Saragun Springs

American Siberia by Dale the Drifter

This week the hapless schmuck who sometimes calls himself D the D (which is a way of marking the passage of time, the shifting of personality, and the ongoing, never-stopping flow of human evolution) offers little more than quotations by another writer (at the end).

This is NOT because the Dale Barrigar guy behind the Drifter persona (character) has nothing to say, but because this week he has decided that only Saint John the Divine can say it better.

When he wrote the 12,000-word book REVELATION, John was an exile on the island of Patmos. In other words (as with Ovid, Dante, Dostoevsky, and too many others too count), they kicked him out and sent him away. When they sent Dante away, they said to him: if we see your face around here again, we will chop off your head and burn you at the stake. And they definitely meant it.

No wonder he went away and imagined them all in hell for the rest of his life (until he started writing about heaven when he figured out he was about to go there soon). He loved his home city and his home region and never saw it again. He started loving Beatrice instead, who he had seen in the flesh exactly two times, nine years apart, for less than one minute total. She inspired the most beautiful, heavenly, memorable dream he ever had in his life.

Us folks in the USA often cast stones at Russia because they’re always sending everyone to Siberia and we should indeed do so if we value human freedom at all.

But in the meantime, us Americans should also look around us a little bit, since we have our own AMERICAN SIBERIA that is more invisible but no less (usually) PSYCHOLOGICALLY traumatizing.

Psychological trauma, or damage to one’s brain and personality, causes physical pain and illness, too. But many people also often forget that struggle and trauma also (often) cause IMPROVEMENT in the one who undergoes the trauma; very often, that is, they become, and continue to become, a better person because of it.

In 2014, there was a guy in Chicago who lost his job because of TEACHER BURNOUT (after twenty years), wicked bipolar depression, and contentious disagreements about technology usage in the classroom (he was very much against it, and they were very much for it, and trying to force him into it) with the “powers that be,” then couldn’t find another job because of current conditions.

Eventually he tried everything else, including manual labor and clerical work in a book-binding warehouse. Then it was slaving away twelve hours a day as a vastly underpaid (making the equivalent of less than minimum wage in Illinois while being responsible for seventeen students including during the covid pandemic since the Catholic schools went back right away, at least half of the students having behavioral problems and three of them having medical conditions so serious that they required near-constant monitoring; one undersized kid’s lips would turn blue from a heart condition, another obese one would have a diabetic emergency, and a third would have what appeared to be seizures from his autism; there were three girls in the class who were like brilliant angels and a few other students who he stayed for), Catholic elementary school teacher. He left all the other jobs he attempted, including this one, only after literal mental and physical collapse: manic depression again, but also the impossible circumstances.

Since he had never been on Facebook because he hated it and its creator the moment it came out, all of the people who used to know him back in the old days thought he was either dead, or most likely in jail, or even more likely, the madhouse.

He was aware that most of the people who used to know him thought this about him, and a few people seemed way too comfortable telling him to his face that they thought it.

A decade of internal exile occurred (time slips away so fast), but during that time he also continued working on something else very happily in secret.

And he quietly turned himself (almost without knowing it) into someone who could, quite simply, do all the things he’d ever wanted to do.

In the meantime, there was one half-assed suicide attempt caused by hypomanic insomnia (three Adderall, nicotine-patch, caffeine-fueled days of no sleep) leading to total, stumbling, falling-down, not-thinking-straight, delirious exhaustion.

He was saved when he looked over and saw his Siberian Husky puppy sitting there looking at him in deep concern, which immediately made him drop the suicide idea he was half-pondering and rush over to comfort the dog instead.

He also had several other bipolar nervous breakdowns that were not job-related (a few of which did indeed land him in the hospital for a little bit), an ongoing battle with more substances than can be listed here, a stroke that culminated it all, and a war against anonymity that he ended up winning so successfully that he now embraces his anonymity and seeks to extend it indefinitely and as long as he can.

The handful of other authentic, genuine literary artists (not just writers, who are cheaper than a dime a dozen, and not even just good writers, who are amazingly rare) he knows, or knows of, in America have all had their own equivalent battles and wars (in their own ways) with AMERICAN SIBERIA.

“BLESSED ARE THEY WHO READ, AND THEY WHO HEAR THE WORDS OF THIS PROPHECY, AND KEEP THOSE THINGS WHICH ARE WRITTEN IN THEIR HEARTS: FOR THE TIME IS AT HAND.”

“I AM ALPHA AND OMEGA, THE BEGINNING AND THE ENDING, SAITH THE LORD, WHICH IS, AND WHICH WAS, AND WHICH IS TO COME: THE ALMIGHTY.”

“AND HE SAID UNTO ME: THESE SAYINGS ARE FAITHFUL AND TRUE: AND THE LORD GOD OF THE HOLY PROPHETS SENT HIS ANGEL TO SHOW HIS SERVANTS THE THINGS WHICH MUST SHORTLY BE DONE.”

“AND HE CARRIED ME AWAY IN THE SPIRIT TO A GREAT AND HIGH MOUNTAIN.”

Dale the Drifter

(Images by Dale the Drifter)

The Drifter know his music!

Sun Beams and Alchemy (and Photo Gallery) by Christopher J Ananias

When the world is a dark pit, and you find yourself locked up with lunatics. Sometimes, a person needs a slice of sunshine. So that’s what this series of photos will try to capture, but alas, it’s hard to catch a sunbeam.

Then again, I don’t need my baseball glove or butterfly net. Not when I have this magical weight around my neck. It’s left the dark room behind, this is true, but I have my own just in case.

I try to explain this alchemy, as if to a five-year-old or my giant German shepherd dog, to these folks on the ward, but they just cock their heads. I talk about apertures, f-stops, and blinking eyeballs.

No respondo, Ernesto just gazes away from me and talks to people who aren’t there. All of their heads turn, and I finally have an audience.

I’m free again, on Antabuse, so I’m back with the camera therapy of nature and sunshine. The technology that I couldn’t explain to them—resting in my hands. Like a thousand picture books.

The shutter is eager to slide over its mechanical eye, snapping pictures of the sun and everything under it, but you have to be careful taking so many pictures of God.

(Farm Sunrise)

(CO OP)

(American Flag-Vet MIA)

(Kestrel)

(Landscape)

Words and Visual Music by Christopher J Ananias

One More Language Game by Dino Alfier

Ludwig Wittgenstein is buried in the Ascension Parish Burial Ground, in Cambridge, UK, not far from where I live. His grave attracts its share of that tiny subcategory of gravestone tourists who happen to be interested in philosophy. I’ve visited his grave on several occasions over the years.

The austerity of Wittgenstein’s gravestone (an unadorned, epitaphless slab flush with the lawn, bearing the simple inscription: LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN 1889 – 1951) has always seemed to me a fitting token of the austerity of his thought.

Sometimes visitors place little tributes on the stone: flowers, a handful of coins, a pinecone, or even cupcakes. The most frequent tributes, however, are tiny toy ladders.

In the second-to-last paragraph of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s first book, he writes:

‘My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it. He must surmount these propositions.’

Hence the miniature ladders on his grave.

He then concludes, rather haughtily:

‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

This admonition possesses the irrevocability – and silence – of a tomb, as if it were possible to say all there is to say, to exhaust the totality of the sayable.

On one of my visits to Wittgenstein’s grave, I saw one of these ladders, a straight ladder propped against the urn-shaped flowerpot that sits at the head of the gravestone. And only on seeing it, did I realise that I’d always thought the ladder Wittgenstein writes about to be not a single straight ladder but a self-supporting double-sided A-frame ladder, that is, a trestle ladder. Why? Perhaps because I thought that with a trestle ladder, I could cross over senselessness in an orderly (a sensible) way: I’d climb one side of the ladder believing that Wittgenstein’s propositions have meaning, and then, having at last recognised their senselessness, I’d climb down safely, and much the wiser, on the other side. There you go. Job done. That way, sense and nonsense would remain neatly separated and there’d be no risky cross-contamination.

But as I now reread what Wittgenstein wrote, I realise that he doesn’t say to climb down the ladder. No, you must throw away the ladder––so to speak. Yes, so to speak. But that’s precisely the problem: what does it mean to speak so? Where do you end up once you’ve climbed out through, on and over Wittgenstein’s senseless propositions? Would you be standing on a thoroughly elucidated, stable platform? But how could a platform resting on senseless foundations be stable?

The more I think about it, the colder my feet get about throwing away that ladder. And perhaps a trestle ladder is not such a bad idea after all.

But by 1945, more than 20 years after the publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had completed the final manuscript of his last book, Philosophical Investigations, in which he rejects his earlier grand claims about senselessness and his haughty admonition to be silent.

Now Wittgenstein says that our making sense of the world involves what he calls language games, and that although we can’t form a perfect picture of how the world is, we can stitch together a makeshift patchwork of family resemblances of the world we experience. It’s impossible to say all there is to say, not because our languages are somehow inadequate, but because language games are open-ended: their rules can change, the game board can shapeshift, and you can always play one more game. Even though I hardly understand what Wittgenstein is getting at here, the expressions ‘language game’ and ‘family resemblance’ suggest an altogether homier and more human-scaled world than that of the Tractatus.

And the miniature ladders that sometimes appear on Wittgenstein’s grave seem to me to embody this change of mind that he sought to justify in the Philosophical Investigations. It’s as if these little playful tributes were saying that we can only climb diminutive ladders of senselessness, piecemeal senselessness in a vast plateau of meaningfulness (mostly?) of our own making––so to speak.

Dino Alfier

Linda King Review by Adam Kluger

When my best friend, a book publisher, would host an annual guy’s weekend for high school and college friends at his house in Millbrook, in upstate New York. I would always take the couch in the library. On the book shelves were great authors like Hemingway and Salinger, and also various books by Charles Bukowski.

“Check out this Bukowski. I think you’ll like it.”

The book was Post Office. The opening line was something like, “It started as an accident.” Bukowski’s first novel was a humorous account of the down and out author’s life working in a post office and I was immediately hooked.

I would go on to read everything I could find by Bukowski. Women, Love is a Dog from Hell, Ham on Rye, Factotum and on and on —all of Bukowski’s poetry, prose, short stories and correspondence. Whenever a new title would show up at the Astor Place Bookstore,

I would snatch it up along with books from his literary hero John Fante, like Ask the Dust.

Over the years I have become an avid Bukowski aficionado/enthusiast enjoying Mickey Rourke’s portrayal of the Los Angles underground legend in the movie “Barfly” and Bukowski’s own performance in Barbet Schroeder’s wonderful 1985 documentary film, “The Bukowski Tapes.” When Bukowski passed on in 1994 it was a major blow. We had lost arguably one of the greatest writers of our time.

So, it was with great curiosity that I discovered on Facebook recently that one of Bukowski’s longtime girlfriends, sculptress and poet Linda King, was going to be appearing in a literary-arts event in 2026. We exchanged emails and Linda mailed me a copy of her old book, “Loving and Hating Charles Bukowski: A True Story,” along with a new photo-book of her wonderful sculptures.

The great thing about Bukowski was his ability to make readers feel something very real with his humor, flow and honesty. Always entertaining, thought-provoking and resonant. Linda King’s no holds-barred recollections of her volatile 5 year on-and-off love affair with the famous street poet, 20 years her senior, is honest, revelatory, heart-warming and heartbreaking at the same time with intimate love letters and poems between the two interspersed throughout the book as it reflects the nature of the underground writers scene in Los Angeles in the ‘70’s and the depth of a couple’s enduring love for each other through constant break-ups, infidelities, drunken fights, jealousies and the desire the be together again and again. This book is one of the most entertaining and insightful looks into the real Charles Bukowski, written by a courageous young woman who was both his muse and object of affection. I loved reading this harrowing account of a relationship that traverses from heaven to hell and back chapter after chapter. It is full of beautiful poetry and real insight into Charles Bukowski by the woman who may have known him best of all. If you are a Bukowski fan, or have ever had your heart broken but someone you love with every fiber of your being —you will love this book. I know I did

Post-script:

Linda King was kind enough to text me this note after I sent her this short review:

[Wow! That is a great review of my book. It is being translated right now into French language. They might like to use it on the back of the book or part of it. I just got off a long trip…tomorrow.

But thank you for you words.-Linda King ]

Adam Kluger

The Poet by Adam Kluger (Art by Dreck)

The city was hot.

But not like last week.

Humid, sticky, murderous.

Bart walked the streets.

The warm stench of urine wafted up from the grates over the subway.

Trudy was working.

She was always working.

Usually, Bart enjoyed taking a stroll around the city.

His mind would fire with interesting thoughts like fireflies in

the woods at night.

Today he went to the local Schlockbusters looking for a movie.

It was hot in the store.

No air conditioning. No good movies either.

He went to a local Great Buy. Nothing good there either unless you had four grand and change to spend on a flat screen TV.

Nothing in the music dept. no new CDs or music videos.

Then he went next door to the bookstore.

All the new books looked the same. They looked like a scam. Like something unreal.

The famous faces on the covers were all ugly and self-important.

He made his way over to the classics section hoping for inspiration.

Bart flipped through a book by Ernie Humdinger on writing.

Even when old Ernie tried to sound humble in his letters to other writers… He still came off as a pompous jerk.

Perhaps he should have written a book entitled “How to take yourself too seriously.”

Or better yet…How to be your own worst critic…kablam!

Bart walked past the homeless guy with the face of a crocodile outside of the drugstore. He would stay there every day and sing to himself. Not a great job, but seemed like he had tenure at least.

The world just was not creative anymore.

There were no great writers, musicians, filmmakers or intelligent life forms in all of Hollywood.

Every day a stupid new reality show was being perpetrated on the public.

The latest had a bunch of rich kids on a cattle ranch.

It was a rip off of another rip off of an old idea that was re-heated and re-cast.

Bart felt like he was inhaling sand and chewing on sawdust. To make things worse…everywhere he looked it seemed like new strange little birds were crawling in the dirt or in the bushes or flying over his head just a little too close for comfort.

An uneasy day.

Even the letters he strung together on his computer didn’t seem to

fit.

He tried to write a poem:

That’s What Happens

They come to me

at the strangest times

these images

of alligators playing croquet

a psychedelic Buddha

pink and white undies

underneath that blue and green tartan skirt

they come like lightning bolts

and dripping water

images of

leopard headed monkeys

with emerald eyes and tails

that never end

in the shower

or on the john

they crawl through my windows

with slimy tentacles

slippery and silent

pigeons explode inside my brain

horses and hippos

bathe in pools of

rainbow-glo blood

I guess that’s what happens

when love

goes away.

He immediately crumpled it up and threw it out the window. Fuck this Goddamn building he thought…no goddamn AC! The anger seared through him… another poem was making its way into his brain…he grabbed a pen and a piece of scrap paper.

Not An Artist

really bad poetry

keeps pouring out of me

like peacock blood

unicorn vomit

and mermaid gas

really bad poetry

like a mountain

of fool’s gold

is easy to mine

but useless to all.

really bad poetry

flows from this pen

ruining perfectly good

loose-leaf paper

words with

no order

or rhythm

or depth

dance away from my

fingers

and glare back at me

with righteous indignation

bad

bad

bad

bad!!!

with no purpose at all

just to fool a fool

who is

not an artist.

Again, Bart crumpled up the paper and threw it out the window. He stood up and looked at his reflection in the metal lamp pole on the desk. Distorted. He grabbed for another piece of scrap paper.

Roxy’s Cat

You’re asleep

I just know it

while your cat

patters about on a

black velvet carpet

of night

you’re asleep

I just know it

while my heart screams

your name

I listen to my air conditioner

it tells me to stay calm

be a cool cat…

while time washes me down the drain

my face

my smell

my laugh

my love

you’re asleep

I just know it

that water dripping

in my bathroom

told me so.

Once again, Bart crumpled up the poem and threw it out the window.

He walked over to the refrigerator.

Opened it.

Looked in.

Closed it.

Stood there.

Took his pen and wrote a note on the pad attached to the door with a magnet.

Then he went into the bedroom.

Packed a bag and never came back.

Adam Kluger (Art by Dreck)

Indeed, There is Balm in Gilead by Michael Bloor

Though there was a rumour that his grandad had been Benito Mussolini’s food taster, Andrew was a proud Scot. In his retirement, he took up volunteering part-time, at Innerpeffray, Scotland’s first free-lending library (established in 1680). Andrew loved to brag gently to foreign visitors that Scotland was the first literate nation in Europe, thanks to the Presbyterian Church which believed that it was the duty of every Christian to study the bible. And, to do that, the peasantry had to learn to read. Not that there were lots of foreign visitors, because Innerpeffray Library was off the beaten track, at the end of a no-through road in rural Perthshire. Summer Thursday afternoons were the exception – that was when a coachload of Dutch tourists would appear every week.

When he’d first started volunteering at Innerpeffray, Andrew had found this regular Thursday influx of (largely elderly) Dutch folk a bit odd. He’d once asked Eunice Drummond about it; she’d been volunteering there for many years. Eunice shrugged and said they’d been coming to Innerpeffray all the time that she’d been at the library. She thought that each group would’ve been staying the night at the Crieff Hydro Hotel, some miles across country. Or maybe they were on their way to the hotel…? She wasn’t sure.

How the Dutch had got to Innerpeffray wasn’t really a matter of acute interest to Andrew. He rather enjoyed an audience, and this Dutch audience understood English very well, even when spoken with his Glasgow accent. He would ask them to picture the strangeness of the idea, in the seventeenth century, that one should allow casual callers of all classes to turn up at the library and then go away again with a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets under their arm, books back then being a luxury item. And, having pricked his audience’s interest, he’d show them one of the old Borrowers’ Registers, which recorded not just the book borrowed, and the name and address of the borrower, but also the borrower’s occupation. They could see farm servants, weavers, quarriers, road menders and the like, borrowing works of philosophy, history, literature and theology, to carry miles back to their wee cottages to read by the dim light of their cruisie lamps.

On this occasion, most of his audience had eventually drifted away from The Borrowers’ Register and gone over to where Andrew’s colleague, Ronnie, was displaying the library’s set of Mercator’s Atlases. Ronnie had an atlas open at a page mapping seventeenth-century Holland, and was inviting visitors to locate their homes. Andrew’s attention was drawn instead to a Dutch couple peering into the glass case containing the library’s copy of Hollingshed’s Chronicles, a history of Britain first published in the sixteenth century. The book was open at the page illustrating Macbeth’s meeting with The Three Witches, a scene which Shakespeare was later to borrow and make famous.

The couple were elderly but vivacious, even vivid. Andrew was on his way over to them, to offer them a bit of background on Hollingshed and his Chronicles, when the woman let out a chiming peal of laughter. It stopped Andrew dead in his tracks.

Although the woman had her back to him, he recognised her by the laugh instantly, from fifty-odd years ago. It was Mila’s laugh. His mind went back to a tousled tent on The Lido in Venice, and the ever-green mystic meeting there of lips and legs. For a moment or two, he watched the two of them by the display cabinet, leaning into each other and whispering, in the time-honoured tradition of library conversations. It was plain to see that they were a happy couple, enjoying each other and their holiday in Scotland. Whereas his time with Mila in Venice, all those years ago, had not ended well.

Deliberately, Andrew turned instead to a small Dutch group who were puzzling over the library’s copy of the 1602 ‘Treacle Bible,’ so called because Jeremiah 8.22 reads ‘Is there not treacle in Gilead?’

Later, after the coach party had departed, to the Crieff Hydro or elsewhere, and the library closed down, Andrew climbed into the car for the short drive home. He was smiling. He and Dorothy were planning a sunny evening meal in the back garden, just the two of them. He was looking forward to it.

Michael Bloor

*This story was developed from an essay on Innerpeffray Library, and the books therein (‘A Favourite Place: Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest free lending library, established 1680’), published in Literally Stories October 28th, 2023.

Extra Credit by Bill Tope

Ralph sat in the back row of the classroom, slumped in the too-small desk, watching his instructor and taking notes in his cramped, pinched writing style. She was sure a looker, he thought, stealing a glance at her legs, her tiny waist and at her long, curly dark hair. Clearly, even apart from the apparent difference in their ages, she was out of his league. He sighed and dotted an “i.”

The pretty teacher introduced herself and asked the students to call her Allie.

“How many of you,” asked Prof. Allie Evans, “took this class as a part of a major in English?

Half of the 17 students, nine male, eight female, raised their hands. Allie smiled.

“How many of you are studying Creative Writing as a part of a vocational pursuit? As a part of learning to write better as a part of your job?”

All the rest of the students, apart from Ralph and one other, lifted their arms.

Allie nodded, then looked closely at Ralph and then at a pretty woman in her 40s. The teacher consulted a roll sheet/seating chart.

“What about you?” asked the teacher, addressing the raven-haired woman sitting in the front row. “Ms…Wiseman…why did you enroll in this class?”

“Please call me Betty,” said the woman. “I’ve always been an avid reader, since I was a little girl. “Lately, I’ve become interested in actually doing the writing myself. I guess I was curious about the nuts and bolts of writing fiction. So, here I am.”

Allie smiled again and nodded. She turned back to her seating chart. “And…Mr. Phillips…is Ralph okay?” she asked.

Ralph nodded. “I’ve tried writing some short fiction over the past year and, like Betty, wanted to delve into the fundamentals of fiction writing.”

“Have you ever got to the point where you submitted any of your writing?” Allie asked.

Ralph nodded.

“How did that go?” she asked next.

“Jury’s still out,” he quipped, and the class chuckled. He added, “I’ve been published twice so far.”

“Congratulations,” said Allie. “If you hear any more on work you’ve submitted, please let us know.”

Ralph nodded again.

“One rhing, about grades,” said Allie to the class. “A letter grade is just that: a letter. It says only that you successfully completed your classroom assignments–or didn’t. I’m required by the university to tender a letter grade, but I think they are not necessarily reflective of what you’ve actually accomplished. Bear in mind that the very successful writer Stephen King failed abysmally in the one creative writing course he took.”

A woman raised her hand. “Is that true?”

“Of course not,” said Allie. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

_____

A week later, the professor told the class: “Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll want to meet with you, one on one, for a brief dialogue. The purpose of this meeting will be to divulge your particular interests in writing and how this course will best serve those interests. It’ll be very informal and last around 20 minutes. Oh. And the university journal, The Argus: you can earn extra credit by volunteering your time as a slush pile reader. Let me know if you’re interested.

As the class became engaged in a “free write,” Allie turned up a leather-bound appointment book and drifted from student to student, arranging appointments. When she got to Ralph, near the end of class, she asked what would be convenient for him and he replied, “Any time. I’m retired,” he explained. The class, which ran on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 2-4pm, then concluded and Allie asked him if that afternoon would work for him. He agreed that it would.

After everyone else filed out, Allie asked him if he’d like to join her in the university coffee shop, where they could enjoy a cup while they talked. “Or is it too late for coffee for you?” she asked.

Ralph said, “I drink coffee all day long.”

“Then you’re a natural writer,” she told him with a smile. They walked the short distance from the classroom building to the student union, to the coffee shop.

Allie was very informal in her questioning, asking about the breadth of Ralph’s literary interests and what his ultimate expectations were with regard to writing. He listened attentively to her questions and answered as best he could, but was frankly more interested in Allie than in her queries. Was she flirting with him, he wondered. He told her he had been divorced for almost two years and had two daughters, fully grown. He didn’t mention that he missed his ex- dreadfully.

“If you’ll pardon my asking, Ralph, how old are you?” she said. He told her.

______

“Your next assignment,” said Allie one afternoon, “is to get together with at least one other fellow student and collaborate on a short story. I’ve taken the liberty of selecting a partner for you, based on age, which is superficial, but it’s a pretty reliable parameter, in terms of personal history and perspective.” She handed out a slip of paper to each student, with the name of their partner on it.

A hand shot into the air.

“Yes, Betty?” said Allie.

“How long of a story do you want?”

“Whatever length you and your partner feel comfortable with,” replied the teacher. “I’d prefer at least flash fiction, which for our purposes would be from 500 to 1,000 words.”

“How long do we have to complete the assignment?” inquired Matt, a 30-something man seated in the middle of the classroom, whose presence seemed to radiate sexuality.

“I’ll give you two weeks, or four class periods,” said Allie. “You may want to meet outside of class to complete your assignment; in fact, I’d say it’s almost a must. The questionaire I distributed last time showed that of the 17 students enrolled in CW, all but two of you are unmarried.”

“We’re all adults, Allie,” another woman pointed out.

Allie smiled. “Precisely, Priscilla,” she said. “This is another course, like any other. This is your assignment; it’s homework.”

“Tell my wife that,” muttered another student. The class laughed.

“I suggest you take your laptops and meet in the coffee shop in the student union after class,” said Allie. “I met with a student there for our dialogue last week and there was very little traffic after this class let out. When you turned in your class schedule, I saw that no one has another class after this one and I presume that most of those who are employed don’t need to report back to work after this class.”

No one raised an objection. “So, any questions?”

No one had any questions, either.

“Alright, time for a free write.”

Ralph gazed across the classroom and observed that Betty, the student whom Allie had selected to partner with him, was headed his way. This was expected, since she was obviously the student closest in age to him.

“Hi, partner,” she said brightly, approaching his desk as the class let out.

“Hi,” he answered back, instantly noting that her ring finger was bare. She made the same appraisal of him and they both smiled.

Ralph came to his feet and they filed from the classroom. Entering the coffee shop, the same waitress approached their table and smirked at Ralph. “Will you be having your usual?” she asked.

“Yes, thanks,” he said.

“Come here often?”asked Betty.

He shook his head no. “Just once before,” he replied.

Betty ordered. She took out her laptop and booted it up.

“Maybe we should introduce ourselves a little,” suggested Ralph.

“Okay. I’m Betty Monroe, unmarried, 42 years old. I live in the city. I work as a copywriter for a Fortune 500 company. Although I write for a living, I’m taking this course in order to strengthen my creative approach to writing.”

“Ralph Phillips,” said Ralph. “I’m unmarried–now, and I retired two years ago.”

“What did you used to do?” asked Betty.

“I was a chemical engineer for 25 years,” he replied. “I own a couple of proprietary patents and so I retired.”

“How old are you, Ralph?” asked Betty pointedly.

“In two months I’ll be 55,” said Ralph.

“I see,” said Betty cooly.

“Is there a problem?” asked Ralph.

“It’s just that, well, our world view won’t be sympatico,” Betty began.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re practically a full generation older than I am, Ralph,” she said. “I mean, I wasn’t even alive when they landed on the moon, whereas you were.”

“Betty, this isn’t a dating service, it’s a creative writing course.”

Their drinks were served.

“Certainly, I know that,” snapped Betty with overt hostility.

“Then what is it?” said Ralph with hostility of his own.

“I would like a more contemporary perspective from a writing partner,” she said bluntly. “You’re just too damn old.” She rose from the table, her coffee untouched. Folding up her laptop, she stalked off.

Walking back to the classroom, where he’d forgotten his raincoat, Ralph found Allie still there, typing away. He briefly described the incident at the coffee shop.

“Not to worry,” Allie said brightly. “Another student dropped out, leaving a second student without a partner. It happens.”

“So who’ll partner up with me?” he asked, doing some rapid arithmetic.

“I will,” she said. “You’ve had work published before, so you were probably too advanced for Betty anyway. She would’ve been intimidated by your track record.”

“If you say so,” muttered Ralph, remembering the scene with his erstwhile partner.

“At all events, Betty will have the youth she sought,” said Allie with a crooked smile.

“Do you want to go to the coffee shop?” asked Ralph.

“No need,” she said. “We can do it here.”

Ralph took a seat at a desk near Allie’s.

They performed their introductions. When it came to the age question, Ralph was surprised. Allie knew Ralph was mid-50s and Ralph figured her for mid-40s. He got it wrong by 10 years.

He said, “And I would’ve sworn you weren’t a minute over 30,” he said gallantly.

“I’ll be 53 after the first of the year,” she assured him. In response to his look, she brandished her naked ring finger.

They both smiled.

______

Ten days later, Ralph sat at what had in fact become his regular table in the university coffee shop, tap-tap-tapping away at the fiction on which he was collaborating with Allie. He paused to sip from an iced coffee and glanced up in time to spot Betty threading her way through the tables to the rear of the shop. In her wake walked Matt. the 30-something stud muffin from the class. Matt looked up, spied Ralph and waved. Ralph returned the greeting, but Betty, observing Ralph, spoke shortly to Matt, who then sheepishly averted his eyes back to his companion.

Ralph only chuckled and returned to his laptop. He was joined soon after by Allie, who took no notice of the other two. Betty spied her, however, and her lips became a thin, unsmiling line.

“Hi,” Allie said as she settled herself at the table.

“Hi yourself,” said Ralph.

“Your number one fan is at the table near the back,” she whispered.

“I didn’t think you saw them,” remarked Ralph.

“I’m a teacher,” she explained. “I see everything.” She smiled at him as though she knew a secret.

The secret was that they had become lovers only the night before. Her eyes twinkled.

“Looking good, professor,” whispered Ralph.

“Feeling good,” she agreed.

“Can I get you anything, Allie?” asked Ralph.

“I’ll take another helping of what you served last night; or was it this morning…” She erupted with laughter that sounded to Ralph like ice tinkling in a glass tumbler.

Ralph glanced at the other table and spied Betty observing them with a jaded eye. Allie looked too and said, “My, she looks perturbed.” She smirked.

“I wonder what her problem is?” said Ralph.

“Maybe her young Adonis can’t get it up,” suggested Allie, who laughed all over again.

When Betty and Matt glared at them, Allie feigned seeing them for the first time and waved. Reluctantly, the other couple returned the greeting.

“Ah, youth,” murmured Allie, catching the waitress’s eye and placing her order.

“Did you complete the outline for our short story, Ralph?” asked Allie, suddenly all business.

“Just finishing up,” he announced, turning the computer so she could see.

“No, that’s alright,” said Allie, “I’m come look over your shoulder.”

Betty’s eyes were sharp as gimlets as they absorbed the closeness of teacher and student. Allie came around the table and leaned far over Ralph’s shoulder, their cheeks almost touching.

Ralph felt a little awkward, but not Allie. “I could take you right now, Phillips,” she said in a low, heated voice.

This struck Ralph as funny and he made a smart remark about doing it on the table. Allie turned to face him, her brows lifted provocatively. “I’ll get on my knees and suck your cock,” she threatened in a stage whisper.

“Ssh,” he cautioned. “They’ll hear!”

Allie turned her face back to the laptop, but dropped her hand, unseen by the others, into Ralph’s lap and began kneading his privates. Ralph gasped.

“Don’t tell me you never got it on in a public place,” she chided, increasing the pressure on his genitals.

Ralph’s head swam. “Al…Allie, please, stop.”

“Oh,” she murmured with a pout, releasing him. “You’re no fun.”

She went back around to her own seat. Ralph’s face was red and he was breathing hard. Allie took the laptop and turned it so that it was facing her. She typed a few strokes and pushed it back towards Ralph.

It read:

“Is your dick hard, lover boy?”

He nodded mutely.

Allie pursed her lips. “Goody,” she said.

_____

They were having supper at Allie’s; aside from being a beautiful woman and a professor and an award-winner author, she was a gourmet cook. Ralph shook his head. How did he get so lucky? he wondered.

“What are you thinking?” she asked, spotting the gesture.

He told her, but her reaction wasn’t what he’d been expecting.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” she said matter of factly.

“Fate?” he asked. “Destiny? Kismet?”

“I don’t believe in any of that horseshit,” she said gruffly.

“Then how do you explain it?’ he asked.

She looked at him somberly for such a long moment that he became restive.

“I told you I’ve never been married,” she went on, filling in the gaps where his thoughts had been percolating. “Didn’t you ever wonder why I never pressed you about ex-wives, significant others, children and the like?”

“Well, sort of.”

“You were married to your high school sweetheart in 1994,” Allie said. “She died tragically in an automobile accident four years later. You had no children…”

Ralph’s jaw grew rigid. Was he being stalked? he wondered.

“You can find out anything on the web,” she added, easing Ralph’s mind a little. “Then you married Gail Fisher, a high school biology teacher, in 1998. You had two daughters, Beth and Kris, now 20 and 19 respectively…”

“What’s the point of the summary, Allie?’ Ralph asked, stemming the tide impatiently.

“The point,” said Allie, stepping forward, “is that I want to marry you!”

“What?” he yelped, taken by surprise.

“I’ve taken you to my bed, many times, over the past month,” said Allie. “I let you kick the tires, look under the hood, take my chassis for a spin around the block.”

“How can you say you want to marry me?” asked Ralph. “We barely know one another.”

“You knew Gail only two months before you proposed,” she reminded him.

“Yeah, things like that,” said Ralph. “How do you even know that? It’s not on the web. Only Gail and I know that…” He paused as a light dawned in his eyes. “You know Gail,” he said slowly.

“Right the first time,” said Allie. “I met Gail in junior college back in the 90s when we were both undergraduates. We kept in touch. Literally,” she added wistfully.

“What do you mean?” he asked, dreading the answer.

Allie ignored the question. “Gail always told me, ‘I’ve got this hot guy. He’s hung.’ and she was right.” Allie smiled saucily.

Ralph frowned. Who was she kidding? he thought. He had always been only modestly endowed, at least according to the women he’d known.

“And she said this guy could go all night,” said Allie.

Well, okay, maybe that was true, agreed Ralph to himself.

“We used to compete for guys,” Allie went on. “But she told me to stay away from you, and then you were married, and so…”

“But now?” he prompted.

“Gail emailed me a while back and told me that her divorce had been finalized and it was open-season on her old man.” Allie tittered lightly.

“But how did you even know I’d enroll in your class?” asked Ralph.

“That was serendipity,” admitted Allie, “but when Gail told me you were taking the class, I shuffled class schedules around just enough…” She smiled complacently.

“So what now?” asked Ralph.

Allie shrugged. “Honeymoon in Hawaii?” she suggested, only half kidding.

“What makes you think I even want another wife, Allie?” Ralph asked.

“In me you’ve got a woman within three years of your own age, so our memory set and social perspectives are sympatico. I’m a well-compensated, tenured professor, so you know I’m not scoping you out just to get your dough. Plus, I’ve got a killer bod’–you’ve got to admit.”

Ralph nodded unconsciously. It was all true.

“Plus,” she added, “I like to go all night.”

_____

Ralph stood uncertainly under a beacon of light, squinting against the glare. Slowly he moved forward, out of the light, and suddenly it was dark as midnight. The roar of an engine caught his attention and up to him sped a sports car. He couldn’t see the driver for the dim light. Abruptly the vehicle slammed on the brakes and drew to a halt. Ralph gasped. He fell forward, over the hood of the car and could hear the cooling engine ticking.

Next Ralph found himself in a parking lot behind some retail stores. He observes two vagrants, a young woman and an even younger man, rummaging through a dumpster, caching items in a large black trash bag. They pay him no mind. Suddenly, Donna Lee, a woman Ralph knew as a teenager, appears and the other woman begins softly singing. At the conclusion of the impromptu concert, Donna Lee applauds politely. She tells the pair that she’ll take them to the bus station and buy them tickets home. The three disappear out of Ralph’s vision.

Ralph startles awake and Allie is there in bed beside him. He tells her his dream and asks what it means.

Rather than explain, she says, “You can use your dreams and bizarre half-memories in your writing, lover, but don’t include a dream in the text. That is a faux pas and a cop out and an outdated literary technique.” Then Allie goes down on him.

_____

In class several days later, during a free write, Ralph is immersed in the creative process. He pays no attention to the rest of the class. He hears Allie say something from the front of the room, but he pays it no mind. At once the rumble of conversation increases and Ralph hears whistles and cheers and applause and his name.

He glances up and everyone is looking at him.

“Congratulations, Ralph, old man,” says Matt, slapping him on the shoulder.

Ralph stares stupidly.

“I hope you’ll be very happy!” he hears Betty say.

Another student asks Ralph, “When’s the big day?”

“For what?” asks Ralph, still out of the loop.

“Your and Allie’s wedding, man,” says yet another student. “Allie just told us,” he said.

“Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, Ralph’s eyes lock with Allie’s. She’s running her pointed tongue over her pink lips.

Ralph gulps.

_____

Ralph is in Allie’s bed and they just got high. Ralph peers closely at the soapstone pipe Allie always proffers.

“What kind of pot is this?” he asks. He has forgotten to inquire about their purported wedding. He learns from the class that everyone will be in attendance.

“The park is a great idea for a wedding, Ralph,” said Mary, a 30-ish student in the creative writing course. “Good thinking. Allie told us it was your idea.” She smiled and her mouth looks so wide he’s afraid she’ll swallow him.

Ralph asks Allie again, “What kind of pot is this?”

She shrugs. “The kind that gets you high, I guess. Why? Does it taste weird to you?”

Ralph tires to form an answer, but he is having difficulty organizing his thoughts, a sensation coincident with his deepening acquaintance with Allie.

“No, it’s fine,” he says, and sighs.

“I can’t believe you didn’t get high before we met,” she remarks.

“The firm I worked for could fire you for cause if you got busted for smoking pot,” remembered Ralph. “Besides, it was illegal most everywhere until just a few years ago.”

“Wanna smoke some crack?” Allie asks him out of nowhere.

“No,” he says positively. “That shit is addictive and it is still illegal. You don’t do it, do you?”

“No,” she replied. “But one of my students gave me a dime bag and told me how to smoke it.” He looks down at a couple of small white rocks Allie holds in her palm.

Ralph shakes his head no.

“Okay, baby,” says Allie agreeably. She tosses the crystals into the waste basket.

Ralph wants to tell Allie about the personality changes he’s been experiencing, but doesn’t want to worry her. So he says nothing.

There is but one class period left in the course, and Allie is sitting up in bed reading manuscripts created by her students and submitted in lieu of a final exam.

“How do they look?” asked Ralph, seeing Allie chuckle.

Allie only shakes her head and shuffles through the pile.

“I invited someone over tonight, Ralph,” she tells him.

“Tonight?” he asks. “It’s getting sort of late for guests, isn’t it? We’ll be going to bed soon.”

“That’s the thing,” replied Allie. “I want us all to go to be together, you know?”

Ralph knew that in her colorful past, Allie had been a player, but he hardly expected that life to continue, and if it did, to include him.

“Who is it?” he asked cautiously.

She hesitated a beat and then said, “Gail.”

His ex-wife!

“You talk about her in your sleep. You told me you’re still in love with her,” she pointed out. “And she misses you too, Ralph.”

“Allie, that part of my life is over. It’s behind me.”

After a moment, he asked, “Did you and Gail ever…?”

She nods.

Ralph blew out a breath. “Whew!”

She is looking close at him. She narrows her eyes.

“So what do you expect to happen here tonight, Allie?” he asks with morbid curiosity. Oddly, it seems to him, Ralph doesn’t feel at all turned off at the prospect of making love with both his former wife and his girlfriend. And he iss still in love with Gail.

“I can see you’re intrigued,” noted Allie with a smile.

Ralph couldn’t help himself; he grinned. “Well,” he said, “a Ralph sandwich. What’s not to like?”

“Then try this on for size, lover,” said Allie. “She’s bringing someone with.”

“The electric spark died instantly. Feeling proprietary about both his ex- and his current girlfriend, Ralph didn’t want to share.

Seeing Ralph’s distress, Allie smiled and put him at his ease. “You can relax, Ralph. Gail is bringing another woman.”

“How will that work?” Ralph wondered aloud.

Allie smiled. “We’ll just play it by ear, okay?”

_____

When the other couple arrived, Ralph noticed obliquely that there was someone, a slender, 30-ish blonde, in company with his ex-wife, but Ralph only had eyes for Gail. She looked good: a few pounds heavier, but it suited her, a positive contrast to the whippet-thin physiogamy she’d had for the years of their marriage.

Gail introduced Petula–‘Pet’–to Allie and Ralph, but it didn’t really register. He couldn’t take his eyes off Gail. Her hair, still dark brown, was longer, the lines in her face sharper, but she looked, Ralph decided, damned good. The two couples sat around drinking wine for a while, but Ralph didn’t taste his. The gathering was friendly. Pet addressed Ralph.

“So you retired early, Ralph. What do you do to fill your days?”

When he didn’t immediately respond, Allie touched his elbow.

“Oh,” he said. “I take classes at the university. That’s how I met Allie.”

“That’s how everyone meets Allie,” said Gail with a little smile.

Ralph found the remark jarring. Another reminder that Gail and Allie been intimate? he wondered. Feeling suddenly left out, he grew quiet again.

“Hey,” said Pet, “I’ve got some blow. A full gram,” she added.

Allie perked up, but Gail didn’t react. She was watching him.

“Are you into illegals now, Ralph?” she asked in a neutral tone.

Ralph remembered Gail as being almost reverential about treating her body “as a temple,” and how she’d seldom even drunk alcohol during their nearly 20 year marriage. He looked at her curiously. Then was relieved when she didn’t partake. Pet sprinkled the translucent crystals onto a small mirror and cut them finely with a razor blade. Allie participated with enthusiasm, as did Pet, but Gail concentrated on watching Ralph.

Of course, Allie pulled out her stash and they smoked some pot. Gail did participate here. After a few minutes, the voices became a soft murmur and Ralph felt himself nodding off. When he awoke, Gail was sitting on the sofa, watching him.

“Where…where are the others?” he squeaked out.

“Allie took Pet upstairs…” said Gail, “…to see her etchings.” She laughed.

“They went up to bed?” asked Ralph bluntly.

“Uh huh. How does that sit with you, Ralph?” Gail asked.

“I…I don’t know. I’m confused.”

Gail didn’t say anything.

“I feel,” said Ralph, “totally at sea.”

“I’m not surprised,” replied Gail, taking up Allie’s small dope pipe. “How often do you smoke this shit?” she asked.

“Every time Gail and I are together,” replied Ralph. “Sometimes two or three times a night. What?” he asked, “it’s just pot, right?”

Gail drew the pipe to her nose and sniffed. “Not quite,” she said.

“Then what is it?” he asked.

“Peyote,” she answered. “Mescal buttons,” she added. “Probably blended with a little PCP or opium.”

“I…don’t do hallucinogens,” protested Ralph rather fecklessly.

“Okay, Ralph.”

“You mean,” he said, “that Allie has been drugging me with hallucinogenic drugs? Is that why I’m seeing things, imagining things that don’t really happen?”

“You were always good at math,” she told him. “Put two and two together.”

“Why would Allie do that?” he asked.

“I haven’t spent that much time with her over the past couple of years,” said Gail.

“She said she knew you from back in the day,” said Ralph.

“I was a bit of a wild child in my undergraduate days,” allowed Gail. “Then I settled down and married you. I figured all the craziness was behind me.”

“And now?” he asked.

Gail took a moment to answer. “I’m still in love with you, Ralph. I never fell out of love with you. It was the empty-nest syndrome and your retirement and the sudden closeness all the time. I felt like I was smothering.. I want to give us a second chance. How do you feel about that?” she asked.

“I think…I…God, you look good, Gail!”

She smiled.

“How do you feel about Allie? she asked. You’ve become a fixture in the other’s life over the last few months. Are you in love with her, Ralph?”

“It’s been like rush week back in college, too much, too soon, and now I learned that she’s been feeding me psychedelics…I don’t think I would categorize it as love. I’ve been lonely this last two years,” he admitted. “I guess I was trying to fill up the spaces, you know?”

Gail nodded.

“What is, uh, your relationship with Pet?” he asked.

“She teaches at the same high school that I do,” explained Gail. “She’s a lesbian and I told her my intentions with respect to you, and offered to fix her up with a crazy-sexy woman who made good bread. Pet is a bit of a loose cannon and I thought they’d hit it off. They did.”

Ralph sat contemplating what Gail had told him. As if reading his mind, she said, “I think you have about outlived your shelf life with Allie, Ralph. She’s used to more…variety…in her love life, if you know what I mean.”

“How did your plans for me figure into everything that Allie did, Gail?” asked Ralph.

“Ah,” said Gail, waving a finger at Ralph, “that would be telling.”

Ralph stood. “Let’s get out of here, go back home.” For the first time in two years, Ralph was again considering their former domicile as a home.

“I like the sound of that, Ralph,” said Gail. “Should we leave Allie and Pet a note?”

He shook his head. “I think they’ll figure it out. I’ve got the feeling that this is what at least some of you had planned all along.”

Gail stood as well. Ralph approached his ex- and kissed her lips gently, and then with more passion.

“Umm,” she said.

As they drifted to the door, held tight in one another’s arms, Gail asked, “What grade did you you get for the course?”

“An E,” he replied at once.

“You mean, you failed’?” she asked.

Ralph shook his head. “No,” he said. “I got extra credit.”

The Wicked Watches by Dale the Drifter

“This malignity is renewed every day against man, as it is written, Psalm 37, 32: ‘The wicked watches the righteous, and seeks to slay him.’”

– Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was one of the most brilliant scientists and mathematicians who ever lived (he invented the calculator). Suddenly, toward the end of his life (and he probably did this because of intuitions that the end was coming, although it did not come immediately), he largely dropped science and mathematics and turned to religion instead.

He wrote a mostly secret book that was not fully published during his lifetime, and also was not published until almost a decade after his death.

The title now is Pensees. It’s a French word which means “Thoughts” in English.

All of the thoughts are about religion, per se.

But the thoughts are not only for so-called “religious” people.

These days, in places like the USA, Canada, and the UK, in so-called educated circles (which are very large, made up of millions of people), being “religious” is considered a badge of shame.

I myself used to share this attitude, for years.

But I grew out of it.

I realized long ago that I “grew out of it” because of enormous personal struggles and pain that “drove me against the wall,” so to speak. In other words, the equation became, for me: believe or die. A lot of that had to do with getting over my own alcoholism, which gradually, then suddenly, turned into the most extreme variety of alcoholism ever known to humankind on Planet Earth. I never went to A.A. (except twice) but I read many books about it and devised my own form of the exact same thing.

I’ve already promised myself that if I live to the age of 80, I can (maybe) start drinking and smoking (perhaps in moderation) again. Only twenty-one more years to go!

…

I’ve been fascinated with the Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky ever since I first discovered him and his works in 1983, A.D., when I was an uncertain, shy, questing, and rebellious sixteen-year-old living in Quincy, Illinois, USA, a town along the Mississippi River twenty miles away from Mark Twain’s Hannibal and known for producing uncertain, shy, questing, rebellious sixteen-year-olds.

There was a reading class at the high school and the teacher had a hideous skin disease that made her hands and face look, almost, like she had leprosy.

She was also enormously overweight.

She was one of the most human, most understanding women, or people, that I’ve ever met, and ever known.

She didn’t make me do any of the things the other students were doing, and had to do.

She didn’t even make me show up on time.

I was late every single day.

And she let me be late.

All I had to do was read.

During that semester, I read all of the major works of both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. That means all of it, all of their long novels, and all of their well-known stories too. (Both of them also wrote thousands of pages of nonfiction and correspondence, and I did not read this material at that time. Wow, their hands, and eyes, must have gotten tired.) I hung out with friends a lot, but also, I did not hang out with friends a lot, at all. I stayed home, alone, reading, not because I had nothing better to do, but because I wanted to.

I didn’t write papers on the material, either.

All I did was read. And occasionally she would ask me to sit with her and tell her about what I was reading while she drank her coffee. That was all.

Dostoevsky’s life always fascinated me as much as his writing did.

After joining a radical reading group, he was found out by the secret police and sent to Siberia for nine years when he was in his twenties.

First, the Czar staged a mock execution where he made Dostoevsky and the other prisoners literally face a firing squad and think that the rifles pointing at their faces and chests were about to go off, blowing them to Kingdom Come, immediately.

One of the prisoners, immediately, turned into a gibbering idiot and never recovered.

A horseman had ridden up at the last minute and informed the prisoners that they were being sent to Siberia for nine years, not executed. The whole thing was staged. And they were granted their reprieve at the very last second before they thought they were about to die. No joke!

They knew Dostoevsky was a writer who loved to read. The illegal reading group he’d been a member of read secret pamphlets about issues like freeing the serfs, which would happen soon anyway but was also unthinkable (for the Czar and others of his ilk) at the time.

“THEY” did Dostoevsky one favor. (Russians are very strange.)

As he lived his life in the Siberian labor camp for four years (his other five years in Siberia were as a common soldier) among murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves, they allowed him to read one book in the evenings.

That book was the New Testament.

He read the whole thing cover to cover so many times that, after the four years was over, he never had to read it again, because he had it memorized, for life. The former educated agnostic was never an agnostic again. The murderers, rapists, gang-bangers, and thieves around him, and the New Testament, put together, had changed his tune, BIG TIME.

All of his subsequent writings, like Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov, have to be read in this light, no matter what one’s religious beliefs are or are not. Both Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein, called The Brothers Karamazov the greatest novel ever written. With blurbs like that, from folks such as those, you can’t go wrong!

When Blaise Pascal dropped everything and turned to religion, he was doing so because he suddenly knew that he was going to die. Such things wake you up pretty fast, unless you are really (mentally, spiritually) just sleeping.

Blaise had always been a sickly, although also life-loving, person (many sickly people are very life-loving, often more life-loving than so-called healthy people, I’ve found). He had always known he was going to die. But suddenly he knew it in his heart, soul, bones, liver, limbs, fingertips, toes, and blood. It is called his “night of fire.”

There are some of us who can quietly accept the dissolution of their bodies and spirits and quietly accept that fact believing that nothing will happen after death. They believe that death is the end of everything, for everyone, always, everywhere. Maybe they are just tired, and want to go to sleep, period. And that is okay.

Even when I was a so-called educated agnostic like all the rest of the educated agnostics out there who throng the world (I’ve never been an atheist, or rather, not for very long), I had a very sneaking suspicion that death isn’t, as in IS NOT, the end. I was, and still am, enormously comforted knowing that Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Hank Williams (aka Luke the Drifter), a half dozen of the smartest, most creative people I’ve ever heard of, all believe(d) the same thing/s, deeply and lastingly. They’ve encouraged me (almost) as much as the Bible has (although they were all encouraged by the Bible in the first place), and, as such, I think of them as comic, open-souled prophets as much as singers and songwriters.

Then again, my very first waking moments (that I can remember) told me that I had already been alive, somewhere else. It was a real dawning of consciousness and it had more to do with the “somewhere else” than it did with the “here and now.” It cannot really be put into words other than saying “it cannot be put into words” (so I won’t even try).

In the old days (as in during the nineteenth century and for the rest of human history before that), almost EVERYBODY believed these things. Even Charles Darwin, even Mark Twain. Although sometimes they also said they did not believe these things – like any rational, thinking person might tend to do now, sometimes.

Jack White sometimes says on stage before beginning a song, “I always feel like I’m in the right place at the wrong time.”

He also says, in the song “Seven Nation Army,” by the White Stripes: “Don’t want to hear about it. Every single one’s got a story to tell. Everyone knows about it. From the Queen of England to the Hounds of Hell. And if I catch you coming back my way, I’m gonna serve it to you. And that ain’t what you want to hear. But that’s what I’ll do.”

Jesus shouted out more than once at the people around him, including the disciples, “HOW MUCH LONGER DO I HAVE TO STAY HERE WITH YOU INCREDIBLE FOOLS!?” He never physically attacked anyone; but he verbally crushed people all the time, and tried to get away from them as much as he tried talking sense to them, sometimes. See the Gospels.

Pascal also quotes a Midrash from the Jews: “Better is a poor and wise child than an old and foolish king who cannot see the future.” This quote is both literal AND symbolic. It applies to literal kings and literal wise children; but also, it’s about SYMBOLIC wise children, and SYMBOLIC “evil kings,” like that ex-boss you hate/d so much, or the wife or husband or parent who’s always trying to lord it over you.

Stephen King is right. There are many evil clowns among us who are always watching, waiting, peering, peeking from the bushes with their pants down around their ankles – watching where they are not wanted, waiting where they are not needed nor required, with their greedy, fascinated, perverted, envious, covetous, delirious, red-rimmed eyes.

We do not need to look at the top of the pile to find evil.

Enemies surround us. All of us!

Some of us even within our own homes, until and unless we, somehow, escape.

No one knows why there is evil. I think not even Jesus, the human, and the smartest person who ever lived (see the Gospels before you say no), knew why. His intelligence was, among other things, the culmination of the Jewish prophets Joseph, Moses, David, Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, and the others. He could never have existed without them, as he knew and said. He knew the Bible (as it was written at that time) better than anyone else. See the Gospels.

Most of us (or maybe even all of us) don’t even know what evil really is!

Critical and Crucial Literary End Note: One of the best depictions of the life of the spirit, as it really is, that I’ve ever read, is in Leila Allison’s wildly imaginative short story “My Fair Wiccan,” as well as in her Feeble Fables of the Fantasmagorical and many others of her works. That is why (among other heartfelt reasons) I feel so honored to be her Co-Editor at SARAGUN SPRINGS!

Dale the Drifter

Unhappy Anniversary, But Worse is to Forget: From the Eds.

(9-11 Memorial, Evergreen Park, Bremerton, WA)

        Nine Eleven Twenty Twenty Six: Or, What America Has Become By Dale Barrigar

          “Let them be turned back and disappointed / who devise evil against me!” 

         – David, Psalm 35 

The question can be honestly asked whether the USA has improved itself after the grievous wound it suffered on 9/11/2001.

The answer has to be a very resounding NO in most ways, at least from any objective and rational observer.

We have failed miserably to address the rapid destruction of Planet Earth (and since we are the most powerful nation on Planet Earth, by far, we play a very crucial role in this). Not just climate heating has continued to accelerate at a rapid pace; we’ve also, as humans, failed to slow down the loss of forest habitat in the Amazon (in other words, we are chopping down and burning down the most important forest that keeps the planet cool and provides it with oxygen so we can have McDonald’s now) and America continues deforestation on its own lands; we haven’t done a damn thing to slow down species extinction (loss of biodiversity is a much bigger problem than anyone even knows right now, and there are far fewer wild birds now, for example, than there used to be twenty-five years ago); and we’ve failed to address many other key factors on the Planet caused by our own activities that will impact future humanity in negative ways we can’t even imagine yet.

Income inequality has continued to get very, very much worse in the USA in the twenty-five years since 9/11/2001. We have WAY more homeless people now, percentage-wise, than we did then, or than we have ever had since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Democracy has eroded enormously in that time. Freedom House is a reliable network that tracks the freedom of nations based on various scales. Finland gets a score of 100 and is considered totally free. North Korea gets a score of 3 and is considered NOT FREE at all. The USA receives a score of 75 in 2026. We are considered free, but not as free as we used to be. And every year, we fall a little further down into the “less free” category.

Technology has run totally out of control in the USA, since 2001. If AI ever reaches the point of Super Intelligence (and it could very well do so any year now), there will not likely be robots in the streets slaughtering humanity, but it will take over humanity’s current financial systems, which it, AI, has already been caught doing, or trying to do, several times. This could lead to an immediate collapse in internet and phone services, the power grid, and current industrial society as we know it – literally, overnight. This is a worst-case scenario that is now predicted by many of the people WHO INVENTED AI. Now that they’ve gotten us to this point without thinking about the consequences beforehand, they’ve all become whistleblowers. The people who have now taken over the production of AI are industrial capitalists, NOT the brilliant, unfamous minds who invented it in the first place. The people who invented it in the first place would slow it down now if they could; but the industrial capitalists, who are the celebrities and heroes of our modern world, are focused only on making more money for themselves, having taken over everything like greedy swine.

We are, right now, both the USA, and the world, MUCH, MUCH closer to a possible nuclear war than we’ve ever been. Not since we’ve ever been since the Cuban Missile Crisis – since we’ve ever been, EVER, period.

And the USA’s empire is collapsing in many other ways. Our military is running out of ammunition and we don’t have the factories, nor the willpower, to make more. There are very few decent, meaningful jobs for our citizenry. Over two million people are incarcerated (the largest prison population on Earth.) Our educational system and our academic system have become financialized, and the humanities have already collapsed. So many different cultures are crowded together that nobody understands one another, and the people who were already here and stole the land from someone else are now having the land stolen from them by someone else. Our very limited, two-party political system is so corrupt and beholden to nothing but money that it finds itself in complete paralysis. Our president is an oversized, orange, cartoonish “reality show” TV star with yellow hair who doesn’t understand any of the problems facing us, or worse, doesn’t care. Our rigidly conventional president before this one was suffering from dementia, bad.

We have become a land with more guns in it than people. Random shootings of strangers, including children in schools, as well as regular shootings of people who know each other by people who know each other, have grown totally out of control.

Rage and alienation and utter apathy and anomie and utter faithlessness and various kinds of mass delusion/s are everywhere. A spiritual civil war has already begun. 

We ignore the Ten Commandments, and worship the Golden Calf like no civilization ever before in history.

In short, our empire, and our nation, is collapsing right before our eyes.

The list above includes JUST A VERY FEW of the ways it is doing so.

And yet, I still hold out hope for the good old USA!

My reason is the ancient one, the only one, the ONE and only one.

And my reason is the youth of America.

I have seen them rebelling behind the scenes.

I have seen them, quietly, behind the scenes, rejecting what we have become and, quietly, reaching for something new that we can become in the future that is best and is built upon all the best things we have been in the past AND all the better things we can be in the future. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they know they are doing it, and they’re not going to stop any time soon. 

And when I say “youth,” I mean ANYONE who is YOUNG AT HEART!

Even if the world, as we know it, collapses tomorrow around us in one or more ways, the youth of America, and the world, will still be here.  

I recently heard an intelligent commentator on You Tube say, “America can do anything it wants to, if and when IT WANTS TO.”

He meant that we are NOT doing it now, at all, but that, when the time comes, we will do it.

The empire of the UK collapsed a long time ago; and they still remain the fifth wealthiest nation on the Planet, and a major player in planetary affairs. The order is: USA, China, Germany, Japan, UK. At this point, the USA is still much wealthier than China: 33 trillion to 21 trillion.

The USA is in a state of crisis, but we are not going anywhere. 

A volcano, a massive asteroid, a nuclear war, could instantly cool the planet down so much that it enters a new ice age FASTER than overnight.

Any of those things would, ultimately, be an act of God.

And I think that, really, everything is an act of God. We just don’t know it yet (often for very good reasons).

CRITICAL END NOTE: We need to start realizing that the Russians and the Chinese see the world differently than we do (but are still humans). Vlad and Xi do not want to nuke the world any more than we do, and possibly less. The Russians and the Chinese are just as afraid of us, AND PROBABLY MORE SO (for good reason), than we are of them.

I am NOT saying I want to live in China or Russia (I do not, and please don’t deport me, for I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, in 1967), nor that I think their systems are better than ours, or beneficial for humanity in general, either. 

But I am saying that the USA has similar forms of artistic censorship, oppression and repression that are just as bad as theirs are, if not worse!

Dale Barrigar

And From Leila Allison

Of all the dreadful events of 9-11, three have stuck with me most. First is the utter uselessness of the “project”. All the time, money, planning, brainpower put into it surely could have been aimed at helping the poor. Destruction and fear are cheap tricks that do not create respect. No one on the planet is as inaccurate as a terrorist when it comes to understanding the human heart. I cannot begin to imagine what they think would happen. Whatever “victory” they earned was already gone by the following weekend. And although such things never last in our selfish plutocracy Americans actually came together–although that too was showing stress fractures by the following weekend. Think Bill Maher and Ari Fleischer, their remarks shortly after. Now I like Bill, but I recall him going Turtle when the subject of socialism and income was raised on his show. Everyone including Bill were at least 2 percenters. A Telling moment.

Anyway….

The second is the Conspiracy Theories. Similar to the forced slumming the word “icon” continues to endure, the word “theory”, one that I once associated with Great Minds such as Einstein has turned into an Erich von Daniken (he of the Ancient Astronauts) cheap show–just another page in the Globe. You would really have to hate someone to believe that they would orchestrate the murder of three thousand people for the sake of a political agenda. A very dear friend of mine, someone I’ve known for forty years, usually a sane, witty and creative person, is all in for “W” and Uncle Dick and sleeper CIA cells. I do not argue the point. One skill I have, and it has saved me on more than one occasion, is the ability to change the direction of the conversation. The key there is to let the person say enough but then toss in something you both like, such as the Seahawks winning the Super Bowl. Timing is everything.

The third is impossible to reason away. I think about the people at the windows. The ones who went out were travelling somewhere between a hundred twenty to two-hundred MPH at the end. There are no words for it. Nor should there be a place in the thinking world for forcing that “decision” on a person–someone whose biggest choice that day until then involved latte or mocha? There are so many of us, and yet each one of us is a miracle so startlingly profound and capable of grandeur beyond the comparatively short reach of poetry. Who holds it in his heart to make such a thing reality–to choose cruel and violent ends for miracles?

Personally, if heaven can be won by both carefully doing nothing wrong and via such suffering, then there must be levels of heaven as Dante had for hell. And when there are levels there comes slaves and masters. Anyway, to the persons who do such things and will again, creeps like Bin Laden, Hitler, Pol Pot and McVeigh, a hearty “fuck you” for causing me to think that there should be a hell of pain if only for you.

It does not matter who said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice”–I’m just hoping that it is true and that we are not the result of random chemical and electrical interactions. I do not want hope to be a fairy story one needs to outgrow on her/his way toward enlightenment.

This is Puck, a Squirrel who lives near the monument. I see him/her every time, and besides collecting sunflower seeds, Puck remembers all things worth remembering.

Leila

Altamira by Tony Dawson

The cave of Altamira is one of the Palaeolithic

wonders of the world, a prehistoric art gallery

where Stone Age fauna can be found depicted

in careful detail by the cave-dwelling artisans.

The vivid colours and charcoal were preserved

by a landslide that sealed the opening for millennia

until discovered in 1868 when during a hunt,

a gun dog scrambled its way inside the cave.

Once discovered, access was unrestricted.

I visited the cave almost a century later

in 1966 and still remember marvelling

open-mouthed at how bright the paintings

of the polychromatic bison and aurochs looked

and how the bulges in the rock were used

to make the beasts appear three-dimensional.

For the last twenty-four years, to preserve it

from the damaging effect of visitors’ breath

on the ochres and charcoal of the murals,

the cave has been closed to tourists.

To prevent the paintings from deteriorating,

the cave is now open only to researchers

so that they can determine the techniques

employed by cave dwellers of the Palaeolithic.

They have revealed that the shapes of the animals

were first outlined with a flint tool, and then painted

over a period that lasted some twenty thousand years.

It’s as if the themes of an artist like Rosa Bonheur

had magically stretched all the way back for millenia,

to be suggested by those gifted Palaeolithic artisans.

Tony Dawson, 7 August 2026