Instead of only blaming the inventors, propagators and perpetrators of these products, we should turn the blame around once in a while and place it squarely on the individual consumer/s of said products as well. No one is placing a gun against anyone’s head in this matter. Take it from one who once had a gun placed against his head on a Chicago sidewalk. And a switchblade placed right below his eye in a Kansas City tavern. And a frying pan swung (hard) in the direction of his head in the kitchen. (The author of this opinion piece is good at ducking, fleeing, and flying (out the back door), as well as staring people down – or talking them out of it when necessary.)
Ruthless billionaire businessmen ye shall always have with you. In 2026 USA, one has the option to ignore them, or at least not to utilize their products beyond what’s necessary, selective, or right, depending on the situation.
They have figured out a way to feed the people exactly what the people wish to eat. And the people go to the hand of the master and lap up the usual b.s. because it is the usual b.s. they long and crave for. If universal wisdom, truth, love and beauty were popular and profitable, the business people would sell that instead.
There are some people who are not in control of their minds and thus have gone out of their minds by feeding their minds on nothing but The Algorithm.
As for the rest of us, we have the option to opt out and choose better materials at any time.
It is a matter of cultivating your one and only soul. If you let someone else feed your soul with nothing but junk, you will end up with a nothing, junk soul created by someone else, which will mean that you have abdicated your personality, the only real possession you possess in this vale of tears. This egregious and pathetic non-condition will not serve you, or others, well when the shit hits the fan, as it’s sure to do again and again in this world that is both spiritual battleground and mortal coil.
The Algorithm is not a gun against anyone’s head. You can choose NOT TO CLICK ON IT and not even to look at it at all, for that matter. Any addict who’s ever gotten over anything can tell you that you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Nietzsche said, “There are so many things in this world I never want to know.” He knew a little and ignored the rest. He also said, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” right before going permanently insane.
A great picture is infinitely more valuable than a bad book (and can be read almost in the same way as reading a good book (and as the book of nature can also be read)).
“Number nine, number nine, number nine, number nine…” – The Beatles
When I say “freak me out,” I mean in a good way.
(To the elite few of you who want to review who Boo is, see photos.)
ONE: Sometimes constantly watches me from across the room of the book-strewn apartment as if to make sure I’m all right (until he dozes off, which happens just as frequently).
TWO: Catches wild squirrels in his mouth between his fangs, doesn’t chomp down upon them, drops them down onto the ground and sets them free, then watches them flee (run away) without going after them.
THREE: Leaps into my lap when he gets scared.
FOUR: Hides behind me when he gets scared if I’m standing up.
FIVE: Puts himself between me and whoever it is when someone is approaching us at night along the sidewalks or in the alleyways of the Chicagoland area we roam through (or wherever we roam through). If it’s more than one person approaching, becomes even more fearlessly vigilant.
SIX: Follow verbal commands when they, paradoxically, are not even spoken aloud by me. (In other words: READ MY MIND.)
SEVEN: Refuse to follow commands just as often, and act like he thinks it’s funny, and in his own way, I do believe he thinks it’s funny.
EIGHT: Run so fast that he literally morphs into a black-and-white blur that looks like it’s flying across the ground. Fastest dog I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen many.
NINE: Stare into the distance while intuiting the Spirit World.
(Leading one to the astonishing conclusion that if dogs could talk, we wouldn’t even be able to believe what they would tell us…)
(Bonus point: can climb fences and trees when he wants to bad enough…)
“Happy are you when men insult you, and persecute you, and tell all kinds of evil lies against you because you are my followers. Be glad and happy, because a great reward is kept for you in heaven. This is how men persecuted the prophets who lived before you.”
This week The Drifter will write little in order to let two quotations carry the day (four if you count the photos but the D will only write directly about the two quotations included in the text, one above, one below.)
When outrage and despair at the state of the world begin to get you down, to gnaw at, or devour, your mind, heart, and/or soul, these two quotations can bring tranquility and peace in their wake.
But that’s only if you let them work on you. And by work on you, I mean that you have to let these quotations hit you hard. And in order for that to happen, requirement number one is that you must have an open mind, and heart. Secondly, you must be willing to work at it. You have to let the quotations find you where you really are. It used to be called studying. Now when we say “studying” we usually only mean rote learning, i.e. going to “school” and memorizing the dubious “facts” they attempt to jam down your throat. I have two twins who graduated from high school last year, and I myself have taught for a total of at least twenty-three years at many different kinds of colleges and universities all across the rough-and-tumble Midwest, also including a three-year stint at a Catholic elementary school called Saint Leonard Parish School in Berwyn, Illinois, USA, with a ninety-nine percent Mexican student population (Leonard is the patron saint of prisoners, addicts, horses, and depressed people, which is perfect for me, and I also used to listen to Leonard Cohen on my way to and from work every day) (Leonard is also the patron saint of a woman with child or children, i.e. preggo), and I can say with an utter certainty that institutionalized education in the USA no longer encourages critical thinking and imaginative exploration in the way it once did (if it ever did). SELF EDUCATION is just as utterly crucial as it ever was, y’all. Everything is available; now you gotta use it.
The first quote is from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded by Matthew, the Evangelist. “Evangelist” means someone who brings good news to those who desperately need it. Good news that is not easy to swallow, or follow, either, but is also NOT AN ILLUSION. As Jim Morrison said, you need to break on through to the other side before this News will make you leap out of your seat and begin dancing (metaphorically at least).
The second quotation is an entire sonnet by the English radical poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was a kind of Jim Morrison before Jim Morrison (although much less famous than his friend Lord Byron while they lived). Shelley was born into a cush life and he could have stayed there forever had he wanted to, or had he been born that way. Instead, he threw sand in the face of his whole society almost immediately upon opening his eyes and he fought tooth and nail for the downtrodden and the outcast his entire life, and against hypocrisy (he could smell hypocrisy while still in the cradle) – and he died young (29) because he was worn out young in the struggle. Shelley called for and helped invent the modern form of nonviolent resistance. He inspired Henry David Thoreau, who inspired Leo Tolstoy, who inspired Mahatma Gandhi, who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., who inspired the recently deceased Reverend Jesse Jackson.
The sonnet is printed here in paragraph form in order to defamiliarize it. It works just as well as a prose paragraph as it does in verse.
It was written just a little over two hundred years ago.
The Drifter will draw out what he believes to be the deepest message for our age after this sonnet which sounds so completely familiar and close to what’s going on in our world now that it should (rightly) give you the chills, or at least goosebumps:
“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; / Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow / Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring; / Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, / But leechlike to their fainting country cling / Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. / A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field; / An army, whom liberticide and prey / Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; / Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; / Religion Christless, Godless – a book sealed; / A senate, Time’s worst Statute, unrepealed; / Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may / Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”
The age of waiting for someone else to do it for you is over. Make yourself be the Glorious Phantom bursting into the True Light, like Shelley did, however persecuted and unfamous he was (and he was both of those things). Everyone has a daimon, or form of genius, inside them. Some choose to cultivate it and will die first before not cultivating it. These are the ones who know the best advice is: DO NOT LET “THEM” GET YOU DOWN (it’s exactly what “they” want). The world has always been this way, and it always will be this way, too (more or less, and more, and less). Even nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, which might wipe out an entire (now global) civilization, is nothing new, since entire civilizations have been wiped out virtually overnight thousands, and maybe even millions, of times – and there has always been the ever-present threat of a dinosaur-destroying-like meteor peeking its head over the horizon at any time, like the worst uninvited guest you could ever imagine (the Native Americans knew this.) “AI”?!? The ancient Egyptians both predicted, and simulated, it, and the cave people in their caves waving their torches around on the cave painting walls while intoning messages to the gods and cutting themselves so they bled profusely while devouring mouthfuls of magic mushrooms had a virtual reality that would knock your socks off if you were wearing any, which they weren’t. Yes, the world has always been this way.
And that means there are always better days waiting somewhere up around the bend. But not in the usual nausea-inducing, Hallmark Greeting Card kind of way.
We always live life for our Future Self (somehow), but we MAKE our future self today. Never stop striving forward with calmness – never (not even when on the threshold of death, or maybe especially not then; Martin Luther, the greatest radical of all time in the modern Western world, believed that everything could change in an instant in that moment).
((Maybe creating is so important to us because the God who made us is also a Creator.))
“Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me / I’m not sleepy and there is
no place I’m going to.” – Bobby D.
Since the enigmatic being who sometimes calls himself “The Drifter” shall turn 59 years of age in two days from today, and has already had a stroke (FULLY recovered at every level), he wishes to prove that he can still levitate.
The evidence for this amazing fact is included in the photos which come with this column.
If anyone tries to sue him over the reliability of this, the Drifter is prepared to act as his own attorney, call himself as a witness, and testify with his hand upon a stack of Bibles that no AI nor anything like AI was used in the creation of these pictures nor have they been messed with in any way whatsoever.
Many have said that Rembrandt, Vincent, and Frida painted themselves so often because they couldn’t afford models etc. etc. etc.
The Drifter does not believe that for a moment. (Not everything can be explained by money or the lack of it.)
The Drifter believes these great artists painted themselves so often because they believed Jesus when Jesus said: “The kingdom is within you.” And also when he said (joyfully): “Take up your cross and follow me!”
The good life is not waiting somewhere up around the bend; it is not on a billionaire’s yacht; it cannot be found on the “dream coasts” exclusively; and it does not involve material possessions, of any kind, at all.
2: Then, you find the stub of old pencil in a pants pocket.
3: And because you looked like a worn-out poet in some lights to a certain lonely soldier, she came on delicate tip-toes and gave you toilet paper, through the bars, with her long, deadly fingers, wearing nothing at all.
4: So now you blow her another kiss and wave her fondly away so you can begin to scrawl with your long, strong, starving hand.
5: Like the black, reaching, screeching, raven-filled tree branches at the shuddering culmination of earth’s last winter’s tale in the occupied village above your mind.
Saragun Springs 