best works.)

Richards co-wrote a fascinating, Hemingwayesque autobiography called “Life.” He was an obsessive reader of Byron at one point. The Byron who went around the higher levels of English society with gigantic dogs, a laudanum bottle, and sometimes a monkey (or a trained bear at college). Byron’s girlfriends and friends were collaborators, competitors, and rivals. One of his beautiful, regal, and intellectually intimidating ladies labeled him, the great lord, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Memory Motel” implies this kind of tragic history, as surely as Mick Jagger read aloud portions of Shelley’s elegy for Keats, “Adonais,” in honor of Brian Jones. (Jones is a member of the eternal 27 Club. Keats was 25 upon dying. Percy Shelley was 29. Wordsworth was 80. At this writing, Jagger and Richards are 81 and 80, recently on tour here in Chicago, home of Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and where the Stones recorded their second album sixty years ago in 1964.)

“I hit the bottle, I hit the sack and cried.”

As I grow older, every time I go back to my own Memory Motel, I hear more.

I had become a failed literature professor at the age of 52, because they took my job away. Also, another relationship had ended. I couldn’t bear to keep the photos of her and us, nor place them in the dumpster either. So I took one of the small, black-and-white, photo-booth photos of beautiful, genius, red-haired her from when we were on our trip to Nashville seeing a retrospective of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash at the Country Music Hall of Fame. And I placed the photo deep in the middle of a library book which I put in the middle of a bunch of other library books I returned.

A librarian named Veronica called the next day and returned the photo to me.

John Lennon: The Revelator By Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“Marley was dead: to begin with.”

– Charles Dickens

John Lennon in his Pickwick glasses is like a character from a Charles Dickens novel, or much like Dickens himself in his concern for social justice and his endless sympathy for the literal, and figurative, orphan, outsider, and underdog.

Lennon can also fruitfully be compared to another English writer of the nineteenth century who rivals Dickens in staying power and popularity. Like Lewis Carroll and his beloved, living Alice, Lennon’s life was all about expanding the mind, and through the mind, the heart.

Lennon was crucified by his own fame in the form of one of his own fans. This early, dramatic death catapulted him to another level in the modern pantheon of heroes and secular saints, just as Van Gogh’s lonely death would eventually elevate him in the same way. Before Lennon was wrenched away from this earth in the literal sense, he created a body of work that yet remains here to be explored in order to uncover its true depth, importance, and hidden meanings. His simple, straightforward, and mysterious writing style will last a very long time, probably at least as long as Dickens and Carroll themselves.

Lennon’s work with Paul McCartney and the Beatles is, of course, a whole other universe unto itself. But perhaps it’s in Lennon’s solo work that we can most fully take the measure of the man and the evolving, never-resting artist (for the artist is working even while dreaming), and the continued meaning of his words and music for the world at large.

Lennon began to move decisively away from McCartney and into his work as a solo songwriter on the brilliant, fragmented, cohesive, novelistic, experimental, James-Joycean double record now known most widely as “The White Album.” In three songs especially from this album, Lennon stakes out his own territory as an emerging, Dylanesque solo artist.

“Happiness is a Warm Gun,” “I’m So Tired” and “Dear Prudence” set the stage for his eventual movement away from the Beatles as the 1960s ended and into his brilliant, solitary decade of the 1970s before the artistic crucifixion in 1980 ended it all at the age of 40 (the exact age when Kafka and Poe, two other short-form writers of worldwide importance who surely influenced Lennon (whether he read them or not), also died).

“Happiness” explodes the tired and worn-out conventions of song-writing. “Tired” laments weariness in general, and weariness with old, worn-out worlds. “Prudence” is an invitation to something new and dear.

In a double or triple-handful of classic songs from the coming decade of the 1970s, the last decade he would have left, Lennon expanded both his writing skills and his persona and stance as a democratic humanitarian, a worker for peace, justice, and love who has few equals in this regard. The writing reinforced the anti-authoritarian persona and personality, and the anti-establishment stance buttressed the writing at all levels. The wonder and the artistic miracle of it is that Lennon also never became an ideologue, a propagandist, or a politician.

He perhaps became a sloganeer at his worst moments. But he always managed to rise above it again to assert the power of pure writing, which made his art for peace that much more effective. It leads us back to Dickens, who in some senses seems to have created John Lennon. Lewis Carroll’s open-minded, exploratory writing also undermined authoritarianism, hatred, greed, and war, in a way that was so pure and effective it was almost invisible at times.

Paradoxically, the invisibility seeps into the culture and effects real change in a way that politics and politicians can only dream of. This is why Percy Bysshe Shelley, another English radical fighting the bad guys, thinking of John Milton, called true poets, “The unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The phenomenon undergoes changes in mode and method of action; but it never goes away. In indigenous cultures, the figure of the shaman, trickster, and medicine person carried and carries much of these responsibilities and burdens.

“Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey” is another song written exclusively by Lennon which appeared on The Beatles’ “The White Album” and was an omen of things to come. A seeming piece of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear nonsense writing, it’s crucial to note that the greatest nonsense wordsmithing is never about only nonsense, just as the best nursery rhymes are not only for children.

McCartney believed the song was about heroin usage. Lennon’s anti-establishment stance would take many forms in the era of Richard Nixon. One of these forms was Lennon’s belief, and life action, like Sigmund Freud earlier, that the individual should be free to use and explore drugs as s/he saw fit, without the government intruding its heavy, uncaring, impersonal hand. It started when Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana in New York City. The sacred weed later led to LSD, and, for Lennon, cocaine and heroin usage. Ironically, in the era of the alcoholic, paranoid, pill-popping Tricky Dick, Lennon’s song was prophetic in very many other ways as well. All members of the Beatles had always been heavy cigarette-smokers and alcohol-drinkers. Their expansion into other drugs was a sign of the times as personal freedoms were skyrocketing.

And it also led to the song that is often cited as John Lennon’s first solo writing performance, completely free of Paul McCartney: “Cold Turkey,” a piece that was supposedly rejected by the band. Like all Lennon’s work, this story about withdrawing from opioid usage has only become more relevant with time as usage of this form of drugs has spread and become far more popular in the general population at large.

“Cold Turkey” introduces a desperate, naked, screaming, wailing, withdrawing Lennon backed by punk-rock guitar long before punk rock existed. Anyone who’s gone through this sort of withdrawal, or witnessed someone else going through it, or both, will instantly recognize the skin-crawling, nightmarish desperation of this personal hell on earth, which Lennon bravely shares in a forum that exposes his weakness for all to see, bringing confessional writing to another level in modern English.

Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that writers, musicians, and artists have always loved the buzz, whether it be from caffeine, food, alcohol, nicotine, or other drugs, walking, nature, or love. Teenaged Arthur Rimbaud, who influenced Bob Dylan so heavily, riffing on Charles Baudelaire, father of the cursed poets, codified this buzz-love in one of his “Seer” letters to a personal friend when he said that the purpose was an “intentional derangement of all the senses” (including the sixth sense) that led to higher forms of consciousness.

Charles Dickens’ Opium Sal from “Edwin Drood,” plus Dickens himself, and Carroll’s hookah-smoking caterpillar, also promoted this type of behavior, as did Freud with his endless cigar-smoking and cocaine experimentation and usage, or Beethoven, Goethe, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare with their alcohol abuse. The flipside is the famous, eternal “27 Club,” almost all of whose members died so tragically young from alcohol, drugs or some combination of the two.

Lennon’s “Cold Turkey” compresses Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas de Quincy, and William S. Burroughs, one of the original three beats, into a song both courageously ahead of its time and backward-looking toward a complex, complicated problem that has always been and always will be with us. This is not pop music as feel-good distraction or toe-tapping laughability. It’s high art that questions, challenges, and provokes, like a poem by Keats, Byron, or Shelley. The language is simple and direct in a modern, or Hemingwayesque, style. The sentiments about sickness are never-ending in this mortal world.

“Gimme Some Truth,” another absolute solo song-writing masterpiece from John, tackles Tricky Dick directly, and by name. Nixon hated Lennon and kept trying to get him thrown out of the United States. John, at a great, paranoid cost to himself and his mental health, refused to leave, as a statement of world-wide personal freedom. He wouldn’t let the biggest bully on the block, at the moment, tell him what to do. It was an act and effort on Lennon’s part that was meant as an example for all bullied people to follow, an act of consolation and encouragement for the world.

Dylan wrote a personal, public letter saying, “Let John and Yoko stay!” In “Gimme Some Truth,” John Lennon stands up for anyone who’s ever felt abused or lied to, which is the same thing, by a hypocritical authority figure, whether it be teacher, preacher, boss, corporate spy, president, parent or other politician. The satiric nonsense writing in this piece is a nursery rhyme turned spiritual sword used against the big, bad eggs in the nest, who have always been there, and still need to be pushed out.

In “Working Class Hero,” a related but also very different song which has had a profound personal meaning for millions of people, including many of the people I know personally, Lennon continues the theme but switches tone and mode. “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,” has got to be one of the most devastating first lines ever penned in song, poem, or story. Lennon’s voice is somehow both monotonous and emotive at the same time as he continues to detail and outline the way society, and individuals, crush one another in this life for no real reason at all, unless it be for mere spite and general selfish nastiness.

Something of the savage misanthropy of Dr. Jonathan Swift for the way we do business these days, in the modern world, is embodied in this song. “Working Class Hero” eviscerates what people do to one another, adding up to one of the most tragic, heartbroken, angry, rebellious songs in the cannon. You wonder how it can be so very consoling in its utter despair, but it somehow is; no one but Lennon could have written this piece or any other of his idiosyncratic, idiomatic, universal laments or anthems to peace, love, and justice.

Because Lennon, like Dickens, Carroll, and Shakespeare himself, is the master of many more than one mode, and many of his songs from the 1970s have a whole-hearted, positive, and even religious quality, and vibe, that has endeared them and him to many more millions of people all around the globe, and continues to do so.

“Mind Games” is one of the very best and most iconic of these pieces. “Pushing the barrier, planting seed,” captures, in five words, Lennon’s lifelong project. “Soul power” says where and how Lennon wants to move the world. The “mind guerillas” are the rebels, the thinkers, the spiritual warriors, the people who refuse to go along with the mob, the crowd, and the herd, because what you don’t do is just as crucial and important as what you do, as Henry David Thoreau pointed out in both his life and work, moving to a cabin to live alone and penning “Civil Disobedience,” which massively influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.. The grail, the veil, and the Druid Dude in the song bring East, West, and indigenous together, today, tomorrow, and yesterday.

“Love is the answer, and you know that for sure,” Lennon sings and speaks, beautifully talking to the world. “I want you to make love, not war.” Like James Joyce’s Molly and Leopold Bloom, Lennon says that “yes is surrender.”

“Why is art beautiful?” asked Fernando Pessoa. “Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives, and intentions.” In “Mind Games,” Lennon, like Pessoa, in a few extremely potent words and images, argues for the beauty of uselessness.

The upbeat and popular “Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)” is a gorgeous companion piece to “Mind Games.” A memento mori, or death-reminder, piece, this song is also a global manifesto that infuses the religious point of view, and religion itself, with new and lively meanings for people everywhere. “Better recognize your brothers,” Lennon says, like Jesus. “Everyone you meet.” It also bemoans the derisive laughter which the mob mentality always throws out at “fools like me.”

“Power to the People” and “Give Peace a Chance” create, or reinforce, great phrases that have entered the language in the manner of Shakespeare or Robert Burns, poet and ballad-collector. The progressive, anarchistic, half-Marxian nature of these manifesto pieces which call for enduring change have endeared Lennon to many in the public sphere, helping to shape and create his status as vast humanitarian, a friend to working people and the lower orders of the social hierarchy everywhere, much like Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In “Mother,” “My Mummy’s Dead,” and “Julia” (another solo song-writing effort from “The White Album”), Lennon leaves the public sphere and delves and dives, like Freud and Jung, deep within the subconscious nature of every individual human. The Dickensian status of the orphan is explored as we are all exposed as orphans in these songs. Julia haunts the hearer by her absence, as do the mother and father in “Mother.” Lennon said this piece was about “all the parents, alive or half dead.” John Donne’s tolling bells begin the best version of this song. “Father, you left me, but I never left you” is one of Lennon’s most heartbreaking lines. “So I, I just got to tell you, goodbye. Goodbye.”

“My Mummy’s Dead” is a partial adaptation of “Three Blind Mice,” the English nursery rhyme and musical round. This song is so deeply, profoundly child-like, its uniqueness is starling, if not shocking, as in some of the poetry of Lewis Carroll. This song is so personal it’s almost embarrassing, which makes it about as brave a piece of writing as there can be. Popular music has once again broken through to another level in Lennon’s hands in the simplest, widest, most universal terms.

In “God,” Lennon tells his listeners what he truly believes in as he also consoles his audience for the loss of the Beatles and the end of the dream in the 1960s. In “Watching the Wheels,” from a decade later, John explains his Thoreau-like, Emily Dickinson-like, monkish retreat from the world and all its aims, objectives, and intentions.

“Happy Xmas (War is Over),” co-written with his genius wife and life collaborator, Yoko Ono, is one of the most beautiful and serious Christmas songs ever penned. It somehow leads directly into “Imagine,” Lennon’s most famous song, inspired by Yoko, and also inspired by the gift of a Christian prayer book from a friend. This song is part of the reason Lennon is the most recorded song writer of all time, surpassing his nearest rival, Paul McCartney. It famously calls for a peaceful world without materialism, religion and God, but Lennon explains that it “means this thing about my God is bigger than your God.” This song is such a well-known, world-wide anthem that it makes the case for Lennon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, if this award were given posthumously. Bob Marley, with “Redemption Song,” is a similar figure.

All the songs discussed in this essay, from around fifty years ago, more or less, sound exactly like they could have been made yesterday, or tomorrow. And almost all the songs talked about in this short paper are short. One of them is under one minute long. In 54 seconds, it manages to do more than a whole shelf full of albums by many another musical artist. The Mona Lisa, most famous painting in the world, focuses on a single, plainly dressed, unfamous woman, and it doesn’t even show her whole body. This kind of minimalism is a key (and a secret) to Lennon’s art.

According to a Wikipedia entry, the “tortured genius character” in fiction is characterized by “the burden of superior intelligence, arrogance, eccentricities, addiction, awkwardness, mental health issues, lack of social skills, isolation, other insecurities, and regular existential crises.” As a tortured genius character in real life, Lennon experienced and lived all of the above. To be a genius is to be misunderstood, said Ralph Waldo Emerson, who Harold Bloom called “the mind of America.”

After his mother’s sudden death when he was a teenager, Lennon drank and brawled for two years. He was later kicked out of college for these activities and other defiant behaviors. But Thomas Carlyle also pointed out that the true poet, thinker, and/or artist “can recognize how every object has a divine beauty.” Lennon lived, and expressed for all the world, this truth as well. In forty short, and long, years, he was able to give enough of himself so that if you know his work well, it’s like knowing a real person well: a best friend, forever.

Sam Shepard, on a level with Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, said (reflecting on himself) that the true artists are largely boring, or useless, to the average individual or the general population on the social level because the artist is always silently working within herself, and doing nothing else as much as possible, even in a room full of people.

Baudelaire said, “The true artist never emerges from himself.” What he creates is a different matter. Lennon’s songs emerged from himself, as in “Mind Games,” to enter our world and literally change it for the better, inspiring countless numbers of thinkers, artists, and rebels all over the globe, and permanently challenging the status quo until the world he envisioned in “Imagine” becomes a reality.

End note: The title of this essay was inspired by the a cappela Son House version of the classic folk/gospel song, “John the Revelator.” Just as I obviously recommend listening to and studying all of the Lennon songs discussed in this essay as an accompaniment to this reading, I recommend listening to, absorbing, and internalizing “John the Revelator” by Son House.

End note: I was informed of the passing on of Kris Kristofferson, another musical rebel at Lennon’s spiritual and artistic level, while writing the last paragraph of this essay on Sunday, September 29, 2024. Accordingly, my next work will be an essay exploring the life, work, and genius of Kristofferson.

Bob Dylan: Bard of the Old School by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

(Ed. Note: This week we are pleased to present works first published by our esteemed co-editor Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar in Literally Stories UK. The theme of the week is music. All through the weekend too. Dale has a wonderful way of injecting his passion and fresh insights into his work. I think you will agree–Leila)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” – Emily D.

“I is another.” – Rimbaud

Bob Dylan is a bard of the old school, and also of the school that never gets old.

Long after every single Hollywood movie ever made will be penned by androids, computers, zombies, vampires, and “AI,” scattered humans everywhere will still be searching out the work of Bob Dylan, whether to read or listen to it.

When Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” his longest song, in the middle of the Covid Pandemic, he confirmed that he deserves a Nobel Prize.

With a terrifying title from Shakespeare, this long song and short fiction is a mini-novel about the Kennedy assassination. And all assassinations, and all murders ever committed, now and in the future. Almost as if to prove that he’s a poet and story-teller more than a musician, Dylan doesn’t even sing this song. He speaks it. He tells the tale like an ancient bard, maybe even going as far back as Homer.

Dylan is often compared to Shakespeare, and for good reason. It could be that a more apt comparison is with the older writer. Homer, like Bob, spent his life traveling from town to town and speak-singing his story-songs to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. This image of Homer has been accepted for so long that it’s become a fact of fiction that tells the truth, as real as any other Greek mythology, from Zeus to Athena.

Dylan has always cited literary writers as some of his most important, if not his most important, influences. He claimed that “Blood on the Tracks” was inspired by Anton Chekhov’s short stories. He listed his two favorite writers as Emily Dickinson and Arthur Rimbaud. He read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in high school. He resurrected Charles Baudelaire in “Idiot Wind.” He said that all writers and artists should read John Keats and Herman Melville.

He acknowledged Walt Whitman’s genius. He went to the grave of Jack Kerouac and read Kerouac’s poetry aloud with Allen Ginsberg. He wrote his songs on a typewriter. He created an absurdist book of prose poems, and he composed a memoir that isn’t his best work but is highly readable, filled with signs of the times, then and now.

Someone once compared Bob Dylan to Ernest Hemingway, another writer for whom Dylan has expressed his approval. Both writers diagnosed their times, and fought the wars of their times. While Hemingway went to Italy as an ambulance driver, Dylan went to Mississippi as a liberal Jew who stood out in an open field and sang Civil Rights protest anthems, surely as dangerous as Hemingway heading to the front as a non-combatant who wanted to help injured soldiers.

Bob Dylan has already entered the ranks of great American authors. When we look back at history, we see that there are millions of authors who did not deserve a Nobel Prize, and many authors who did deserve it who didn’t receive it. Harold Bloom, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Jorge Luis Borges, James Joyce, and Leo Tolstoy are a famous half dozen of these. A hundred years from now (yes we will still be here), Dylan will be seen as a writer who deserved such a prize, and then some. His humanity, and his ways of expressing it in English story-language that never gets old-fashioned, will last a very long time, even, or especially, as the rest of the mainstream world continues to become more robotic, inhuman and tyrannical.

The Sunday Drifter: From the Academy: No More Literature Here

(Images provided by the Drifter)

“Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.”

– Oscar Wilde

LITERATURE, in its pure form, says The Drifter, is no longer taught in American universities.

What we have instead is economic grievance (usually from people who are already wealthy) and identity politics (also from wealthy people) masquerading as literary theory.

The pure spirit of Literature has been crucified, in the American academy. It was dead and bleeding on the cross. Now Joseph of Arimathea has disappeared with the body.

Charles Baudelaire, the first poet of the modern city, anywhere (his city was Paris) used to pray to the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe, just like a Catholic prays to a saint. (Baudelaire was also Catholic, perhaps the most unique Catholic who ever lived, or one of them.)

If you told someone in American academia these days that you pray to a Literary Saint, the cynical crowd would suddenly rear its ugly head and laugh you right off campus immediately, from coast to coast and everywhere in between.

For me, the two greatest literary critics, ever (in the English language), are Dr. Samuel Johnson, and Dr. Harold Bloom. Johnson died in 1784, at the age of 75. Bloom died in 2019, aged 89.

Both of these titanic and gargantuan figures (and they were both gargantuan and titanic physically, as well as spiritually and mentally) have been wildly and consistently misrepresented in the popular press. Ideas they never had are attributed to them; stances they never took are assumed to have been their own; and their personalities, the most important thing about each of them, have been distorted beyond all recognition.

But the works and the good writings about each of these figures still remain, as well as the visual representations (from which you can learn entire worlds) and large collections of quotations about them by people who knew them well or just came into contact with them for brief periods.

One of my favorite works by Samuel Johnson is his first full-length book, the short biography The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, sometimes known as Life of Savage, and whose full title is An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (whether or whether not Savage was really the son of the Earl was one of the things about him that was always in dispute and a large contributor to his renown, or infamy, because he claimed he was, and the Earl claimed he wasn’t – loudly).

Savage was a famous minor poet, sometime actor, fulltime alcoholic conman, and all-around good guy who Johnson was friends with for a time. They roamed the London streets together at all hours, sometimes sleeping rough when they had to, starving and drinking and trying to make a living as Grub Street hacks (sometimes partially succeeding at the latter).

After Savage died, impoverished, alone, well-known, and alcoholic, Johnson wrote his life, thereby penning one of the first deeply psychological biographies ever committed to paper. One reason I love this book so much is because Savage reminds me so totally of a person I once knew, a very close friend, with whom I got into so much trouble at that time it has to be saved for another column.

Johnson also wrote a kind of nonfiction novella called Rasselas. This book was one of the very first Western explorations of Buddhism ever written, a fictionalized, Westernized account of the Buddha’s story almost as if filtered through the story of Muhammad.

Johnson himself, as a man, was such a strong and powerful abolitionist, before abolitionists even existed, that slaves in the New World ended up naming their children Rasselas after his great character. Johnson later adopted a black child as a single father after the death of his wife, raised the boy into manhood, and left him his money and name when he passed on. Such things were so unheard of in the 18th century that hardly anyone understood Johnson’s point of view at all. They didn’t know that he had moved beyond racism in an era when no one even knew what “racism” was.

Johnson was a multiculturalist (in the sense that he believed, like Jesus, that everyone should be included) not decades, but centuries, before such a thing existed with a name, and he didn’t just preach it, he lived it. And yet, the English Departments of the American academy now mostly accuse him of being an ultra-conservative “dead white male” who deserves to be ignored, forgotten, and even “canceled.”

Such thinking and behavior only give fuel to the rising and rabid fascist tide among us, a situation that is like a flood and a fire at once within human culture itself and thereby demands the mixed metaphors.

Harold Bloom has also, seemingly endlessly whenever he is discussed, been accused of being a so-called political conservative, even though he never was anything of the kind at all, and even was the exact opposite, more of an imaginative and creative, one-of-a-kind anarchist in his politics than anything else. (“Anarchist” in the sense of placing the highest possible value on human freedom, and human expression, itself; it has nothing to do with the practice of political violence, or rather believes the practice of violence should always be avoided because when you practice violence you’re not free.)

Born in 1930 in NYC, Bloom did his best work after the age of 50 (once Ronnie Rayguns took over), and perhaps his very best work after the age of 70, even though everything he did before 50 was the basis for all that came after, and led to it.

Five of my favorite books by Bloom are: How to Read and Why (2000); Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (2003); Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003); The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011); and Falstaff: Give Me Life (2017).

This last book, a true and deep classic in Shakespeare studies, a brief book that takes the reader on a lasting tour of all things Jack Falstaff, was written and published just a few years before Bloom passed on at the age of 89. In its late 80s, one of the most powerful human minds of our times appeared to be getting stronger than it ever had been, not less so.

Harold Bloom was like Oscar Wilde in the way he took nonfiction writing about literature and raised it to the levels of the very highest and best imaginative literature itself. Bloom said that William Shakespeare was his ultimate model, as opposed to any critical writers he’d ever known or studied (except for Samuel Johnson). As a writer, Harold Bloom was much closer to someone like Bob Dylan or Ernest Hemingway than he was to what we usually think of when we think of a “literary critic.” And he was a real and true harbinger for many directions imaginative writing will take in the future and is now taking even as we speak, inevitably (says The Drifter).

Crucial END NOTE from The Drifter, MFA, PhD: The Drifter’s name, “The Drifter,” is not influenced by, but is rather stolen directly from (in a sense), two names that Dr. Samuel Johnson called himself, when he himself wrote columns: The Rambler; and later: The Idler.

A Few More Crucial Note/s: Samuel Johnson’s prose style can strike the modern reader as outdated at first, but a good reader can catch up with him within the hour, and the struggle to do so can only be beneficial, since this is Johnson, and since nothing too easy is any good. Johnson is far more modern than almost any other writer of English prose of his era, his pal Boswell rivaling him in this. And often enough, his prose sounds exactly as if it were written yesterday, or tomorrow (these are his best bits, and they’re scattered everywhere throughout his vast, massive work).

Harold Bloom wrote a lot (a vast understatement), and he has entire, five-hundred-page books (among his early work) that are composed almost entirely in a stilted, bloated, airy, windy, jargon-filled prose that is still, despite itself, brilliant and unique almost all the time.

After the age of 50, at his own admission, he started to write for a more general audience outside of academia, including the reader he called the “incredibly intelligent child of any age.”

He did this for two reasons. One: he wanted to reach more people while he was still alive. Two: his skills had improved.

THE MOST IMPORTANT PART: Reading good works or otherwise genuinely engaging with good art of any kind keeps your mind, heart, and soul in a good place, so that, the more you do it, the better your own inherent goodness becomes. The opposite of this, just as powerful, is rotting your brain (and heart and soul) with meaningless trash.

Addendum: Roger Ebert is the Harold Bloom of the movies; Lester Bangs is a Bloom of rock and roll.

Stay tuned this week as The Drifter attempts to practice literary criticism upon modern popular music, but in a late-Bloom kind of style, not an early-Bloom style, i.e. jargon free and written for the incredibly intelligent child within all of us no matter what age.

The Photography of Christopher J Ananias Part One

Earlier this week, Christopher published three stories on the Springs, which included his own photography. Christopher has generously provided this site with many of his pictures, which we will share five at a time, one per month, because, as the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. On some servers the pictures might touch. If I knew what to do about that you wouldn’t be reading this sentence, now would you?–LA


The Wiccan Way by the Great and Powerful HeXopatha

(Ed. note: Don’t let the byline fool you. HeXy would no more write a column than the Donald writes his own speeches. But until her apprentice Eira-Lysbyrd earns her broomstick Eira will write the column for her exalted Master and like it. Yet, if you are like me, you may notice that a touch of Eira’s attitude gets through because she knows that her Master never reads the paper–L.A.)

The Wiccan Way by The Great and Powerful HeXopatha

Peasants (aka “people”) have forever been under the impression that Magick is the old fashioned spelling for magic. That is not so.

Magic is the trickery of charlatans; it involves false-bottom boxes, partially clad female assistants, veils, misdirection and a great deal of smoke. Magick is the highest degree of art. Magic is also said to be a component of true love; Magick is what you need when you realize, a bit late, that “true love” and “still desired” do not remain on the same page happily ever after.

I admit that elderly, perhaps dotty Witches often tire easily and need the assistance of fresh blood to convey Magick properly. That is why I have my wonderful, dynamic, irresistible and in all ways brilliant Apprentice Eira-Lysbyrd spread Magick throughout the realm of Saragun Springs. I predict you will be hearing a big noise from Eira, and I suspect soon. Yes, I’m willing to bet my wand on it.

Sometimes, I admit, Magick needs to be carefully watched. Especially in the act of enchanting trees. For centuries, Wiccans have known the perils of enchanting certain trees. For instance, HeX–I mean I, foolishly enchanted an Elm. Elms are the Cats of flora. They can be majestic servants or they can turn on you and be royal pains in the cauldron. Anyway, our Elm, by name Ernie, is often a reliable servant, yet every now and then Ernie will launch spells of his own, such as the recent turning of every other person in the Springs into a Toad. Such events contribute to the gnawing suspicion that I am slipping. Thank the dark forces that Eira-Lysbyrd is here to keep the realm in order.

That’s it for another week, peasants, it’s been an hour since my last nap. Oh, if you happen to come across a three headed Viper, please return her/her/him to the Castle. It is highly recommended that you do so quickly because only Eira has the triple Snake bite venom.

The Great and Powerful HeXopatha

The Saragun Gazette Presents Versatur Circa Quid by Judge Jaspar Montague, Quillemender

(Ed. note– Today and tomorrow we will share columns written by two members of the Springs for our daily paper The Saragun Gazette. These little columns are obviously inpsired by the Drifter who appears on this site every Sunday.

Today we present the first Gazette column written by the late Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender. The Judge is my Great Great Great Great Grandfather (1810-1902). Since 1902 he has been a Spirit who never lets anyone forget it. The Judge “resides” in a gold gilt presentation gavel, which was given to him after nearly seventy years on the bench in Wiccanfire County, Massachusetts. Versatur Circa Quid was inscribed on it by his peers. Allegedly it is Latin for “what comes round goes round” and is the name of the Judge’s literary contribution to journalism. You will notice he uses the phrase aplenty and then some. Although some might not be pleased to be summed up by such a vague sentiment, it appeals to the Judge. –Leila)

Versatur Circa Quid! (A Staggeringly Brilliant Guide to the Spirit Community of Saragun Springs)

By Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender

Versatur Circa Quid! breathers!

This week I shall opine and inform my readership on the subject of the humble Footfallfollower–commonly known as the 3F. He is a maligned Spirit accused of having a surfeit of laziness and a stunning shortage of gumption, style, wit and imagination.

The biggest problem facing the 3F is the accusations are true. Sadly, everything that lives becomes a ghost equal to the task of death as they were of use in life. Therefore it should not shock anyone to learn that the only thing the 3F’s have going for them is the largest Spirit population. Naturally this is because most people are painfully stupid.

Versatur Circa Quid!

Regardless, the first and last that 3F’s do is create an extra footfall inside cemeteries. You walk along, stop and you hear one extra step. Nothing else happens. Moreover such is seldom noticed. It would be base canard to describe another Spirit as having such shabby craft. Yet the 3F’s do not care. Leila calls them “the juggalo ghosts.” Upon studying the subject I must agree.

Still, being Spirits I feel obligated to give my priceless charity to the willingly unwashed from time to time. But really, I feel that comparing someone who produces a single extra foot step inside a cemetery to the wonders of, say, a Quillemender, requires more attention be paid to the Quill than the 3F.

Versatur Circa Quid!

Even a Footfollower knows that we Quillemenders reorganize extant written passages, without the original author’s knowledge. We greatly improve letters; via our alchemy pedestrian gibberish is transformed into sterling prose. Thermal dynamics, not insipid incantations, allow us to accomplish our art. But since most of you are obviously 3F timber, I will attempt to impress no further science on you.

You are welcome.

Versatur Circa Quid!

As a Quill, I must constantly evolve with technology. When I started after my decease in 1902, missives were written by hand or with crude typing machines that few dolts could afford let alone master. Books and newspapers, of course, were done by the printing press. Today there is room for legions of Quills to reside in various electronic devices; virtual lettering is ridiculously simple to emend, and proofing (and spelling) seems to be a thing of the past. Unfortunately there’s a shortage of intellects among the living suitable to be a Quillemender, but we the grand few persevere with tarty elan.

Behold! “The secretary told the assembly he was inclined to do a bit of fucking.” An Irish Quill got that jewel into the London Times in the 19th century. It remains a hall of fame bit of Quillemending. And it is the standard we strive to meet today.

Versatur Circa Quid!

Alas and alack, how does adding an extra “clonk” that rarely matches the tone of a footfall compare?

But if you need to meet a common Footfallfollower (perhaps seeking a glimpse of your future), go to any cemetery, walk the stone path, stop and listen. On any given day you will hear single thuds emanating from many graves. But when you wish to seek the inspiring awe and majesty of a Quillemender, revisit certain emails you sent your boss last week prior to your unexpected “downsizing.”

Versatur Circa Quid!

Your Master,

Judge Jasper P. Montague, Quillemender

Bedpan by Christopher J. Ananias

(Wonderful image provided by the author)

Little Marco stood by his mother and they looked at the old man in the bed. Marco wished he would die already, but he refused. His grandfather gurgled and farted, reaching out with an age-spotted claw, “Grr-Grrrr.”

“Oh, geez.” His mother’s mouth went thin and white. Marco stepped back and didn’t want to be in the room, but Marco was in training.

“When the old bastard makes that noise and farts, especially when he farts. Get the bedpan and put it under his ass.” His mother grabbed the pot. She pulled down the blanket. He was naked from the waist down. Marco looked away. “Watch!” She lifted one flabby leg and bent the knee then the other, and slid the cold bedpan under his ass. The old man’s penis started twitching and rising in a bush of yellowed white pubic hair. “Just ignore his thing and make sure he doesn’t push the bedpan out and shits the bed. That’s what he wants to do. He wants to make everything as hard as he can on us.” The old man smiled showing his toothless gums and looked evilly conscious for a moment. His eyelids fluttered in pleasure over washed-out blue eyes. Dead fish eyes. Then the smell hit Marco, and he ran out of the room.

“Why do I have to do this? I don’t want to do this?” He wiped at the tears on his face. She stormed out and slammed the bedpan on the kitchen counter, splashing urine, roiling the turd.

“Dump that into the toilet.” His mother towered over him. Marco was only a small seven. He reached up and took it with unsteady hands holding the sloshing stinking metal away from him and walked toward the bathroom. When he got back. His mother was getting all painted up for a night at BIG DADDY’S. She wore her stripper clothes under a blue and white Adidas striped sweatsuit, like some kind of basketball star.

When she left, Marco got hungry and went to the kitchen and put a pan of hamburger stew on the gas stove. He turned it on, but it only clicked after he turned it on high. Gas stunk up the kitchen. Then he remembered to put it on IGNITE. Whoosh, the flame lit. Marco studied the flame and had an epiphany. He got the Red Devil barbecue grill lighter and switched off the child-proof button. He lit every curtain in the tiny house. The flames climbed quickly. He held his nose and lit the piss-stained sheet hanging under the comatose old man. His mother had smashed Oxycontin pills into his gruel of Cream of Wheat and Gerber baby carrots. Marco almost got trapped but ran out the door when the flames caught the couch, chairs, plants—everything. Whoosh! The scorching heat pushed him like a giant gas stove burner. WHOOSH!

Marco stood outside, telling the big fireman how his mother left the stove burner going and he was home alone with his beloved grandfather. He hoped Grandad was OK. His eyes were like big sad brown saucers. Now he could go live with his Dad.

#

Everything looked wonderful. All the things Marco the fledgling firebug, murderer, and traumatized boy could ever want. His mother’s prison was way down in Rockville, Indiana, so he wouldn’t see her again, which made him sad in a way that baffled him.

His dad was a big guy who wore flannel shirts like Paul Bunyan. Marco wasn’t sure about him…His father’s voice was very strong and Marco thought he might get mean like some of his mother’s guests from “BIG DADDY’S.”

He showed Marco around the house. They went to the top of the stairs. “This is your room.” It had everything. A bed that looked like Captain Hook’s ship. A night light with Micheal Jordan slamming a basketball into a hoop. He had video games and even a Daisy “Red Ryder” BB-gun sitting in the corner which fascinated him to no end. EVERYTHING.

They left the room but didn’t go downstairs. They walked down a long dark hall that smelled like medicine. His father said, “I want you to meet someone.” A terrible dread came over Marco. “Say hello to Grandma, Marco.” The voice sounded stern like Marco’s Mother’s.

Marco said in a sour voice, “Hello, Grandma.” The room smelled like the blue porta potty at the park. The old woman was smiling like she had a big toothless surprise for Marco. He saw the same faded dead fish eyes of his Grandfather’s, that didn’t see, but did. The old woman let out a long complicated and terrible smelling fart that sounded like a baby elephant, lost in the tall grass, trumpeting for its mother. The smell rose like a brown fog.

Marco’s father pulled down the sheet, and she was naked from the waist down. Her bony legs sprang wide open like she was ready for the business.

“I’ve got a little job for you Marco. Grab the bedpan.”

THE END

Matchboxes, a Bomb, and Bleeders by Christopher Ananias

(Image provided by Christopher Ananias, a fine fine Hawk)

The explosion happened around the time Danny and his long-haired buddy Jay Michaels turned my stingray bike into a chopper. They added aluminum tubes to the front forks. I was pretty cool, peddling the town, kicked back like Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” I don’t know if Dad still lived at home or not? It was so long ago.

The bomb exploded three houses up a grassy alley from our house. Sound travels in strange ways, especially in one’s memory. It bounced off the elementary school bordering Baker Street, like all the kids hung their pigtails and buzz cuts out the windows and shouted, “Boom!”

I don’t recall any sirens or groups of people with hands to their faces saying, “Oh my God!” Not even a teenager smiling, saying, “Fuck me.”

The day of the explosion was warm. I was outside, playing with Matchbox cars. Matchboxes were a big thing, bigger than marbles and jacks.

I remember in second grade whipping one of those chunks of steel at Mark on the shiny gym floor. The matchbox skipped off his hand and hit him in the mouth. I froze—all the fun—gone. He was a hemophiliac. The principal warned us to be careful around Mark. A big handlebar mustache said, “He’s a Bleeder.”

Mark grabbed his mouth, and nothing happened. Just like every other time he fell or got slammed into, everyone held their breath for the unstoppable river of blood that never came. Mark seemed unaware of his condition, hanging upside down on the monkey bars and tackling people.

The season of the explosion was during summer vacation. When Danny and his friends were building tree forts, turning bikes into choppers, and someone made a bomb.

The explosion came from the largest house of the richest people in town. This house had pointed green gables and a conical tower on one end, like some kind of Dutch architecture. Later, all grown up at ten, on my paper route, I stared at it from Jefferson Street. The stigma of death must have turned off the sunshine, because it always seemed gloomy.

There was a lot of speculation around town…

“The bomb bout rattled my windows out! I knew those boys were up to no good!” said old Mrs. Pearson. She spoke to Darrel at the Mobile gas station, beside the post office.

“Tom, did you hear how he looked?” shouted Ken from the sunny porch. Tom and Ken were best friends.

“No, did you?” Tom stood flat-footed on a yellow three-speed by the fire hydrant.

“I heard, it blew the top of his head-”

“-Be quiet about that, Kenneth!” interrupted his mother from the screen door, always catching him.

“Sorry Mom… Tom, you wanna skateboard at the bank parking lot?”

“Yeah, let’s go!”

It circulated that the richest boy in town made the bomb. Others said it was a disastrous chemistry set experiment. A chemistry set that says, 16 AND UP. I had two competing images in my mind. I thought he was a mad bomber, then a scientist in a white lab coat. The town Marshall, an old guy named Milt, who also drove a school bus, didn’t arrest anyone. Not even “Pop Bottle” Pete who lived down by the railroad tracks.

Life does what it does, and I graduated from the fifth grade to the big scary middle school on the hill. A new world populated by gargantuan eighth graders who wore leather motorcycle jackets and fucked.

On one little keynote… For a moment, in this shuffling middle school maze, I became a celebrated person. When, in gym class, a wild swing of the yellow wiffle ball bat connected, shooting the wiffle ball over the bleachers. I rounded the bases to home. The big boys cheered! Pete, the tall sandy-haired eighth grader clapped me on the back and said, “Good one you little shit.” He later became my dentist.

#

Mark was with us for a while. A gang of us drank, smoked dope, dropped acid, laughed our asses off, wrecked our parents’ cars and our motorcycles. One unfortunate upper classmate, drinking before, during, and after a warm high school football game took a header off a highway bridge doing 100 MPH—splitting his car in half. This reminded me again of the boy who accidentally blew himself up, years ago on that summer day. Death wasn’t just calling the old folks.

I never saw Mark bleed the whole time. Not even when he stuck up for me when I was drunk and he hit a guy square in the teeth. Mark was a brave dude—probably only weighed 130 pounds.

He spent time in the hospital for his hemophilia throughout school—and out of school in the 80s. “Where’s Mark?” Someone would say, answered with, “Back in the hospital.”

The rivers of blood came. I just never saw them. Sometimes the bleeding is on the inside. When I was nineteen, he started disappearing before my eyes. His Def Leppard and AC/DC shirts looked too big, like heavy metal gowns. He never said what was wrong. Mark had always been skinny, but this was something else…

The day of Mark’s funeral, I rode shotgun, in a strange bubble of isolation with my half-ass friends dressed the same way they always did. I watched the cut down cornfields clipping by, in a sort of fog, riding in Ken’s rusty blue Gran Torino. Drinking warm Budweiser and taking lackadaisical hits off the constant joint. A hand in the bag of Seyfert’s Potato Chips

Ken jumped the railroad tracks at the steep hill by the “Doll House.” Where they sold fishing equipment, bait, and big weird Dolls with human hair on their heads. My ass lifted off the seat! The car crashed like “The General Lee” in “The Dukes of Hazard.” We laughed hard like we used to, but our connections were already coming apart. I was coming apart.

We arrived late at the funeral home with beer on our breath, brushing potato chips off, and stinking of pot. People were upset with us. Mark’s best friends had a role to play.

We lined up by his casket, like deserters who came back to the battle, and walked him to his grave. Then we got back into the Torino and fucked away another day.

THE END

Christopher J. Ananias enjoys wildlife photography. He likes to walk along the railroad tracks, dodging the trains. His work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grim and Gilded, Dead Mule of Southern Literature, Literally Stories UK and others.