music

My Philosophy: Step One

“I love you because you do not know how to live in this world.”

– Zarathustra, by Nietzsche

This has zilch to do with formal, systematic academic philosophy, which I don’t understand, or care about, at all. It has to do with living life.

And if someone were to ask me right now what my philosophy of life is, I would say a combination of stoicism with a small s and the very earliest Christianity. There is a reason why some early Christians got thrown to the lions, and why Nero had Paul beheaded.

The earliest Christians, of whom there were around 150 in Rome, were rebels. Among other things, they granted women and slaves a status that was almost unheard of back then, and they refused to honor the traditional gods or worship the emperor as if he were holy.

They were following a man who said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the middle of them.” What he meant by that was, after I die my spirit will still guide you, but you must be the artist of your own life. Riches or fame or power are not the things you should seek (like the emperor does), because they are only the empty things of this temporary world. It is yourselves you should seek, because you have selves and they are your eternal gifts and possessions which no one can take away from you, ever – not even the emperor. This philosophy can only be more crucial now (2026 AD) than ever before.

The Jesus of the masses is a false Jesus.

The Prosperity Gospel was written by Satan, that great snake oil salesman.

The stoicism part has to do with being what might be called a “badass.” Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest stoic philosophers, said that even if you’re being devoured by a wild animal, you should keep your cool, because it will all be over soon and you may as well not look like a fool screaming your head off on the way out. It is akin to what the Native Americans meant when they said, “Today is a good day to die,” and then acted like it, like Sitting Bull sitting down amid whizzing bullets aimed at his head and smoking his pipe. All the bullets but one missed (until the end), no one knows why.

It is not about looking for death, it is about not fearing death, even when it knocks on the door. Too many people fear death and dissolution and don’t even know they fear it. This condition makes them angry, cramped, greedy, grasping, cowardly, pinched, bitter, resentful, uptight and mean (and then they take it out on the rest of us). Marcus said that the first thing you must do is understand, that is seek, yourself. In this he was much like Jesus, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. Marcus, who was an opium user like Nietzsche, the emperor of Rome, and a general who witnessed gory war over and over again, and almost all of whose children died before he did, did not believe in tragedy.

Bukowski said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Neil Young said, “It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.” Someone once said that real rock stars do not die, they collapse.

Sinead O’Connor was found in her house, already dead from emphysema at 56. She was a lifelong chain cigarette smoker and heavy marijuana smoker who said the sacred Ganja helped her creativity. (I believe her, truly.) Her version of Prince’s song, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” permanently redefined what pop music is, and what it should be, forever (even though it isn’t any more). It was a case, in 1990, of real and true, solid and great art becoming wildly popular. Such things (the convergence of real art and the popular taste) almost never happen today. If you want to find great new art now, you must look outside the mainstream, first and foremost. THE MACHINE has taken over the mainstream and the Machine does not understand the human soul, which is the first criteria for both great art and great philosophy.

Chris Cornell was found on the bathroom floor of a fancy hotel room in Detroit, Michigan, at 52. He had benzos and other prescription downers in his system. The hanging rope (so-called) was around his neck, just like in the music video he’d recently made. Almost all suicide is an accident. If someone had gotten to him just a little bit sooner, things may have turned out differently. But he had found what he loved and let it kill him.

Prince checked himself out of a hospital after an opioid overdose, even though his doctors and assistants begged him not to. Very soon afterward, he was found alone in his own elevator in the Minneapolis, Minnesota, suburbs. He was 57. He, too, had found what he loved and let it kill him.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, universally acknowledged as the greatest German of all time, said we should live like this. Every day, we should let one song, one picture, and one poem or piece of writing take us away to somewhere else and then bring us back to ourselves. Every day. And we should work at it – harder, much harder, than we ever work at anything else, even though we also need to work very hard at everything else. “It” is never easy. And it is not supposed to be easy. Easy things are worth nothing. There are too many easy things and too many easy people in the world right now.

All three songs attached to this essay bring tears to the eyes behind the shades within seconds of being heard, for the writer of this essay. It is not because the writer of this essay is sad, although he is sad.

It is because the music is so beautiful.

END NOTE: They say AI is gonna get us, permanently. But not if you have a superhuman spirit of mind, or a mind of spirit, that can outmatch it. “Artificial Super Intelligence” will be able to do everything better than us. But not with the things of the spirit. And the spirit flies, it rises, far above all – even artificial super intelligence (no contest in the end).

CODA:

Bukowski’s T Shirt

Late in life

he wore a t shirt

with his own, old face

upon it.

(See the cover of

You Get So Alone at Times That It

Just Makes Sense, 1986.)

This was a way

of saying

fuck you!

to all those who

had tried to kill him

off.

Now

here

it’s gotten

worse

than it already was.

Don’t let them

or It

take over,

that is,

destroy

(devour),

your soul.

By Dale the Drifter, including photos and music selections!

Saragun Springs Presents a Small Circle of Purity

I used to be one of those people who hated it when they could not understand the words to a song. But after a lifetime of it I have come to an understanding that often it is the emotional sound in a voice that is the lyric. It creates a mood and as you will see in the clip I’ve added that mood can expand and sweep up a certain type of mob.

Nirvana was like that, well Cobain was–he deliberately aimed at what I mentioned earlier. He was an extremely wonderful human being when you dig into the things he said and tried to say. By wonderful I do not mean he visited sick kids or picked up strays (though he may have done those things), I mean he was fascinating to read in an interview. He was so unlike the people around him and it makes sense he could not live long. Scarcity does not always mean special, but in his case it is the truth. Frankly, I find the Foo Fighters as artistically relevant as a half rack of diet Pepsi.

I loved the energy in punk music, which later became grunge and probably still exists more in the truly outlaw country we have along the fringes of the form than anywhere else. Personally speaking, I have all the respect for the Sex Pistols as I do the Monkees. They were built, designed and produced. Funny thing is all the members are genuine human beings and I do love that fat guitar sound they had–but like Johnny Rotten finally had to say “You ever get the feeling you are being used?” Punk was not as much as an expression of truth as it was disgust for what the kids were being told was true, as their world decayed all around them.

I find there was more truth in bands that never blew up but were known. X is one of those (still going in an off and on sort of fashion) and so was Husker Du (which was named after an educational board game, the words are Danish meaning “Do you remember?”–the band added superfluous umlauts over the vowels, which I’ve forgotten how to make on this keyboard). The guys in the band did not assume the punk look. Oh hell no. The singer looked like he drove a beer truck, the bassist had a great Deadwood mustache–Only the drummer (who died a rocker’s death from cancer caused by several addictions) bore resemblance to a rocker, and even there he looked more like a roadie than a performer.

Back in the 80’s punk bands did ironic covers of 60’s songs. But I do not think that was the case with Husker Du’s version of the Byrd’s “Eight Miles High.” The emotion that flies from the threesome is a powerful thing and it is especially keener when you listen to the studio version on headphones. For a very long time I thought that the name of their song was coincidental to the Byrd’s one. That is how different they are.

I believe art is a localized magic like love. Both can exist only in small spaces but they do they are the gretest human creation. Most people are horrified by the Husker Du version of the Byrd’s classic. I guess that’s called gatekeeping–we are so into labeling stuff and each other. The keepers may have conveniently forgotten their parent’s reaction to that “hippy shit” they were listening to in 1960-whatever. Or maybe they were protecting something very dear to them and that any alteration by the future was a call to arms. Things usually go better when people try to understand, but since that is hard to do, anything ranging from cheap meanness to ugsome patronization takes its place.

Regardless, there are times when art does not need the words to get across, yet the circle is small and the resistance is immense. And in that small magic circle, stood I, when the world was just as old as ever but I was still fairly new.

From 1987 I present Husker Du performing “Eight Miles High” in Nordic weather that, as a northwesterner, I am very familiar with.

(Image is of Alfie, truly a Punk Rock Cat)

Leila

Harold Bloom by Dale the Drifter

“I write for children and angels.” – William Blake

The posthumous book THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: THE LITERARY LETTERS OF HAROLD BLOOM was recently published (in 2026) by Yale University Press. It is a small, thin book, and there is no doubt that many of the literary letters Bloom wrote over his 89-year-life are not included. But this book is a representative sample, condensed and where every example has its relevance; as such, this book is like part of the gospel for anyone who loves creative literature in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Creative HUMAN literature, that is. In a world of lies and delusions, both mass and personal, one thing (at least) is for sure: the half dozen or so technical “wizards” right now who are building AI do not understand human artistic creativity, or its importance for our species, at all.

They are purely technical minds, so divorced from an understanding of real and true human, artistic creativity that they themselves are almost inhuman. THIS is why they have no problem trying to turn everyone who is now (still) human into a dollar-making (for them) robot.

THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING was published by Yale University Press with a grant. That means this is not a commercial book. The number of people who purchase this book will not be enough to make back the money it took to publish it. Whoever was behind this project understands that some things in the world are more important than money.

I said it was gospel. The letters of Paul (including the ones written in his name after his style that are included in the canonical Gospels) are some of the greatest creative writing that has been written on Planet Earth, any place, any time. THAT is why they’ve had such a profound impact for both (mostly) good, and ILL (just barely behind the good they have done). The surviving letters of Paul amount to a double handful; they were written for free and have changed the world more than any other human writing, ever. That is because they are WRITTEN SO WELL. (Paul’s letters survive all translations, and become new things that have grown from the old and so are part of the original source with consistent ties going back two thousand years, more relevant now than they were then.)

Bloom spent his life channeling the fact that HOW WELL something is written is the first criteria that should be considered when considering creative Literature with a capital L. Political considerations are also commercial considerations, one way or another. Any political agenda the good and true reader of classic imaginative literature brings to the material will be a highly imaginative, extremely fluid one, and it will be secondary. Rigidity of thought and purpose are not part of the highest (human) creative arts. Bending the mind and breaking the rules is what creative writing is for. Therefore, it will always be trampled into the dust by THE MACHINE, but it will never die there. It will rise from the mud like the most beautiful flowers that have ever been born on Planet Earth. This is because imaginative literature in its highest forms contains the very wisdom of humanity itself, not less and not more. So many of the greatest writers are essentially comedians in the end because this viewpoint finally transcends the tragic viewpoint. It sometimes seems heartless to make the mind rise above it all but this is what the greatest writing actually does, which is one reason (but just one reason) why it is often called “transcendent.” It strips away the delusions and shows humans what they are, what they were, and what they might become. The comic viewpoint in the highest levels of writing transcends all tragedies. After taking very deep account of them first.

In one of these letters, Bloom writes about himself: “Lord knows what I am. Not a poet, critic, scholar, historian, psychoanalyst, philosopher, or theosophist – but a worthless mélange of the gang of it.”

All creative writers worth anything in 2026 need to be all of the above, and even more, somehow. That is just one reason why it takes almost all the best of the best writers so long to find their voices, starting now, or yesterday. The complexity of the world has blown itself way out of proportion. The writer who ignores this is not doing their (or his or her) job.

There are at least 200 separate academic disciplines in the world today. In most of them, the number of experts in the world who can truly understand the real and true cutting edge of that discipline amounts to a few dozen at most.

This is probably also true for the most cutting-edge imaginative human literature right now, which is the most cutting-edge discipline there is (by far).

As such, it is a dark time.

As the world plunges down toward more darkness now, in the end the light will grow – or it will be extinguished.

“Theosophist” means imagining somewhere else (without abandoning the here and now).

Dale the Drifter (images by Dale the Drifter)

The Sky to Talk About by Dale Barrigar

(All images by Dale Barrigar)

“You’re soft as glass / and I’m a gentleman / and we’ve got the sky to talk about / and the world to lie upon.” – Townes Van Zandt

Getting back to nature is not what most people think it is and this MISUNDERSTANDING causes too many people to not get back to nature when getting back to nature is probably the single most important thing many of us could ever do right now.

Too many people believe that “getting back to nature” equals what Ubiquitous Advertising (and now social media in all its octopus-like tentacles and forms) has told them it is.

In order to get back to nature, you do not need to purchase expensive hiking boots and a new backpack and the right clothes and the right walking stick so that you look like you are a nature buff.

You do not need to climb Mount Everest or fly on one of “their” toxic airplanes to a “nature” destination that is filled with tourists just like you.

You do not need to swim to the bottom of the sea nor hike back into the literal wilderness so far so that you do not see any other humans for forty days or more and end up dying of starvation.

You do not need to purchase a mountain bike; do not need to buy rock-climbing equipment; do not need to buy expensive guns in order to slaughter animals with, or a boat so you can hunt down fish; nor do you need to purchase a jeep; a surf board; or a tent and camping gear, in order to get back to nature.

If you are outside right now, glance up into the sky and really notice it and what it’s doing right now; then step to the nearest green thing around you (even if it’s been made that way by humans) and notice how this green plant grows and interacts with its environment, giving back good and taking bad out (you can FEEL this around a plant if you want to). We wouldn’t be here at all without them.

If you are inside, move to the nearest window somehow and open it if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay. Study what is happening in and through the window, whether it be sun, clouds, night, moonlight or starlight or whatever the light (from the sky) is doing.

Even if you couldn’t open the window, you have gotten back to nature when you noticed (and engaged with) the natural light (or its opposite, darkness); and the natural light is always there, even when it’s combined with a human-caused light, which is, after all, also part of nature, because humans are part of nature.

If you can’t move right now, turn away from what they call “the world” and enter so deeply into yourself that the world falls away and there is nothing but self, so much so that “the self” disappears – and you realize that you have been here all along and always will be even after whatever else happens happens. (And it is going to happen anyway whether you like it or not. This is part of what they mean when they say, “Let it be.”)

Nietzsche famously wrote, “Stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss will stare back into you.”

Most people misunderstand that quotation and think it’s a negative, and terrifying, thing.

It’s actually the most positive thing one could ever hope to imagine.

Dale Barrigar

Hating Tolstoy’s Guts: A Musical Manifesto No Matter What Else Happens by Dale the Drifter

“And it would take a time machine

To fulfill all of my fantasies

’Cause a hidden dream can be embarrassing

And the only thing that’s sacred ’til the end.”

– Conor Oberst

“…and the number of the beast is 666.” – John

“Everybody must get stoned.” – Bob Dylan

As insane as it sounds at first (but it will not sound insane after first blush), there are a million writers (and more) who hate Tolstoy’s guts.

They sit there staring at that behemoth of a novel, War and Peace, which is two thirds as long as the Bible and Shakespeare’s complete works, and every single episodic, philosophic, dramatic word of which is brilliant, a novel whose teeming amounts of characters (both humans and animals, and even furniture, rooms, machines, weather, rocks, plants, planets) are as alive as the greatest characters in Shakespeare, and they (these writers) sit there staring at this MONUMENT of writing, and the writing life, and they hate its guts.

They hate it because they are violating the Tenth Commandment, and coveting the achievement and talent of War and Peace’s author.

But don’t worry. Tolstoy himself HATED SHAKESPEARE’S GUTS. He wrote many thousands of ridiculous words about why Shakespeare is so pathetic. Indeed, it is a literary marvel to think that a writer of Tolstoy’s talents and intelligence was unable, completely unable, to appreciate Shakespeare. Dickens and Dostoevsky, for example, considered Shakespeare to be a kind of god, literally. Dickens named all of his magazines after Shakespeare, and he sometimes wondered if he himself was Shakespeare, in his manic explosions. Tolstoy hated Shakespeare because Tolstoy envied (and coveted) Shakespeare’s talent and unmatchable achievement.

And there are many artists who can’t stand Michelangelo. They look at his statues, which have presented the human form in a more beautiful artistic way than probably anything else on Planet Earth (see his statues of Mary, Jesus, David, and Moses for starters; looking at pictures of these is more than good enough), and they look at that most gigantic of all gigantic paintings, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and they can’t believe just one man did it all. They forget that he had ZERO social life (zero = 0!) as an adult, that he never did ANYTHING but work on his art, that he crippled himself by working so hard at his art, that most people who knew him hated his guts because he wouldn’t even say hi to them because he didn’t have time to get involved in pointless conversations that didn’t involve his art, and that he did all this and more (like rarely bathe, eat or sleep, and when he did sleep, he slept in his clothes, and when he did eat, he ate while he was working) all because he never did anything else but WORK ON HIS ART AND THEN WORK ON HIS ART SOME MORE. In his downtime, he fervently read Dante and the Bible with an intensity that fed straight back into his art. Everything for him was ART, and ONLY ART. He could NEVER have done the nearly-superhuman things he did if this wasn’t the case. He lived to be 88 in an age when that was like 110 now because he was always too busy working on his art to die, literally. (In certain ways (but only in certain ways), perhaps not even Shakespeare can match him.)

If you want to be your own kind of Michelangelo, you can’t spend ANY time just lounging around feelin’ good, except what you need to keep you going again as soon as you can – as soon as possible. (But proper rest is essential in order to survive and thrive, too.)

And there are many musicians who hate Bob Dylan and his music and lyrics. Many writers (especially in academia) started hating his guts even more than they already did AFTER he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

They look at those hundreds and hundreds of songs (close to a thousand when you count unreleased/later-released material), so many of which are both literary AND musical masterpieces, they look at the forty studio albums all of which are at least partly great (and therefore great), they look at the uncountable numbers of demos, bootlegs, and live recordings, and videos, that are just as good as anything on the studio albums, and they want to throw rotten eggs and rotten fruit at Dylan.

ALL writers, artists, and musicians have these kinds of feelings sometimes. Because if you didn’t have them, you wouldn’t be spurred on to compete, which means create.

Contemplating a transcendent work (Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Melville, Dickens, Dickinson, Van Gogh, Dylan, and Rimbaud, always Rimbaud), and absorbing it, and returning to it, is not always a matter of abject worship, or utter hatred, either, for the real artist (and only for the real artist, not the pretenders).

Sometimes you sit there trying to figure out what you can possibly do that’s better than this, or that can be in the same room with this without having to hang its head and exit in utter shame and infamy.

The boundaries of human writing are still being pushed forward (especially in the personal essay, the short story, and new forms of the novel and poetry).

As the Machines continue to take over more, and more (for now, until humanity wins, or goes down in flames trying), including many writing jobs, the importance of truly creative HUMAN WRITING gains ground every single second that ticks by.

As long as there are humans, there will be RARE humans who look for this. In ways we can’t scientifically pinpoint (which is the beauty of it all), they are (and will be) very, VERY, very much helping to keep the flame (of the human spirit) alive (more than anyone else, YES, more than anyone else, whether they be politician, technologist, or scientist, etc.). It has nothing to do with making a splash now. (It is too pure.) It has nothing to do with whether you “believe” in what everyone else calls “God.” It has all to do with making something individualistically and universally, relatably HUMAN that will survive its own time (and it will look strange at first, maybe even like hieroglyphics, “before” its time; OR it will not be ahead of its time). No less, and no more.

When you live for something larger than yourself (no matter what the actual results are, in truth), you stop caring about what the rest of them call “dying.” (Also, since we all go, does it really matter when?)

Final Note: ALL great writing is AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, ESPECIALLY Shakespeare, the greatest user of sources who ever existed (after Jesus).

Dale the Drifter (images provided by the Drifter; song selected by The Drifter)

Communing with the Dead; or: Fearful Symmetry by Dale Williams Barrigar

“What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

– William Blake

NOTE TO READER: This is a philosophical kind of literary essay. That is why it is written in such an awkward, simple, friendly, open-hearted way. (1,000 words.)

There are enough technocrats in the world. Them and their billions and billions and billions of followers, who follow them because they follow the Golden Calf ($).

Some of these technocrats even believe that God is a computer game, and we are the characters.

These are some of the “smartest” minds in the world, in a technical sense. And their religion of the computer game matches real religion minus all of the redeeming qualities.

The world needs more philosophy, art, and religion, much, much more.

Philosophy, art, and religion are not the same things.

You need the first thing to build the second thing and the first two things take you to the third thing without you even knowing they are doing so and the third thing (which is the most important thing) continuously feeds back into the first two things, which are then strengthened accordingly, which makes them feed back into the third, and the process goes on into the future strengthening the philosopher, artist, and religious adept who is all the same one in different guises that sometimes meld with each other.

PHILOSOPHY = a mental way of living on this Planet and making it through without tearing your hair out (too many times) or hurting anyone else (as much as possible). It is a way of being, and the best philosophies do not even have names because they are so individualized and psychologically specific. The best philosophy for your life belongs to you alone and only aspects of it can ever be shared with anyone else alive on the Planet in any way. This is one reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so very, very long and very often.

LITERATURE = communing with the dead. Literature Is communing with the dead. It is not, totally NOT “canonical.” It is anything but academic. Literature itself is communing with the dead in a way that’s more alive than anything else. When you read Christopher Marlowe and get him, living ghosts are crowding your brain, including the ghost who created it all, most of all, Christopher Marlowe, who remains the single greatest creation of Christopher Marlowe, who is far more alive than most living humans are. Another reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so often is because so many of the “living” ones around us are dead. (It can be like Vincent Price in the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth.) Marlowe lived and died like his fictional creations lived and died. That is honesty.

Not all of the writers a good writer reads are dead; but the majority are. It is one of the very few known situations in life where your power increases vastly, slowly, and steadily after you are no longer here in the flesh.

(“So long lives this and this gives life to thee,” said the man who learned more from Marlowe than any other.)

ART= LITERATURE. Literature is the first art, and it started with the first meaningful grunt or groan that led to the First Word, when one human said it to one other human and that other human understood and said it to the third human and then they all understood, together. And next time, they did it again with the same sound, which was called The First Word. Now we have “language;” AND LITERATURE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF LANUAGE. (The English language, the largest human language in the world, has a vocabulary so large it is technically uncountable.) You cannot create art without a philosophy of life. The philosophy of how to live (and how to stay alive) comes first, then living it, then saying it to someone else in a memorable way, which is literature, and takes forever to master and understand. Without a philosophy of life that comes first, you cannot create art, which takes a lifetime to perfect. The effort to live with the philosophy, then create out of it eventually (while practicing along the whole time), leads to feelings of real religion (leads to the artist becoming a religious adept), defined in the next paragraph.

RELIGION = imagining the possibilities beyond what our senses tell us in a serious, individual way. It is like a “sixth sense;” an invisible third eye; a soul feeling; something you turn to; NOT someone else’s rules; anything BUT someone else’s rules; everything that is NOT someone else’s rules, at the deepest level. Harold Bloom’s metaphor for this is “the oldest part of one’s self.”

REAL RELIGION does not involve other humans in the sense that everyone needs their own internal religion that no one else can understand or relate to or take away from them under any circumstances, and that means any circumstances. Then and only then can it be shared with any other humans in any way, including writing, which, in the end, only scratches the surface (but is enough up to a certain point; not after).

Harold Bloom called the above “a religion of one.” This turns you into a king or a queen on the face of the earth even if your pockets are empty and you have nowhere to stay; even if they have you behind bars, symbolic or literal ones (or both).

ALL THE PROBLEMS the world is having right now ARE CAUSED BY a scorching lack of philosophy, art, and religion in their truest senses. None of these things are only for an elite, they are for everyone in their own way. The theaters of Marlowe and Shakespeare were thronged with groundlings.

In the state of nature everyone is a poet but now hardly anyone knows it and almost no one acts like it. That is why the “smartest” minds in the world believe we are all just characters in a computer game.

END NOTE: In order to avoid being surveilled, all you need to do is step away from their machines. There is still PLENTY OF ROOM to do this whenever you want to – in the Americas.

Dale William Barrigar

Endless Ghost by Dale the Drifter

“You’ve got to fight to keep your legendary love.” – Lou Reed

Franz Kafka said: “I have always been haunted by the feeling that I understand more than others, yet cannot make them understand.”

How a Reader reacts (perhaps, but not really perhaps) to this quotation says everything about who that Reader is.

Such a condition has nothing to do with formal education or monetary status. It has everything to do with the core essential Self.

All can read the quotation on a literal level.

Those who scoff and mock are in a VAST SUPER MAJORITY, while those who ponder and understand are in the tiniest of tiny minorities.

The quotation can be interpreted at least two general ways.

One: It is about the plight of the modern artist, even more now in 2026 than ever before.

Two: It is about the plight of modern humanity (what they used to call “modern man”) in general. That is, ultimately this is about the Universal All in the modern world (the modern world that started in its ultimate beginnings ten or twelve thousand years ago as far as we know it now).

Kafka’s three perhaps greatest works explore this profound, essential, existential condition in a way that few others have ever done.

THE BUG: the man who turns into a literal insect because he is so persecuted by both society at large and the basis for all society, the family.

THE TRIAL: the man who’s punished, ostracized, exiled, and finally murdered by society for absolutely no reason he ever even has time to figure out (he dies as a young man with a kind thrust of a knife into his chest by two strangers).

THE CASTLE: the man who must attain shelter within the Castle or freeze to death outside: and who’s only let in by “them” when it’s already too late.

Kafka’s (so-called fictional) prose visions are not “nightmarish,” they are realistic. They are dreamlike, but they are not fantastical. The world has not always been like this, but the world is like this now.

In the end, everyone is crucified, even Judas.

Dale the Drifter (images provided by Dale the Drifter)

The Preachers by Dale Barrigar

Dolly Parton’s grandfather inspired her entire life in numerous ways. He was a wandering preacher who also played music. In many parts of Appalachia, preaching and music and religion and happiness and the Good Book all go together. Dolly was a gorgeous flowering of all that.

Their kind of religion is not the bad kind of religion. It is not even the judgmental kind.

It is the life-giving kind, the happy singing kind, the joyful kind, the everything-will-be-okay-including-DEATH-ITSELF kind.

In this kind of religion, anyone who suffers in any way at all is seen as holy instantaneously (more holy than they already were), and as someone we should all LOOK UP TO, not pity. Even children. ESPECIALLY CHILDREN.

There is little pity in this kind of religion.

What there is here is LOVE. Just love. Only love. All love. And love is the only thing there is. Even when it doesn’t LOOK (or feel) like it at all. You don’t even have to believe in God.

The best preaching never happens in churches, as Dolly’s grandfather knew very well.

It happens on the streets, on the sidewalks, in the parks, in the mountains, in the cities, or anywhere just one person suddenly feels the Holy Ghost inside and decides to connect with another “just one” person who also feels the Holy Ghost within themselves. These are epiphanies, moments, flashes of sunlight from behind the dark clouds, not constant things; but they leave an afterglow.

You can be gay, you can be trans, you can be black, white or green, you can be any color or creed under the sun or above it, you can be anything you want to be and already are.

The best preaching is informal, brief, fast, sudden, spontaneous, and OFTEN WORDLESS.

It often happens in less than a single second, with a single glance of the eyes. And then you pass on by. You always pass on by.

All it takes is two willing people who will remember one another even though they don’t even know each other’s names.

Dale Williams Barrigar (images by DWB)

Your Cheatin’ Heart by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“The time will come when you’ll be blue.” – Hank Williams

It is hard to see someone crying (mostly genuine) tears over you even as you know they’re cheating on you (even though they won’t admit it to you) as you say, with great and utter finality, “I’ll see you around.” Your own tears do not appear in the moment; they appear, unannounced, years later, when you are long gone, somewhere else.

Willie Nelson, perhaps the greatest heir of Hank Williams of all time, used to cheat on all of his wives, all of the time.

And all of them would catch him at it. And the thing is, HE WOULD NEVER, NEVER, EVER admit it, not even when the women placed the red-handed evidence right in front of the Red-headed Stranger’s face.

And I know how that goes. It is called “acting” like nothing ever happened, and some of us are (just naturally) as good at that kind of acting as Marlon Brando was at the art kind of acting (and he is the greatest American actor of all time, alongside Marilyn). (Addiction is a great teacher of acting: “No, OF COURSE I haven’t been drinking again,” etc. etc. etc….)

The song, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” is a song that has been said to literally DEFINE ALL OF modern American country music.

Hank dictated the lyrics to his fiancé, about his recently ex-wife, as they rode/drove in a car from Tennessee to Louisiana. The lyrics suddenly appeared before him, almost as in a dream, all in their full glory, and he just let them come out, while she wrote them down. When something like that is happening to a person like Hank, you don’t take time to criticize, IF you understand him at all, which she did. (Hank also died in a car not too long afterward – literally.)

His voice as he sings this song is powerful, brokenhearted, and hillbilly. The powerful and the brokenhearted are utterly raw and natural. The “hillbilly” is/was entirely an act, but a brilliant act, like a Shakespearean thing.

Hank was also one of the first people to take the cowboy hat out of the American West and move it on over to the US South. Now, cowboy hats are everywhere down there, like in Nashville (even though they kicked him out when he was alive). Yes, the cowboy hat thing is because of Hank, who sometimes called himself Luke the Drifter. And that is just one reason why (just one reason why) he really is the Shakespeare of American country music. Country music, along with the blues and folk, created rock and roll. Just one reason why Willie Nelson is great is because of how he combined “hippie” and “redneck” and turned them into something all-new.

When Ray Charles sings this song, his voice is sad, slow, sweet, stately, surrendering-to-the-moment, soulful: “truth and beauty,” to quote John Keats, who has a lot more in common with Ray and Hank than most people will ever know (or care to know). Just one reason why Ray Charles is great is because he could sing ANY kind of music with utter conviction, which is also Shakespearean.

SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF WROTE AT LEAST 100 SONGS.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Ramblin’ Man by Dale Barrigar

“I love you, baby / but you gotta understand, / when the Lord made me / he made a ramblin’ man.” – Hank Williams

The song “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Hank Williams, ends with these words:

“And when I’m gone /

And at my grave you stand /

Just say God’s called home your ramblin’ man.”

Hank was 29 when he expired in the back of a car being driven by a college kid he’d hired on the way to another gig in the middle of America.

Exhaustion, chloral hydrate, morphine, alcohol, amphetamines, nicotine, caffeine, probably a few other drugs, and very, very little food for a very, very long time can be said to be the direct cause/s of his death, i.e. his sudden heart failure in the middle of the night in the back of a car blasting across the American heartland.

Neil Young, who’s 80 now (the age Dolly Parton was when she passed on), and who had his own big-time drug and alcohol problems, and who is a direct descendant of Hank Williams, like Dolly, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, once said in a song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) says in his song “27,” “They say I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”

Those twelve words strike me as being one of the best explanations for the 27 Club I’ve ever heard.

The best singers do not sing only about themselves, just as the best writers do not write only about themselves – they sing and write about all of us, very often when it looks like (on the surface) they are writing or singing mostly about themselves, like Hank in “Ramblin’ Man.”

AND IT’S UP TO US TO MAKE THAT IMAGINATIVE CONNECTION, INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK IN OUR COMFY CHAIR WITH OUR EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF BUTTERED POPCORN AND TOSSING SPITBALLS AT THE ONE WHO IS TRYING SO MUCH HARDER THAN WE ARE.

And some real artists (everything in our world is either real or fake), when they live long enough, learn how to slow down – at least enough, for a while.

(The song “Ramblin’ Man,” as performed by Hank, is very close to a spoken word poem, which is probably why Sam Shepard loved the song so much and used it so often.)

In honor of these departed kids and others of their ilk, whether “famous” or not, HERE is a list of twelve members of the 27 Club. They weren’t all 27 exactly (at their passing). Some were 29, like Hank, or 26, like Mac Miller and Nick Drake, or 25, like Tupac Shakur. (8 of 12 were exactly 27.)

Hank Williams. Robert Johnson. Mac Miller. Tupac Shakur. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. “Pigpen” McKernan. Nick Drake. Kurt Cobain.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)