“If we live good lives, the times are also good. As we are, such are the times.”
– Saint Augustine
“The Drifter” wishes to complain this week.
Out of respect for potential hyper-sensitive readers, he shall limit himself to three brief topics.
His two kids and his three dogs can fairly attest to the fact that complaining is one of his fave hobbies.
Some folks call it “letting off steam,” so a gasket doesn’t blow.
They say Henry Miller was still complaining about his mother on his death bed, when he was 89, even though she had died 75 years earlier, when he was 14.
And yet, Miller always called himself the happiest man alive.
…
The other day on NPR I heard some clown (a well-known, well-paid clown) say that the “tech bros” are the “cool kids on the block,” and I almost chucked up the lunch I hadn’t eaten.
(The seven cups of coffee that were in my stomach began to swirl around. It’s usually half-caf since I had a stroke a year and seven months ago. FYI, zero side effects from the stroke and I’ve also given up any and all smoking of anything. But I still enjoy second-hand smoke whenever I can find it, like walking through the halls of my Chicagoland apartment building any time of day or night.)
The term “tech bros” is itself an absurd and ridiculous thing (even though, or especially because, “everybody” seems to be saying it now).
And yet, to say that these folks are “cool” is even more ridiculous, when one thinks of where the term was born.
MILES DAVIS was, and is, cool.
His album, Birth of the Cool, came out in 1957, the same year as On the Road.
Miles Davis was so cool that even Bob Dylan said he was the coolest.
Jack Kerouac was cool.
Charlie Parker was cool.
Shirley Jackson was cool.
N. Scott Momaday was cool.
I saw him live one time in Chicago, reading some of his things and giving a talk. I met him for two minutes afterward and it was more than enough for me to assuredly confirm that N. Scott’s coolness was at Miles Davis levels.
The “tech bros” are highfalutin, ruthless industrial capitalists (to the extreme in a world (seemingly) without accountability for the rich).
But they are not cool.
The NPR guy himself is “slick,” but not cool, as in: a bullshit artist. (Which is why Hemmie said the most important thing an artist of the real needs is a good BS-Detector.)
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In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Fred Nietzsche wrote, “The public permission to choose between five main political opinions insinuates itself into the favor of the numerous class who would fain appear independent and individual, and who like to fight for their one-sided opinions. After all, however, it is a matter of indifference whether one opinion is imposed upon the herd, or five opinions are permitted to it. He or she who diverges from the five public opinions and goes apart, has always the whole herd against him.”
In the USA, we ain’t even got five. We have two. And one side is controlled by the generic corporate capitalists. And the other side is also controlled by the generic corporate capitalists, which is why they failed to enforce accountability when they had power, i.e. 2021 to early 2025, which is why we’re in the situation we’re in now, at the end of 2025. How in the hell can this be called “freedom” any longer?
Dr. Cornel West, if you’re reading this, PLEASE keep doing what you’re doing. Your admin skills may be lacking like some of them say, but you’ve got more soul than the entire US Congress put together. And SOUL is what is needed now.
(After Nietzsche lost his mind, he sent a letter to someone saying that he was traveling around Germany executing all the antisemites. He saw IT coming even then, and even though he was (according to “them”) insane.)
…
The last thing the Drifter wishes to complain about today is all the people who are in a hurry to get nowhere. They will run over innocent children or old ladies on the street without looking backward just so they can get home faster to sit on their fat asses doing nothing (fat asses are fine if you’re doing something). If you have done this or are doing this, please slow down and give it another thought, if you ever have thoughts. Also, Henry David Thoreau said, “When in doubt, slow down.” I can also recommend Leonard Cohen’s song “Slow” to all the folks who are in a hurry to marry themselves off to someone else. Living alone ain’t a sin. It makes you an outlier in our society, but some of the best people have been outliers.
Jesus, Buddha, Shams of Tabriz and Joan of Arc would be four examples.
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THE DRIFTER’S SONG RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS WEEK (December something ’25):
The Drifter recommends the song “Still Think About You” by A Boogie wit da Hoodie, from his 2016 mix tape titled ARTIST (his real first name is Artist).
This song is rap as ART, and the piano in it will break your heart, as will the lyrics and the content of the song. The word on the street is that his girlfriend got preggo with another man, and left him, inspiring this beautiful, intense tune.
Boogie also worked as a pizza delivery person at one point. The Drifter sympathizes; he did the same thing (in the 1990s).
THANKS to Tressa and Elena and their friends for the knowledge of this song.
The worst punishment I ever received at that place was being locked in a broom closet, in the dark, for three hours.
The school was Our Shepherd Lutheran Elementary located in a suburb of Detroit. The time was the mid-1970s.
I was in third grade when she locked me in the broom closet.
I say “she” because it was her who did it – my third grade teacher, Ms. Caul, who actually wasn’t that bad most of the time and who I even thought of as a friend some of the time.
But this time we knocked heads.
She wanted me to go up to the front of the class and join the other five kids who were serenading the rest of the class who were sitting at their desks.
She requested that I join the singing, that I head up front and begin to bust out in passionate song, singing hymns to the rest of the class as if I were some sort of transported hymn-singer, which I wasn’t. And far from it.
I was the kind of kid who wasn’t too good at joining, or singing (except when I was alone).
I had been sitting there at my desk looking at the happy hymn singers and thinking how pathetic and sad they were when she requested that I leave the security of my desk, head up front, and join them.
When I said no, she told me again to get out of my desk and march to the front of the room, pronto, buster.
When I said no again, she started walking down the aisle toward me, and she was here (which was there) before I even knew what hit me.
She was hovering over me, helicoptering above me, pointing at the front of the room and demanding that I take my place with the singing group.
I crossed my arms, turned my head away, and said no again.
Now she grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of the chair, and dragged me to the front of the room.
Then she swung me around and slammed me (accidentally) into the kid at the end of the hymn-singing line.
Next she informed me that I would now be singing, not with the group, but as a soloist.
I had refused to sing in the group and it astonished me that she believed I would now consent to busting out in a solo for these fools.
I set my jaw shut tight, crossed my arms, and stared out at my classmates in their desks, all of whom seemed more horrified than I felt.
She began yelling, telling me to sing.
The truth was, I could not have sung at that point even if it had meant my life.
That was when she yanked me out of the room by the arm and marched me straight down the hall to the broom closet. For some reason, the light switch for the broom closet was on the outside of the little room, in the hall.
She threw the door open and with a great shove she fairly hurled me into the tiny room filled with brooms, mops, buckets, and cleaning supplies.
Then she slammed the door shut tight, locked it from outside, and turned the light off from outside.
I was alone in the broom closet, locked in, in the dark.
Like I said, I was in third grade, so that means I was either 8 or 9 years old.
I state my age as a reason for why I spent my time silently weeping in there, in rage and terror.
I felt like I’d been locked in a dungeon and, indeed, to this day I almost feel like I know what it’s like to be locked in a dungeon because of my refusal to join the singing fools.
Some people enjoy being cheerleaders for the system.
Some people see absolutely nothing wrong with groupthink, following the herd, living the life of a passive approver of the ways things get done around here, no matter how they get done, as long as the group gets what it wants and the majority rule, in a societal system that wants slaves for its great devouring jaws, and not even IT knows why, except that’s the way it goes.
“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
The three hours might only have been thirty minutes.
When she let me out, she said, “I’m sorry Dale, but you had it coming to you and I hope you’ve learned your lesson this time.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald called Joan Crawford the quintessential flapper (which, for Fitzgerald, meant the quintessential literary woman) because she combined two qualities into one.
She had a desperate-hearted love of life, or a love of life that was tinged with desperation, and she had it more intensely than anyone else.
He also disparaged her acting abilities. He said it was nearly impossible to write for her. (He was a screenwriter who usually didn’t even receive writing credits.) It was nearly impossible to write for her because of the tendency she had to overact, he claimed.
But there’s a very fine line between overacting, on the stage or screen, and over-re-acting, which happens in life.
To me, when I watch it now, much of Joan’s overacting on screen seems like nothing more than the OVERREACTING that certain people are all-too-capable of when they find themselves in emotionally charged situations.
Joan overacts on screen because she overreacted in life half the time.
She did both because she was an artist. And artists are people whose moods sometimes, or even most of the time, get the better of them.
Because it comes with the territory.
Art is about emotion, moods, atmospheres, feelings (as well as thoughts and ideas but here we’re focusing on mood).
Joan Crawford had a genius-level intellect on many levels.
And one thing she understood far better than most people was the ways people’s moods get the better of them.
And she understood this even as her own moods would get the better of her.
All of this comes out very clearly when you watch her, with close attention, on the screen.
It’s best to do it in a partially darkened room when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night with good creative energy but not creating anything, just absorbing more for later.
Try to find your own sweet spot regarding medications that can keep you buzzing while not taking you over the edge.
Breathe the midnight deeply, relax, and be very alive.
It’s best to focus on some of the movies she made during the 1950s.
For me, this decade is Joan’s high point.
Before that, she hadn’t fully matured. After that, she started to become a bit of a parody of herself. (There are exceptions in her work in either direction in time.)
It doesn’t have to be a great movie (in technical terms). All it needs to do is have the great Joan Crawford in it.
Watch the way her face moves.
The beautiful way her face moves and never stops moving.
And what it shows. (And she knows it.)
Joan Crawford understands (all too well) when people are playing her (or trying to).
She’s always willing to give other people a chance to be their best selves (but watches very closely when they veer off the track – because she’s been hurt before).
She knows that the world is made up of people who need one another but also can’t live together (or not peacefully).
She can read the reactions to what she says as deeply as if she were reading a book (which she also did much of during her life).
She knows that more sadness is up around the next bend.
But she also communicates the Dickinsonian fact that hope springs eternally.
She knows that humans are beautiful and ugly by turns, and that being ugly inside is much more important (in the wrong way) than being beautiful on the outside.
And she knows that outer beauty is what Jesus called “the light of the body.”
This exists for those can see it. It is an inner radiation that travels outward even when the subject (its source) is unaware that it’s doing so.
It’s the reason Joan was just as beautiful at 70 as she was at 20, even though she chain-smoked and chain-drank for most of her years.
When the dust settles, one man, at least, will still be standing.
He might only stand five feet seven inches in his socks (Eminem is, and Kerouac was, five-eight, a precursor and an heir), but Alexander Pope, one of the dozen or so greatest English poets of all time, was four feet six inches tall. (Pope died in 1744 at the age of 56.)
And Bob Dylan has more than a little of Pope’s verbal resources, great heart, wild intelligence, deep soul, artistic energy. If “Eloisa to Abelard,” by Pope, doesn’t break your heart and make you want to go on living, nothing will.
The Drifter has compiled seven reasons why, with their flipsides, Bob Dylan deserves his Nobel Prize. The reasons are brief and they are meant for quick reading in a busy world; but they are also meant to be pondered upon and thought about more later for any and all who are interested. (And meant to be USED.)
ONE: He both does, and does not, care what he looks like, and he looks like it.
TWO: He has done a lot of drugs but hasn’t done so many drugs that he isn’t still going strong at 84. The life of the artist, any artist, is a balancing act.
THREE: He puts out material at a relentless pace as if this were the most important thing in the world, and then does little to promote it.
FOUR: His “style” of life and work are ancient and modern.
FIVE: His work can exist “on the page” or in the air.
SIX: He does, and does not, care/s about “quality.”
SEVEN: He goes out into the world – while wearing disguises.
(Afterthought: Those last two should be hung out with like zen koans…)
Saragun Springs 