images

The Street by The Drifter

“Soul is a feeling, a feeling deep within. /

Soul is not the color of your skin.”

– Van Morrison, “Soul”

In the good old days, this street had been rowdy, ragged, loud, edgy, marginal. For at least two miles in length, one bar and liquor store and cheap restaurant after another on both sides of the street had sat beside each other inviting in any intrepid soul with a few bucks in their pocket and the desire to get partially drunk or completely drunk. The music here had been raw, Chicago blues bands or punk duos or some combination of blues and punk or imitation-grunge or garage rock moved on over from the garage into the bar. It wasn’t always the greatest music (by far), but it was usually heartfelt and it had soul.

“The good old days” in this context meant the late 1980s, the 1990s, and shading into the very early 2000s. After that a shift started to occur that happened gradually, then suddenly.

Now this street was too clean. The restaurants were too expensive. The dive bars had been replaced by workout centers, hair salons, specialty shops, and boutique stores. The music was utterly perfect and utterly soulless. The people here now were the kind of people who walk at the same pace always, never speeding up and never slowing down. Lots of them were nice enough on the surface but as a group, as a race of humans, they were miserable to be around. And “race of humans” here meant people with enough money to hang around and enjoy this atmosphere. It didn’t matter what color you were any more. All that mattered was whether you had the money.

He didn’t hang out on this street any more, and he even avoided driving down it for the most part, except when he wanted to relive old memories by taking a journey back into the past where he could imagine it the way it used to be and remember. A few of the bars still had the same names, even though they weren’t the same kind of places any more, at all.

It was the Fourth of July weekend in the Year of Our Lord 2018. He was here to visit some old friends, and he’d come over here because he’d been becoming so isolated from “the world” lately that it was starting to scare him a little bit, sometimes, perhaps (or deeply). He hadn’t seen most of these people he was about to see in fifteen or twenty years.

And he couldn’t believe, which literally meant that he could not believe, just what it was he saw.

They all looked so old! Even though they were, most of them, no older than he was!

He quickly realized it wasn’t so much in the gray (or graying) hair, the wrinkles, the extra pounds. After all, he himself had all of those things as well. No, not at all, it wasn’t in the surface details where their age sat. It was more in their eyes, in their postures, in their attitudes. People who’d once seemed like lively carefree souls to him now seemed like closed-off, uptight, unimaginative bores.

And as he sat in the bar with them (there were about seven or eight of them) trying to be social at some level, he quickly realized that these folks, who now had become truly strangers to him, were all dominated and dwarfed by a quadruple threat, which was made up of: the large screen, the small screen, the dollar bill, and the beer mug.

There were five or so men and two or three women, and they were all doing the same things in sequences and orders, almost like metronomes: staring at the baseball game on the large screens that dominated all walls of the squeaky-clean establishment, scrolling on their phones, discussing the low stakes gambling they were all involved in, women too, and slowly, steadily consuming their alcohol.

He wasn’t drinking because he was an alcoholic who couldn’t drink. After a single sip of alcohol in any form, all bets would literally have been off. He would’ve followed that up with two or three more beers in quick succession, then gone straight to the hard liquor. He would’ve drank for days and days until he passed out and later woke up not knowing where he was and with the most frightening hangover that it literally would’ve made him consider putting a bullet in his brain just to end the pain, not because he really wanted to leave here. He’d quit drinking because of the suicidal tendencies it had started to create in him; and other reasons. His brain chemistry had been so warped by the constant alcohol at that point that he couldn’t even write any more. He hadn’t had a drink in seventeen years.

So he wasn’t drinking. And he realized now how drugged they all were. It wasn’t even difficult to be in their presence and not socialize with them, since they were all so obsessed with the double screens, the baseball betting, and the slow, steady consumption of their soul-killing alcohol that you could sit there in their midst and quite easily not even be noticed (almost).

He was just about to bail out, call it good, shake off the depression this had all caused, say, “See you in another twenty years!” (once he’d gotten away from them, that is) and go do something else when he saw HER.

He didn’t know who she was and he knew he’d never met her before because he would’ve remembered for sure.

She didn’t look old like the rest of them.

She had the same wrinkles and the same extra pounds (except quite a bit less so of both perhaps).

She was a blonde, what used to be called a bleach blonde. She looked, almost, like Marilyn M. if Marilyn M. had grown up to be fifty or so years old. She smiled like M.M.

She had a lively walk like M.M.

Her eyes were ALIVE like M.M.’s.

They sparkled with HUMOR like M.M.’s.

She looked around her like she knew what was going on but also didn’t care – like M.M. She had a rebel soul like M.M. (or so he imagined).

And she was lost and vulnerable like M.M., too (again, or so he was imagining).

And she walked right up to him, asked him what his name was, and sat down right next to him! And when he found out that her name was Marilee, his belief that there are no coincidences was reinforced again for the trillionth time (he was a trillionaire in his belief that there are no coincidences).

It turned out that she was the cousin of one of the beer-guzzling sports drones.

And he discovered rather quickly that it was difficult to strike up an interesting conversation with a stranger in this stultifying atmosphere: this clean, safe, comforting (to them), conforming atmosphere. (He realized that these were the kind of peeps who would’ve been hanging out in the Roman Colosseum back in the day.)

But she kept glancing at him from the corners of her long, lovely, long-lashed, sleepy-wide-awake, dark green eyes with blue eye shadow on.

She smelled like a beautiful dream and looked like a beauty queen.

He hadn’t “been with anyone” in years, both on purpose and not on purpose.

Just sitting next to her basically lifted him up into the clouds – in a very good way.

It made him not care at all about the lives of all these soulless bores. Let them rot in their own open coffins for all he cared. What did he care? He didn’t care!

There was still someone like this, like her, in the world!

He looked at her again.

She was already looking straight back at him.

…

But there were some things he needed to go take care of. He was, after all, the kind of person who frequently had “things he needed to go take care of.” Even the few people who knew him best didn’t know what those things were most of the time. They laughed at him a lot, and thought he was an enigma even more so. He frequently said to them, “I have some things I need to go take care of.”

“What things do you need to go take care of!?” they would shout at him.

But he didn’t like explaining himself.

He understood why Leonardo da Vinci wrote backwards so no one could read his writings; and why Vincent Van Gogh ended up spending most of his time alone in the fields, sometimes even sleeping there. (VVG was a much happier man than they portray him as in all the movies; although he definitely had his down days as well.)

And today, alas, he really did have some things he needed to go take care of.

The first thing was his sixteen-year-old twin daughters, who’d suddenly phoned him out of the blue with a minor emergency while he was sitting there next to his new Marilyn Monroe friend wondering how to strike up a conversation with her in this stultifying environment.

His kids’ friends’ baby was sick (both of the parents were eighteen) and nobody had any money and they needed him to give them a ride to Urgent Care.

He’d also decided that he couldn’t go through this totally “sober.” It turned out that she was drinking quite a bit faster and quite a bit more than the rest of the party, not to mention stepping outside to have a quick ciggie pretty frequently. She wasn’t drinking like a full-blown alkie (like him), at least so far, but definitely like an expert boozer. He would need some “medications” if he were going to pull this off right.

That fact meant that he needed to make a little trip to go see a friend he had.

He’d already heard them all saying that they would be here for a while, that they would maybe move to another bar, but they were definitely planning on staying on this street tonight for the duration, because it was a holiday weekend, because it was summer, and because some of them hadn’t seen each other in a while, etc.

He even asked her if she was planning on hanging out for a while.

He told her that he had a couple of things he needed to go take care of.

She stared at him with her bright, lively, intelligent, knowing, a-little-buzzed, green eyes and he could tell she was almost about to ask him what things he needed to go take care of. Next, he could also tell that she wouldn’t ask him, since they’d just met. A good sign!

He figured he could go take care of both the things he needed to take care of within ninety minutes or so and get right back here.

And he told her so.

She looked straight at him and said, “Never fear. I’ll be here when you get back, sir.”

…

He was not a person who always walked at the exact same pace, never slowing down, and never speeding up. Instead, he was a person who changed his pace all the time, sometimes walking super-slowly and stopping to smell every single figurative rose he happened upon, other times walking so fast he looked like he was in a joyful hurry to get somewhere even though he wasn’t going anywhere special, he was just going.

He walked super-fast to his small car, unlocked her, hopped in, called his friend with the “medications” to make sure he’d be there in about an hour, and took off to pick up his kids, their friends, and the baby.

Just as he was rounding his first corner off the street that he had hated before and was now planning on returning to soon (as soon as he finished the two crucial missions he was on) because maybe after all it wasn’t so bad if she was here, a woman who was doing something on her phone pulled her car out in front of a woman who was driving her car down the street like a maniac. The maniac driver slammed on the brakes, and leapt out of her car with her purse, as the woman who’d pulled out in front of her stuck her hand out the window and gave her antagonist the middle finger. The woman flipping the bird was unable to move her car forward because of the traffic, and the woman with the purse now pulled a pistol out of the purse, ran up to the other woman’s car window, and stuck the pistol in her face. The terrified driver turned her face away then ducked down into the car, and the woman with the pistol screamed, “Stay out of my way you stupid fucking Mexican bitch!” Then she hit the top of the car with her pistol butt and got back into her own vehicle, traffic started moving again and everybody drove away.

The incident would come back on him later in a nightmare, but right now he was in too much of a hurry to sit for long with the witnessing of this minor trauma. His two kids and their two friends and their baby were waiting for him. The parents of the baby were also sick and within three or four days both himself and his two kids would all come down with the same brutal, wicked, nasty, ten-or-eleven-day-long summertime cold, but for now he drove the kids to Urgent Care, made sure everything was OK as they signed in at the clinic, made sure a nurse looked at the baby before he left to make sure nothing was an emergency, handed the kids half the money he had in his pocket, and darted out the door back into his car.

As he was driving across town to go meet the man he planned on getting the “medications” from, he played the song “Soul” by Van Morrison over and over again, from Van’s great album Keep It Simple (Van’s thirty-third album released in 2008), and he (the main character of this story), quite literally, calmly wept behind his sunglasses as he was driving. He wept because the song was so beautiful and for no other reason. He played the song LOUD over and over before he switched to the title track and calmly wept along with that too, behind his dark glasses. It was a happy weeping, a cathartic weeping, a joyful weeping, a crying for beauty, and a tear-stained face because beauty still existed, very much so, in the world, in this world.

Himself and his brother called the man he was going to meet Alley Man behind his back because the alley was where the man hung out, and they called him the name he called himself to his face, even though they knew his real name was Mohammed.

As the main character of this story approached Alley Man who was standing there in the alley he instantly knew something was wrong because he, Alley Man, had lost about fifty pounds since the last time the main character had seen him, which hadn’t been that long ago.

The two of them stepped into Alley Man’s garage to make the transaction and then the main character of this very true tale asked Alley Man how he was doing.

Alley Man, who was about the same age as the main character, raised his shirt and showed the main character a huge, massive, red, bulging, sore-looking, worm-like-looking bright scar across the middle of his chest in the shape of a cross.

After a heart attack recently, Alley Man had had triple bypass surgery to save his life, and while they were in there, they discovered the malignant tumor on his lung, which they also removed while they were in there (taking half a lung with it), so that the surgery lasted all day and on into the evening.

Alley Man removed the lit cigarette from his mouth and said nothing could kill him, praise God.

They high-fived and fist-bumped each other and the main character told Alley Man to take care of himself.

As he was almost about to get back into his car, the main character ran into Alley Man’s brother-in-law, who was a man who was four and a half feet tall and had one eye.

This man’s wife was always hiding his shoes so he wouldn’t go roaming around the alleys all day and all night, but it never stopped him.

The man with one eye was wearing ragged pants, a ragged shirt, and nothing but ragged socks on his feet because his wife had hidden his shoes again. He came up to the main character, holding a beer can in one hand and an unlit cigarette stub in the other. He had another cig’ behind his ear.

He asked the main character if he had any spare change. The main character handed him a dollar. The man with one eye asked him did he have any more, brother. The main character shook his head no, gently, and told the man whose name he didn’t remember to take care of himself. The one-eyed man looked at him closely, looked at him some more, then wandered away in his ragged socks sipping from his beer can.

Alley Man had said they often found his brother-in-law sleeping in the alley. He was a street person with a place to lay his head if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to (except sometimes). God knows what had made him that way and maybe it was God himself; or herself; or itself.

In the car, the main character took about a third of the “medications” he’d purchased from Alley Man. As he sat there in a traffic jam listening to Van Morrison (the song “Behind the Ritual,” from Keep It Simple, over and over again) he felt the warm, mild, steady, liquid, consoling, BUZZING, humming, reassuring glow from the medicine seeping into his brain, his heart, and his whole system, changing everything for the better, at least for now.

He knew the “medications” would last for at least a few hours and he knew the afterglow from the “medications” would last for at least a few hours more beyond that and he knew he had more when that ran out. It was good enough for now, and now, he reminded himself, is what matters.

But the traffic jam was a bad one and it held him up for a long, long time. By the time he returned to the street that gives its generic name to the title of this story, all the beer-screen-sports-and-dollar drones were still in their usual positions, exactly as if they hadn’t moved one iota in all that time. But SHE (Marilee) was gone.

Instead of ninety minutes his little trip had taken him two and a half hours, probably even closer to three, because of weekend holiday traffic and because he’d pulled over at one point to sit and enjoy the buzz of the “medications” while meditating a little bit.

He asked some folks from the group if they knew where she’d gone and they told him she was still somewhere on this street probably – most likely somewhere in another bar. Then they quickly turned away, back to their screens and beer mugs, offering no more information.

He looked for her all up and down the street, peering into all the establishments, entering some, just glancing into others.

Just as he was about to give up and was thinking about going back to ask someone in the herd whether he could get her phone number perhaps (and he was stressing very much about that because of his intense social anxiety), he looked up and she was standing there on the formerly attractively ragged and now too-clean street corner staring at him.

She ran to him and almost collapsed into his arms.

By now, the sun was going down, and it threw a warm, beautiful, sunset glow over the whole summertime street. She smelled better than anything ever and her warm, soft, collapsing body (along with the “medications” he was on) literally transported him immediately unto another world – a better one.

She asked him if he had a car and they went to his car and she got into the back seat so he got into the back seat beside her, after rolling the windows down so they could feel the wonderful summer eve coming in.

She verbally unloaded on him then, as if they’d known each other since childhood.

She told him all about her accident last year when she’d shattered her ankle in a bicycle-riding accident, how long it had taken to heal, how she hadn’t been able to work during that time, etc. etc. etc.

She told him about her new life in Florida (his heart had sunk more than a little when she’d told him she lived in Orlando, 1,200 miles away from where they were right now in Chicago, but he filed that info away to deal with later and kept on listening) and how hard it had been, how things had not exactly gone as planned down there so far, and that was an understatement, etc. etc. etc.

She told him about her son, who was in his twenties and was addicted to opioids (no comment).

Her son lived in an apartment above a bar on “the street” and that was where she was staying while she was in town.

Then they started making out, out of the blue, there in the back seat of the car with the windows open.

They held hands, and kissed, and hugged (nothing else) in the back seat of the car as if they were teenagers. It was dreamy, beautiful, wonderful, warm, close, intimate, intimidating, great, awesome, amazing, totally unbelievably personal and proof that life was still okay despite the fact that this society itself had landed in the toilet a long time ago and would soon be flushing itself away into who knew what, for sure.

She said she had to go now and asked if he’d walk her over to her son’s apartment and asked if he’d meet for lunch tomorrow at one PM at a restaurant on the street. Yes! to both.

As he was walking alone back to his car after dropping her off, a guy from the sports-drone crowd called his name and hustled over to him on the sidewalk. He asked the main character to hold out his hand and when the main character did so to humor the man, the man placed a wad of cash in his palm. And he told the main character, grinning, that it was three hundred dollars. Someone had placed a bet in his name, and they were all honest after all, so congratulations!

He thanked the fellow heartily (the main character was on a very un-fixed income for a wide variety of reasons that shan’t be gone into now), drove over to where his kids lived with their mother, and gave them the money.

The next day, she didn’t show up at the restaurant for lunch.

He waited at the restaurant, and in the vicinity of the restaurant on the street, for at least three hours (and probably more). While waiting, he texted her exactly three times (they’d exchanged phone numbers the night before).

SILENCIO.

He texted her (very briefly) exactly once a day for the next three days in a row, then quit.

A week or so later, he couldn’t help himself, and he looked her up on the internet, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.

She’d very recently (within the last twenty-four hours) posted a picture of herself sitting on Daytona Beach snuggling arm-in-arm with another guy. They were both in their bathing suits and they both had huge, frozen smiles on their faces (almost like grimaces) and were showing plenty of perfectly whitened teeth for the camera.

He popped a few more pills (cold medications and Alley Man refills) and put on the Van Morrison song “And the Healing Has Begun” from the album Into the Music (1979); and turned it up LOUD:

“And we’ll walk down the avenue again.

And we’ll sing all the songs from way back when.

And we’ll walk down the avenue again.

When the healing has begun…”…

The Drifter (Images by The Drifter)

Some Girls story by Adam Kluger and Artwork by Dreck (Adult Advisory: If You Are Offended by Sex and Language, Put on a Disney Video Instead)

The Trekkie

Taylor was from a farmhouse in the Midwest and she was pretty with strawberry blonde hair but very shy and mousy. She looked like Chloe Sevigny and she hung out with the nerd patrol in the TV room and watched Star Trek with the brainiacs almost every night.

Long Island raised Jewish Princess Fern didn’t know what compelled her to sit next to Taylor. But the lights were pretty dark in the TV room. Fern was feeling frisky after a long night of partying at the campus pub. She let his hand fall on top of Taylor’s. No one could see. Taylor didn’t say a word as she grabbed Fern’s hand.

It was thrilling. No one else in the room knew what they were doing. When Fern tapped Taylor’s leg to follow her out of the TV room as she got up, Taylor didn’t make a move.

Not until Fern left the TV room and went up the stairs toward Taylor’s hallway. Five minutes later Taylor followed.

Taylor looked Fern in her green eyes, smiled widely and slowly opened the door to her own room on the girl’s hallway—and they didn’t say a word.

Fern ran her hands over Taylor and slowly kissed her.

Taylor seemed frightened at first but then quickly and hungrily made out with Fern, tasting the beer and cigarettes on her breath. They were both so naughty now and Taylor loved it.

Fern felt Taylor’s perky tits and cupped her tight ass.

Taylor started to get undressed quickly and before Fern knew it, they were fucking on a fluffy blue rug on the dorm room floor.

Licking each other’s wet, candy-flavored pussies. They still had not said one word to each other.

But Taylor moaned loudly and scratched Fern’s arms and back as she came.

Taylor was a real hellcat in the sack and the coolest part was they never said one word to each other…they didn’t have to.

When they saw each other the next day in the TV room they ignored each other. But later that night, they repeated the previous night’s ritual. As Fern left, she noticed Taylor’s nerdy friend Paula smiling. Obviously, their secret was out of the bag. The later sessions would never match that first time…which was like the first Star Trek…far superior to later incarnations.

The Publicist:

Brad met Brandi, the publicist with wavy, blonde hair at a music event and then took her to Cirque du Soleil. Brandi was a divorcee and she loved to be told what to do. Brad treated her like his own personal fuck slave and she loved it. He would make Brandi beg for him to fuck her in the ass and then he would tell Brandi how her female co-workers would like to join in. He ordered Brandi to lick their pussies and assholes. Brandi loved the dirty talk and Brad loved smoking some doobie before she came over.

“Get on the bed now and pull down those pants so I can fuck your ass like the little bitch whore you know you are…”

“Yes master, thank you…”

”Shut up and get those pants down bitch.”

Brad’s cock was never harder than when he would go through these B&D scenarios with the publicist. They engaged in phone sex all the time and Brad discovered that a lot of women love to be humiliated. Even though he revered and respected women… when it came to hot and dirty sex…why not? They were both adults… and the dirtier he talked to Brandi the more she loved it.

”That’s right…your girlfriends are all watching me fuck you in the ass you little whore…now they’re turning around so you can stick your nose in their ass cracks and lick their assholes…you’d like that wouldn’t you?”

“Oh yes master, you know I would…”

“Of course I know you would…get to it”

Brad usually just fucked Brandi in the ass…while he did it she would finger her clit. When she left to go back to San Francisco …Brad would miss her. Brandi was a cool chick and a great fuck…and as publicists go…she was one that Brad could actually tolerate…

”Next time my crew wants an exclusive interview…you better fucking make it happen or I’m going to make you suck their cocks while I pound your ass…you understand what I’m saying you stupid fucking publicist whore?”

“…yes master…you’ll get the first interview every time…”

“You’re damn fucking right I will! Now take it in your ass you little bitch…”

“Oh yes…oh my god… yesss”

“Take it you bitch…”

“Oh yesssssss, thank you.”

“That’s right, thank me for it you fucking publicist cunt.”

“Oh yes, master I’m a stupid fucking whore.”

”I know you are, bitch…take it up your ass …that’s right just like that…”

It would go on like that every time until they both came and then they would laugh and smoke a joint and then Brandi usually went home.

The cosmetics executive:

Once Stephan got a taste for the B&D games he found there was no shortage of women that liked to take part. Cindi, the cosmetics executive with the short black hair and pale complexion, was a friend of that hot co-worker Shelly who worked in the women’s dept.

Cindi was a set-up and she was totally game to be told what to do. Stephan made Cindi agree that if she was going to stay over at his apartment that she would follow his orders and do what he said.

There would be a safe word and he tied Cindi’s legs and hands up with a robe belt and tie.

Then he blindfolded Cindi, kissed her beautiful naked body and then put plastic laundry clips on her nipples.

Cindi’s pussy was slick and she was moaning like a woman possessed.

Stephan looked down, took another toke of a joint and admired the beautiful, writhing executive stretched across his sheets…he slid a vibrator onto Cindi’s pussy and she started to moan even louder…

”That’s right you’re such a good little slave that I’m going to make you come…but I want you to remember that your pussy and asshole and mouth are my property…”

”Yes, they are master”, Cindi moaned.

Stephan was glad Cindi remembered that she was supposed to always refer to him as “master.” The candle was originally there to drip on her…but instead he dipped it in the jar of Vaseline and slid the wick end slowly and wickedly up Cindi’s inviting asshole.

“That’s right you little slave bitch…suck on that candle with your asshole like you’re sucking on a lollypop…and don’t you dare let it slide out of your asshole.”

“oooooh….ahhhhh…ooooohh…oops…I’m sooo sorry master…it slipped out of my asshole by accident, Cindi gasped apologetically.

“SMACK!!!…now, don’t let it happen again slut…now, slide it right back in…” her pale white asscheek now had a bright pink handmark.

“oooooh, yessssss, master…thank you so much.”

Stephan jerked off on her back after Cindi came from the vibrator and that was the first of their many “play dates.”

After a while Cindi wanted a relationship and Stephan wasn’t the guy for that. But he always kept a candle and laundry clips in his kitchen drawer in case Cindi would occasionally decide to reach out for an impromptu booty-call.

The Blonde:

Porsche was blonde and she had been introduced to Ben by Manfred. There was some instant chemistry…but Ben didn’t act on it until months later when he used the aspiring actress for a TV modeling segment.

Manfred had said he had fooled around with her, but Ben doubted it and Porsche confirmed that too.

She was Italian and she looked like that blonde from Raging Bull…Kathy Moriarty…Ben discovered that her thing was getting spanked and phone sex. Ben was glad to oblige…

”Porsche I know you are in the bathroom right now…let me hear you…I want to hear you go to the bathroom…that’s good…now wipe yourself off and go into your bedroom and pull out that dildo I told you to buy earlier…did you remember to tell the clerk that you needed a big dildo so your master could fuck you in the ass for being such a nasty little slut?”

“…yes master,” Porsche replied.”

”You’re lying you little bitch I can tell by your voice”

“…no master I told him…I have the dildo right here”

“…you are a lying bitch…and you know what happens to lying bitches don’t you?”

“No master, what?”

“…they get fucked in front of all their co-workers…next time I call you in the office,I want you to finger yourself under your desk…do you understand me?”

“…yes master I do”

“…good girl…who owns your mouth, pussy and ass?”

“…you do master “

“…say it then…”

“My mouth, my pussy and my ass belong to you master…”

“Good girl…now stick that dildo in your pussy…”

Porsche started to gasp. Before long she was moaning into the phone…“oooooh…..ahhhhhh.”

”you want to lick your girlfriend’s pussy don’t you?”

“..Yes master..unghhh…oooooh.”

“You are a dirty little lesbian whore aren’t you?”

“..yesssss… master…uhhhhh”

This girl was hot all right…Porsche did play around with her girlfriends on occasion and if Ben hadn’t been seeing someone else at the time he would have really enjoyed fucking Porsche.

They kept meeting at parties and they kept trying to slip away to a private room so Ben could give her the spanking he kept promising her on the phone…but something or someone always seemed to bust it up before Ben could lay a hand on her delicious ass.

The best he could do was give her a pinch.

One time, they were in the elevator going down with other people in the car. Ben asked Porsche to hold his drink as well, then without anyone watching, Ben non-nonchalantly slid his hand between her legs on top of her pussy. She was wearing panties but for twenty seconds she stood there blushing as the other people in the elevator paid no notice. Ben whispered in her ear…”that’s mine… isn’t it…” she whispered back a breathless little “yes.”

Adam Kluger With Artwork by Dreck

The Party by Adam Kluger (Artwork by Dreck)

“His prose?”

“wonderful, piquant”

“Sentence structure, syntax, use of colloquialisms?”

“The entire body…of his work…is chopped…a little hard to digest but deliciously robust narrative nonetheless.”

“You really have been spending a lot of time on your food blog, huh?”

“Platform is everything these days Bascombe. How are plans coming for tonight’s get-together.”

“Oh, you know, the usual drama and complaining, of course. It wouldn’t be a literary circle event if someone wasn’t bitching about someone or sticking the knife in somebody’s back. It’s all part of the fun and games, I suppose. You’re part of the scene long enough and nothing surprises you. These writers though– continue to show even poorer taste if I do say so. This latest one– couldn’t have been any more impertinent really. You shepherd them through “the process”–you offer them immortality and you give them a chance to be sampled by the true arbiters of the literary intelligentsia and do you receive any form of gratitude from them whatsoever–hardly.”

“I know Bascombe- they are truly the basest of all creatures. All ego and no talent. Insecurity and hubris. They grab and cloy and never once realize that they are not special in the slightest. They are simply the current flavor of the month.”

“This new one was the worst I tell you– he thought he was born with a gift of some sort. You know the type. He had no time to “play the game” as he would call it. No time for foolish submission guidelines or petty protocols.”

“Can you imagine?”

“Yes…he really did say that.”

“Didn’t he realize that those submission guidelines and protocols that he mocked were instituted centuries ago to keep out the dreck and the unwashed masses who claim to be writers?”

“If we did not maintain standards or a threshold, then there would be nothing but a giant puddle of dung surrounded by flies.”

“And by flies you mean, of course, aspiring writers”

“Of course.”

“So who shall we expect at tonight’s heavenly soiree?”

“Oh, all the usual suspects- the staff from Creative House including the illustrious Madame B and her devilish young ingénues all dressed in high fashion like Dorothy Parker clones, all the top literary lights, bloggers and buggerers…some glitterati, musical theater friends, a surprise or two –expect the usual standing room only.”

“Lovely, lovely– are they all going to be pulling this new fellow apart to get at him?”

“Mmm…there should be enough of him to go around….when last we spoke he impressed me with his big personality.“

“So how did you handle the particulars?”

“Per usual…he signed his rights over to us for the novel etc, etc..for the standard minor advance.”

“Did you make him jump through hoops?”

“Of course.”

“And dance like a chicken with his head cut off.”

“Naturally”

“And he didn’t read the fine print on the contract?”

” They never do—do they?”

“That’s right, so eager they are for that small advance and for that sweet taste of fame.”

” They never have time for contracts or submission guidelines or petty protocols…”

“They never do.”

” Even when it says very clearly in black and white.”

” Upon the occasion of my death, all rights to my novel revert back to Bascombe Wellington & Associates.”

“Speaking of which…how’s your famous “writer-stew” coming along?”

“Should be the hit of the party –as always.”

“Bascombe, you are a cheeky devil.”

“Thanks, old friend–be a good fellow and pass me a fresh sprig of rosemary will you..and could you toss these left over metacarpals into the incinerator–I have a feeling he won’t be needing them anymore”

“Quite right…. you incorrigible old rascal, you.”

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)

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.

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

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

Under the Bridge by Christopher J Ananias

CHRIS 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.

CHRIS ANANIAS

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?”

CHRIS ANANIAS

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.

CHRIS ANANIAS

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)

CHRIS ANANIAS