The Drifter

The Drifter: Divorce; or, The Immature Adult in America

“Now Lord God let my poor voice be heard.” – Bob Dylan

You get burned, or nailed down, when you’re being good.

Jesus on the cross has many messages for the human race and that is one of them.

There are many people among us who once had the ability to see things differently (more truly) but now, through repetition and conditioning, that ability they once had has been destroyed.

And they are unhappy, very unhappy, because of their false belief in a false dream. (The American Dream.) (I speak here of America only and I think I don’t know if this has yet become a globally universal condition. I critique the American Dream and offer my opinions upon it because I love America. America made me (for good and ill, sometimes very ill) and to hate it would be to hate myself (which sometimes happens). The American Dream is either dead or dying depending upon who you ask these days but probably not to the majority. Whether it can be resuscitated in a more realistic and positive fashion in the future by new generations remains to be seen. S/he who abandons all hope becomes dead inside, and often a selfish raving dark-hearted half-lunatic as well.)

It was a dream they swallowed, so to speak (to revitalize the fishing metaphor in a new context), hook, line, and sinker.

There are many here among us who have forgotten their youth.

And having forgotten their own youth/s, they see nothing but horribleness when they look at the youth of those around them – everyone here who is now young.

The generation gap is a human problem which AI, instant communication, the selfie, and listing your pronouns has done nothing to solve.

Too many people among us think there will still come a day when everything will be perfectly perfect, and that makes them wonder (very much) why the present moment isn’t already perfect.

(Because according to “The Dream,” it’s supposed to be perfect. Reference: all the melodrama in television, movies, books, articles, advertising, and other mediums which reinforce this notion daily, hourly, and sometimes minutely or every-single-second-ly.)

This tension, between the expectation and the reality, creates the so-called bitter taste in the mouth (another reinvented metaphor because of the context and the awareness that I’m using what you’ve heard before; Shakespeare and Dylan do this stuff all the time so who can blame me? I can’t think of anything else that says it better and I’m not gonna spend all day trying).

Sarcasm and passive aggression often become the norm when someone feels that their (false) dreams have been dumped on (defecated upon, in other words).

(And sometimes the passive aggression lurches into just plain aggression without warning.)

No amount of mowing the lawn, scrubbing the floors, cleaning the windows, dusting the doodads, having a date night, ordering from Amazon, or going on vacation can fix this. (“Fulfillment Centers,” indeed.)

There are too many expectations but there should be no expectations, kind of like in the Stones’ great song “No Expectations:” because there is nothing to expect.

If something good happens something else bad will happen to weigh it in the balance and when the bad comes, brighter days are ahead, almost for sure, IF you can hang on that long. Hang on, hang on!

Rumi was born in what was once the Persian Empire (present-day Afghanistan) 818 years ago.

He said, “Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with their heart and soul, there is no such thing as separation.”

And that’s how you can love someone you’ve never met.

And once you can believe that, everything else becomes golden.

(Separately, there is the problem of physical pain, for which the “grin-and-bear-it” method is the best medicine. Marcus Aurelius said that even if you’re being torn to pieces by a wild animal you should keep your composure, because it will inevitably be over soon, among other reasons; don’t sweat it! (or try not to). Prayer also helps; and cursing God or asking why is talking to God which makes it prayer (see the Book of Job including THE WHIRLWIND) and He has a sense of humor (I’m sure of it) and understands; just remember to say you’re sorry afterward; when we finally see his face we ain’t gonna be able to believe it!)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WALT WHITMAN!

Walt Whitman is a brother, and even a twin, to Rumi if anyone ever was.

Old Walt was born 207 years ago today in a little village on Long Island, USA.

This essay into the unknown is in honor of him, since much of what it says was taught to me (The Drifter) by him (and the other American Transcendentalists).

“Old father, old artificer, hold me now and ever in good stead,” as Stephen Dedalus said.

The Drifter

The Drifter Presents: Happy Birthday Bob Dylan

“I is another.” – Rimbaud

“Say one more stupid thing to me before the last nail is driven in.”

– Bob Dylan

“Your best friends are my worst enemies – Angelina.” – Bob Dylan

Happy Birthday, Bob!

May you live as long as Willie Nelson is now and on and beyond (and same to you too, Willie; you two are kindred spirits).

But when Bob Dylan ever does pass on (not die), I will instantaneously think of what Bob himself said about himself after Elvis moved on: “After Elvis died, I didn’t talk for a week.”

I will not (probably) be silent that long, but my heart will break (in a certain way). And I will know (deep down) that times have changed.

I’ve seen Bob play live an uncountable number of times across five decades: in the ’80s, the ’90s, the ‘00s, the ’10s, the ‘20s.

I’ve seen him drunk (I mean me, although it was obvious that he was too at least a few times), I’ve seen him sober, I’ve seen him on drugs, I’ve seen him not on drugs, and I’ve seen him with my (now ex-) wife when she was preggo with the twins.

After the show she said: “It looked like you were studying him the whole time.”

That’s because I was studying him the whole time.

I’ve been studying the man (on and off) since I was thirteen years old.

I’ve seen him in Iowa, I’ve seen him in Missouri, I’ve seen him in Wisconsin, I’ve seen him in Kansas, and I’ve seen him in Illinois, many times, both in Chicago and at other locations.

(Side note: many folks don’t know that Iowa is our (the USA’s) Number One Agricultural State, which is true; it isn’t California. Reminder: Robert Zimmerman was born and bred in Minnesota.)

I’ve seen him with Tom Petty, I’ve seen him with the Grateful Dead, I’ve seen him with his own bands, I’ve seen him at the first Farm Aid in 1985, and I’ve seen him (and heard him) in my mind all the time, especially when all you beautiful ladies said goodbye.

(I never say “hi” and I never say “bye” to the beautiful ladies. They say hi and they say bye when the time comes: I’m still here; just don’t get too close any more; I don’t know why!)

(True beauty emanates from the inside outward and resides mostly in the eyes. Plastic beauty can be beautiful on the outside, but when you peer into the dead or predatory eyes, it chills the effect more than a little.)

The last time I saw Bob live he was with Willie and Mellencamp on the Outlaw tour, here in Illinois, two years ago.

He hid behind his piano wearing a hoodie the whole time and really pissed off a lot of the audience because he’d turned all his well-known songs into some sort of seemingly incoherent (but only seemingly) jazz.

Boos even started to go up here and there in the crowd.

I almost went over and told one guy to shut his fucking mouth.

I was ready to tear his head off if he didn’t listen to me.

But I restrained myself.

It was like some puny little fool in a football jersey standing there hurling rotten eggs at Mount Rushmore (even tho’ the dude was six feet three).

Because that’s what Dylan is: he’s as big as Mount Rushmore.

And maybe bigger. (Even tho’ he’s only five feet seven – or less.)

They say that when Dylan and Cash used to hang out together, they didn’t even talk.

As the great American fiction writer Barry Hannah (RIP Barry; your two greatest works are the short story “Water Liars” and the short novel Ray) once said: “I don’t need to meet Bob Dyan. He’s already shaken my hand.”

END NOTE:

For an answer to a full-scale nuclear war (which is becoming more likely by the hour, however unlikely that sounds), listen to “Let Me Die in My Footsteps” by Dylan, 1962. (And read the Bible and the Tao Te Ching.)

(Faulkner rightly said: “All it can do is kill us.”)

ONGOING NOTE: For a great song about public heroes dying, see and hear Waylon and Willie’s song “Heroes” (2:46) off their 1982 album WWII. Not to be confused with “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” – which is also true.

(All images provided–brilliantly–by DWB)

Why I Heart Eminem by The Drifter

(Images by The Drifter)

“But don’t you place the blame on me / As you pour yourself another drink, yeah.”

– Eminem

I heart Ems because he talks about, explores, and explains what it’s like to be from Michigan, which means, of course, what it’s like to be from the American Midwest: “flyover country.”

It’s kind of like America’s greatest rock critic (by far), Lester Bangs, who always loved to wear his “Detroit Sucks” T-shirt while living in, and loving living in, the Detroit area, which is known as both Motown and Rock City among other monikers. I can’t believe he was only three miles down the road co-creating Creem Magazine while I was living there as a rebellious little kid. And yet, such is (weirdly for me as a person) true.

There is a simple four-part formula for understanding the essence of Eminem as an American artist, I say!

I speak here of his best, most mature, and most fully developed work, not every single thing he’s ever done. He is a very profuse, honest, sometimes dark, and prolific artist, and if I wanted to slam him, I could choose lots of things to slam. He’s also a very self-aware and self-critical artist – anything anyone can say about him, he’s already said about himself a million times before (much like the poet Charles Bukowski).

The four-part formula goes like this.

One: What it’s like to be from the state of Michigan.

Two: What it’s like to be from the American Midwest (“flyover country”).

Three: What it’s like to be an OUTSIDER.

Four: How the figure of The Outsider, in his work, becomes a symbol of the modern Human in general, plain and simple, and also not simple at all.

Someone once asked him if he believes in God; he said, “I don’t go to church, but I do pray.”

Such an answer shows how he is a kind of modern-day Everyman who modern-day Everywomen can also relate to.

Every place in America, and I mean every place in America, has great heroes and heroines who lived there in the past or are living there right now. By “heroine” and “hero,” I simply mean someone who can be looked up to in some kind of way; someone who proves that humans are, somehow, worth it; and can act as a representative figure somehow (which is also much more of a burden than it might sound like at first blush).

Because if we don’t question the fact of human nobility sometimes, we are blind and mad. And if we don’t ultimately believe that humans have that noble strain within them, we become someone like the current president of the USA, who believes that everything, and that means everything, comes down to nothing more than a monetary transaction, one way or another. Think well of other people – without being blind – and eventually you start to think well of yourself, too.

Eminem’s gated KMart mansion is fifteen miles away from where I lived for the first ten years of my life.

My parents were young and our neighborhood was modest and I often find myself back there in my dreams or in the smell of rain or snow or grass or in the warmth of the sunshine, all of which I learned there first.

We lived in the area where Eminem’s film 8 Mile is set.

Five of Eminem’s greatest songs are from his 2013 album The Marshall Mathers LP 2.

When this album came out, I was separated from my wife and broken up with my truly-beloved, soul-mate girlfriend (who I took up with only after my wife kicked me out and I also kicked myself out even more, which she tended to forget (about the girlfriend) a little too often, since we never lost regular contact while taking care of the kids, in front of whom we always retained a friendly family demeanor in between the poison barbs we regularly aimed at each other; see the quote from Eminem himself at the top of this essay for an example). Two people I deeply love were battling cancer (they got over it, but I didn’t know if they would, at the time; and one of them was her). And my mother had recently passed on. And I was losing my job, a process that took, on and off, two years. Unlike the cancer/s, I knew how this one would pan out from the start, but I never stopped fighting (even though lost in a fog-of-war confusion most of the time, at the time) until it was over (when I immediately plunged into a periodic three-year depression that almost killed me lots of different and exciting ways).

The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and especially the five songs I’m about to list, provided me with great, deep consolation, comfort, and inspiration at the time. For some reason, the album cover has one of my favorite numbers hidden in plain sight upon it: 946.

My two kids, who are forty years younger than me almost to the day, also love/d these songs, then and now, as do most of their friends.

This album was/is one of the rare times when great art and the American mainstream actually come together these days. Lana Del Rey, at her best, is another example of this; as is Taylor Swift (at her best); as is Lady Gaga – at her best.

“The Monster” (co-vocals by Rihanna). ALSO SEE THE MUSIC VIDEO WHERE RIHANNA WEARS BLACK LIPSTICK AND EXTRA-LONG FINGERNAILS!

“Legacy” (co-vocals by Polina).

“Headlights” (co-vocals by Nate Ruess).

“Stronger Than I Was.”

“Bad Guy” (the sequel to Ems’ great song “Stan”).

Remember the spirit of the 1960s (even if you weren’t alive at the time) and play it loud!

These songs are not really rap or hip hop per se; they are more like rap rock, like when he sampled Black Sabbath or Nick Cave on earlier songs; and even more like something one-of-a-kind in a genre of their own, a genre of Eminem’s own invention. Like all great art (including all great essays), these songs don’t really fit into any pre-conceived categories: at all.

But these five songs are so great, they can, very rightly, be compared to the best of The Beatles; Bob Dylan; Nina Simone; The Clash (London Calling); Nirvana. Yes, it’s true: Eminem, at his best, is that good.

Another thing many folks don’t know about Eminem: he took better care of his little brother than their parents did; and he took better care of his three daughters than their mother/s did (two are adopted, from his ex-wife with another man and from his ex-sister-in-law).

Unlike everyone else, he stuck around.

Exciting End Note/s:

I can also recommend Eminem’s powerful 2010 album RECOVERY.

Especially these songs: “Cold Wind Blows,” “Love the Way You Lie,” “Not Afraid,” “Going Through Changes” (one of the songs where he samples Black Sabbath, brilliantly), “Space Bound.”

This essay was written in a single burst while sitting in the car outside Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home and Studio in Oak Park, Illinois, USA, on May 12, 2026, which is right around the corner from Ernest Hemingway’s boyhood home. I do not use, and have never used, and will never use either grammar or spell check, believing my brain should be the one to do the work instead of any sort of a computer for a multitude of reasons some of which I can’t even explain. I believe that any typos or mistakes (if there are any) are deliberately made by something else. Therefore I let them stand if I catch them after a certain point (after my brain says “Finished”).

SEE THE QUILLEMENDER OF MY CO-EDITOR LEILA ALLISON!

(Borges rightly says that the real writer is never afraid to write a bad page.)

I saw seven GIGANTIC wild rabbits in Wright’s yard while writing this!

They were running around chasing each other because they know that it’s SPRING.

The Heaven of Beauty by The Drifter

“For when words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.” – Ezra Pound

This week The Drifter offers a twenty-three-line poem because that’s what occurred – or arrived. In the unlikely event that anyone out there wants more “Drifter” today, I advise perusing this pome (not a typo) a multitude of times. This is not an article from The New York Daily Bullshit with a tag on it saying, “2 min read.” Reading this piece very, very, very, very, very, very, very slowly (aloud, or inside) is the recommended method – a form of medicine. I here predict (and if I’m wrong, I won’t know it, or care) that this one will be around for a while.

In the title, “Beauty” is a name, as in the old French legend, “Beauty and the Beast.”

This piece contains the past and the present, and has eyes on the future, in a writing where hundreds of things are deliberately hidden within every line.

And: age, does it not sneak up on us like a thief in the night?

With sincerity,

The Drifter

April 30, 2026 AD, 11:33 AM

The Heaven of Beauty

When I thought of your long red silver hair

and how many years it’s been that I haven’t seen it

blowing in the wind,

I was surprised, and almost shocked,

and I couldn’t believe that it was almost May again.

May,

month of dying

purple lilac petals in Berwyn,

another chance, a thawing of the heart, a re-resolution,

despite all.

May,

a sinking of the heart, a re-realization,

a too-real realization, and a knowing, that nothing,

like us, does not last forever.

And May,

telling me

there will be

another summer

of a different kind

Somewhere Else

somewhere down the line

one of these

lifetimes.

The Drifter

The “Mad” Woman by The Drifter

(All images by The Drifter)

“So you may say, / Greek flower; Greek ecstasy / reclaims forever /

one who died / following intricate song’s / lost measure.” – H.D.

Today’s discussion of medical issues is from a layman’s point of view since I am a Doctor of Philosophy and not a medical doctor. But the medical facts have been garnered and gathered from folks who are medical doctors – in person, not just through reading. So this column offers the best of both worlds: the medical facts filtered through a philosophical perspective, with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe and Franz Kafka, except that THIS IS REALITY.

…

The “Mad” Woman

You walk back into your tiny apartment after another trip around the block. The second you enter your one main room, you realize that something is amiss. Someone has been in here again during your 30-minute absence. Not only have they been in here again, they have rearranged some of your items. The difference in placement is very subtle. A hair brush you thought had been over here is now over there. Your coffee cup has been moved three inches away from the place you left it. And the television remote control device is now sitting on the opposite end of the end table from the one you left it upon when you left your apartment thirty minutes ago. Because the people, or beings, who enter your apartment and rearrange your stuff when you are gone are very subtle, very secretive, and very sly. You do not know why they are targeting you and rearranging your stuff; but “they” have been doing this for years. You slowly move around the apartment putting everything back in its right place. Then you notice that the dart board on your wall has also been rearranged. It has been moved exactly three inches to the left. You suddenly realize that the dart board is not a dart board: it is an eye. It is a GIGANTIC EYE through which THEY are watching you. THEY also follow you around on the streets sometimes. You have been incarcerated more than once for accosting these spies on the street. You approach them unannounced and unawares, demanding to know why they are following you, whose orders they are following, and why they don’t feel guilty about being spies. The authorities sometimes show up when you take these interrogation tactics too far. Sometimes that’s when the straight jackets come out and the incarceration thing happens again. You are aware that all of this seems “crazy” to them. But you are being followed, tracked, and surveilled within your apartment. Not just the dartboard but also the bathroom mirror is an EYE watching you. Watching you and reporting your activities to THEM. That’s why sometimes you don’t move for hours. You just sit there alone in your chair in your apartment utterly unmoving, not even daring to get up and go to the bathroom. Some day you will figure out who is doing all of this, why they are doing it, and what the universal ramifications are. You’re pretty sure that most of the spies are human. Others are definitely demons who look like humans. A few are humans you’ve been long familiar with, like your sneaky and wily landlord. That landlord of yours who always acts so friendly on the surface then turns around when you’re not looking and reports all of your activities to the authorities. The ultimate authorities are not human. They are not God, either. Rather they are some kind of currently unknown (to humans) creatures who live on a Planet called the North Star that is not in our galaxy and not even in our universe. One day you will know the reason for all of this, and it will elevate you. In the meantime, you can’t get a job because your life is constantly taken up with dealing with them, fleeing from them, thinking about them, analyzing them, dreaming about them, hiding under the covers from them in the tiny bedroom. (Under the covers is the only place they can’t see you, although they can still sometimes say things to you, like, “You stupid fucking bitch” over and over again.) Maybe some of them are friendly though (you are hoping this is true). Maybe everyone and everything in the world is not your enemy. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe! If you weren’t on medication, things would really start to get bad. You remember that you haven’t taken your medication in a few days, not since the last time you saw your therapist. You go to the medicine cabinet. To retrieve your medication. It should come as no surprise that your medication has disappeared because THEY have stolen it. Later you will locate the medication bottles in a different area of your apartment and realize that the jerks who are following you around and messing with you have moved your medication again. You dump all the many multicolored pills all over the floor and slowly and methodically begin to count them again, over and over and over again…counting the pills in this way also keeps the voices in your head quiet as night comes on, at least for the most part…

…

Welcome to the wonderful world of full-blown schizophrenia. The low moods and crazy highs of bipolar disorder look like a cake walk compared to this. Bipolar disorder is an episodic disorder where the patient is rarely, if ever, psychotic, i.e. totally out of touch with reality. There are a few medications that work really well in helping to control the occasional, extreme moods of bipolar disorder along with all of its daily intensities, mini-nervous-breakdowns, hilariously dangerous outbreaks, and sometimes-constant hyper-irritability. There are no medications that are great, or even very, very good, at controlling schizophrenia, although some med’s can help control the delusions and hallucinations a little. There is not much chance that any of this will change, at least not in the next couple of centuries…

…

The Native Americans, like the ancient Greeks, believed that “crazy” people were in touch with the gods in a special way that made them special people. They weren’t just sad, pointless cases with no reason, no goals, no ambitions, no purpose. Instead, their unusual condition was seen as a thing that was bringing messages to the rest of us. Not clear messages, ambiguous messages. But messages nevertheless. In the modern, secular, capitalistic, warlike, atheistic (or fundamentalist religionist), consumerist, commercialized, monetized, advertised, atomized, and alienated world, your value is the price tag on your head. Special people are not special, they are worthless, pointless junk to be discarded if possible. The medical professionals who do more than anyone else to try and help these people also often do more than anyone else to stigmatize, traumatize, and stereotype these people. There are literally millions of severely mentally ill people in the USA alone, and that doesn’t count the rest of the world. It’s a known fact that schizophrenics in the USA and UK, for instance, usually hear voices that are harshly criticizing them; while schizophrenics in places like Africa or India usually report (instead) hearing the voice of God.

These people really are messengers. It’s us who are not listening.

The next time you see someone standing on the street corner yelling at and kicking a telephone pole as if it were alive, or staring into the sky with a terrified look on their face as if an angry Martian were gazing down at them and scolding them, see if you can get inside their head before you pass on.

The Drifter

Doing It Anyway by the Drifter

(All Images by The Drifter)

“It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

– William Carlos Williams

“Look at / what passes for the new. / You will not find it there but in /

despised poems.” – William Carlos Williams

The above lines appear so simple that any literate child could have written them in her or his off moments.

At the same time, it took me twenty years of periodically re-reading and returning to these lines before I was able to understand them in their deeper levels, or in what Ralph Ellison called “the higher frequencies.”

I always knew there was something there, but just what it was always seemed to elude me.

It was this mystery, this enigma, this most simple yet deepest of riddles, which kept me returning to these lines, as with so many other great lines of poetry.

When you know what it is but also know you don’t really know what it is (and Socrates said the most important thing to know is what you don’t know), the mind-heart-body-spirit must engage with the work in a way that is beyond mere mental exercise, but also is mental exercise of the highest kind.

By the word “high,” I mean that it makes you feel high.

The word “kind” in another guise is another thing poetry is, even when it’s savagely satirical.

The honest and plain truth is that poetry says what nothing else can say, whether that something else be politics, science, philosophy, or even religion, which is why poetry is a religion to many.

It is a religion to an uncountable, indefinable, and scattered multitude, now and always.

It is what made us human (“in the beginning was the Word”) and it will be the last thing to go when and if we ever become no longer human.

There is nothing to believe; but somehow poetry makes you believe it anyway.

Key Notation: A novel like MOBY DICK or JANE EYRE or a Nathaniel Hawthorne or Carson McCullers short story are also, very much so, “poetry.” Wallace Stevens said that we should go around collecting poetry from the epiphanic moments in our lives and put those moments into words only afterwards; and so on one level, there is no greater argument for the holiness of poetry in and of itself than this.

The Drifter

Report from a Battlefield by The Drifter

…Then the Drifter said:

The Drifter is phoning it in this weekend, or at least shooting from the hip, because the kids (the twins) have pneumonia. And he himself feels like he might be coming down with pneumonia. Or it might be the effects of a lifelong insomnia problem. I remember wandering around exploring our little house in the Detroit suburb of Madison Heights alone in the middle of the night before my brother was born. I was four when he was born. I remember, like it was yesterday, the day they brought him home from the hospital. Like it was yesterday with a large gray veil thrown over it, that is. Sometimes I wonder what are all the things I don’t remember. I know what I remember. What I don’t know is what I forgot. Meanwhile, what I forgot doesn’t mean it hasn’t affected me. It might have been a traumatic thing that has affected my whole life more deeply than anything else that I do remember. I also know that memory has a way of casting a beautiful sheen over some things they could not possibly have had to that full of an extent while they were happening. This hectic week has also reminded me that you need a zen-like control of the mind in order to do any good writing at all, except maybe fragments you can save for later.

Regarding the pneumonia, the effort of providing (or trying to provide) constant emotional support while also talking everyone down and also talking them up all the time (“it will be okay, you can get through this,” etcetera), while simultaneously dealing with crowded doctors’ waiting rooms, harried medical staff, looming insurance debacles, half-assed pharmacy escapades, endless traffic jams, social anxiety disorder caused by bipolar disorder, and near-migraine headaches can be a thing that will lead to nervous breakdowns, just like it has done in the past. My well-medicated brain that has a dead patch in it from having a stroke can handle a lot but it too has its breaking point. The first sign is usually emotional, followed by physical, collapse. Lest it sound like I’m complaining I admit that all of the above is a journey too and these are also some of the most meaningful events in life. Watching your children suffer and panic and cough up blood up close teaches you something, even if you don’t know what it is at the time, and even when they are otherwise healthy kids who you know are probably gonna be okay.

The kids’ mother, my ex-wife, teaches sixth grade math fulltime at a public elementary school. Nearly half of her seventy or so students either have no father at all (that they know of or know) or have a father who’s in prison. It doesn’t make for the most controlled eleven- and twelve-year-old male behavior imaginable. The job has too many students and too many hoops to jump through almost constantly but teaching jobs around here aren’t easy to come by even under the horrible conditions. She takes over with the twins after work when they’re sick and I get to fly away like a bird, but until she’s available, the job of double caregiver is all mine. What I get out of it is a great relationship with great kids. The danger is a bunch of small nervous breakdowns that can lead to a big one. But I get to look myself straight in the eye in the mirror and say, honestly, that I’ve never abandoned them. The sense of freedom this causes through a lack of guilty feelings from doing otherwise is one more freedom in a world where we all want freedom. Freedom comes from what isn’t there as much as from what is. It’s hard to concentrate on anything else when the bombs and the bullets are flying in your direction.

I had started on a column this week before the pneumonia thing began and I here append a 287-word fragment of the rough draft as evidence. I believe it is worthy of perusing or I wouldn’t append it:

This is for all unsung spiritual warriors everywhere who know whereof I speak.

Those who do not know whereof I speak are of course free to read this anyway but it’s unlikely you’d get the same kick out of it as those in the know.

Whether this happened to you yesterday or forty years ago matters not one tiny jot.

What does matter is that the reader of this understand the concept of life as a war and certain individual chapters of it as battles and battlefields.

Understanding this concept does not mean that the symbol and metaphor indicated is real, if it were real it wouldn’t be symbol and metaphor, even though symbols and metaphors are real.

Real war is a horrendous ordeal for all involved, except the ones who get off on it, and there are many who get off on it, probably far more than is generally acknowledged.

The concept of life as a spiritual war means that the strains and stresses of living it on a daily basis can take the same kind of toll that a real war can take in the long run.

On any given day living my normal life in Chicagoland all these things might happen, sometimes within the same hour.

I might be almost run over or slammed into by an errant, enraged driver who then yells at and curses me for almost getting in his or her way even though I’m following the rules of the road and she or he is not.

I might be accosted on the street by a beggar in such a horrific, bedraggled and tragic condition of decomposition and desperation that my eyes, and my heart, can barely stand it.

I might

UNFINISHED.

Sensationalism by the Drifter

(Happy Easter dear readers; all images provided by the Drifter)

“The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.” – Oscar Wilde

Sensationalism is here defined as a form of artistic presentation (akin to but separate from melodrama, that unrealistic form that spreads its tentacles everywhere and infects everything) designed to titillate the consumer of it.

I intend the words artistic and presentation here in their widest senses, and will conclude this little screed ((manifesto)) by permanently redefining both of those terms.

The definition of titillate, that striking word, = to arouse or interest someone superficially, often with the mildest of sexual undertones, so mild that these undertones can be easily denied, often with a chuckle and a wink of the eye.

A recent scientific study indicated that 97% of the Western World now spends 79% of its free time engaged in titillation engendered by superficial sensationalism in one form or another. In other words (among other things), we have become too comfortable in our minds and bodies, and that is bad for the soul.

“Superficial” = lacking depth; existing only on the surface; purposely having no substance or purpose; and deliberately having nothing to do with anything of any importance whatsoever at all, and being really proud of it. An example might be the First Lady of the USA.

The line between “fiction” and “nonfiction” is utterly blurred in our time, perhaps in all times; even Shakespeare believed things the meanest street urchin would guffaw at today.

Supposedly serious subjects, these days, have been reduced to titillation and sensationalism all presided over by the largest and most gigantic killer clown and bullshit slinger you can possibly imagine. Pennywise and Randall Flagg are mere chump change compared to this huge dude and his incompetent, fumbling entourage slavering at the mouth with eagerness to do his bidding. And all of them look exactly the same, like male and female versions of each other, hair and make-up included. The Plastic Society has produced Plastic Beautiful People. It is no wonder literal humanoid robots are up next. But don’t worry, such things were predicted by the ancient Egyptians millennia ago.

Half of America wants its mad king back. Forget the Boston Tea Party, now we attack the White House. It doesn’t matter how it got that way. It is that way and that’s enough.

The real war is underground now and the next civil war started a long time ago. The sane ones here are one half of one percent of the population, scattered across the continent; and they are the ones who are most called crazy by the rest of us.

The likelihood of a catastrophe happening big enough to change anything in any meaningful way is not quite, but is almost, zero.

What we inhabit now on a national and local level is called PURGATORY. But if you read the Purgatorio by Dante, you see that it isn’t all bad.

Artistic means when you shape the world and/or the word (not always the same thing) for a purpose and an audience, no matter how large or small. All real poets know that an audience of one is often ideal. Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson must be the most famous American poets right now (at one time, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Carl Sandburg could compete with or outdo them, and for all we know those days will come again), and all their best poems are to one person.

Presentation means to offer someone something – as in a benevolent holiday gift – or a secret poison.

Coda: Too much sensationalism and titillation stunt the imagination, that universal faculty that allows the human species to envision future possibilities. It is like taking a stallion and placing him in a stall and putting blinders on him. He will be well fed, but he wants to get out and fly again.

“Imagination” = Leonardo envisioning submarines and flying machines 400 years in advance as if he were on drugs (and probably he was) – or Jesus and Buddha envisioning heaven on earth: which is one of the reasons Mona Lisa is smiling. “Like the vampire, she has been dead many times,” as Walter Pater so rightly observed. Maybe this is what gave her the highway blues.

Fact/s: The population of the USA in early 2026 is around 350 million. One percent of that is 3,500,000. Half of that = 1,750,000. We should all get together and ignore the rest of them; it would make a good-sized city. Athens during the time of Socrates had a population around 150,000 strong. They didn’t even know America existed, although the smartest of them felt the vibrations. Even rich people didn’t wear shoes half the time. Anybody who was anybody knew everybody and everybody who was there at all was noticed by somebody, which was both good and bad. “Privacy” as we know it didn’t exist. Even the most hard-up beggar did not feel alienated.

Put your devices away in the other room and you can still have privacy, very easily.

With imagination, you can morph alienation into a nutritious food for the soul, like a natural magic trick – if you survive long enough to learn how to do this trick.

Jesus didn’t want us to follow him. He wanted us to BE him, which means act like him – for our own good, and that of others. Such is what is explained in the profound book The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis, a mysterious, shadowy German monk from medieval times, not to mention The Sermon on the Mount. Most of the ones who do this best now have never even seen the inside of a church up close. And they may not care too much about Jesus on a personal level. It’s OK; it’s about us more than it was about him. And he knew that very, very well. He himself only showed up at church to raise a ruckus and shake them out of their stupors.

Leonard Cohen said, “Show me the place, help me roll away the stone, / Show me the place, I can’t move this thing alone.”

The vast majority of people during Jesus’ own time who knew him or knew of him believed he was crazy. There was something in his eyes.

The Drifter

Don’t Always Take Their Advice: A 1990s Memory; or The Drifter Confesses

(Images provided by the Drifter; view carefully!)

“Yes: writing has done much harm to writers.” – Oscar Wilde

“I had a girl / Now she’s gone / She left town / Town burned down / Nothing left / But the sound / Of the front door closing / forever.” – Warren Zevon

…And then sitting on the porch The Drifter opined to the two who were there with him:

I was given some of the worst advice about writing I’ve ever received in some of the “best” writing programs in the entire Midwest. The American Midwest, roughly defined, has over three hundred degree-granting writing programs currently, both undergraduate and graduate, in Spring 2026. It was similar back then. The Midwestern Gothic is a fuel for many muses, both half-hearted and fiery. One in five Americans are defined as Midwesterners which means we are a looked-down-upon minority even though we’ve produced many of the greatest American writers, like Twain and Hemingway, Hart Crane, Saul Bellow, Robert Bly, James Wright, and Lorine Niedecker. And messy “Honest” Abe Lincoln, the pipe-smoking mercury pill addict who spent most of his time on the road with his horse because he found his manic-depressive wife intolerable on a daily basis.

I received the worst advice I’ve ever received from the most famous novelist I ever worked with. He tried to steal both my women at different times and at the same time at two different parties; drank all my liquor while saluting me; destroyed my manuscripts by spilling wine on them and burning them with cigarettes (“accidentally”); and said he was helping me. He told me not to take five pages describing a character walking across the street. He said not to describe eyes. And he provided a whole mishmash of other rotten advice that ruined an entire novel of mine. I didn’t know any better at the time. I never knew how long it would take me to really find my own voice, either. This writer, still living and producing at 72 right now, had created two minor New York Times best-sellers (one novel and one nonfiction book) back then and worked as a script writer in Hollywood for a few years. He was well-connected to such well-known literary writers as Jim Harrison, Harry Crews, Barry Lopez, Larry Brown, Barry Hannah, William Gay, and Thomas McGuane, to name a few: or so he claimed. He never came close to scoring on either one of my aristocratic underclass Ladies, as unfamous and oft’-intoxicated as I happened to be, which made me half-different from him. Both of these drama queen heartbreakers had their own side activities so they couldn’t blame me, thought I, though they both tried to anyway. This kind of histrionic performance took up a lot of time. Drinking and smoking beloved cigarettes while driving my little car was one of my favorite activities along with the music I played and I was constantly looking out for the police in a relaxed way, whether it was fighting and loud music at night, the purchase of not-exactly-legal substances or drinking and driving, which I always did in a condition of chilled-out, laser-like focus which could not be dented by alcohol consumption. My occupation was Professional Pizza Delivery Person. I left my shifts with fistfuls of cash. They couldn’t track you by cell phone back then. Of the twenty or so drivers at the store, twenty or so were males. About half were either Hindu or Muslim. There were many long discussions about religion around the ovens with cigarettes being shared and sometimes marijuana. One of the job’s key features was the potential to get either jumped, mugged, or robbed or all three at once so I was always looking out for the thieves and gangbangers as well as the police. It was another era of course and I do not recommend it but it worked for me at the time, “it” meaning the drinking and driving and running around. I didn’t go to the gym but I got tons of exercise, often too much. I had bottles hidden everywhere I lived and didn’t live, in couch cushions, in basements, in backs of cupboards, in desk drawers, behind bookshelves, under the bed, in the bushes, behind the garage, and beneath the car seats, to name a few. Keeping up my own supply of both liquor and cigarettes often took constant struggle and effort but scoring these items produced the looked-for joy every single time, cigarettes included. Got my mojo back, friend! Every cigarette I ever lit whether it was accompanied by strong, hot, black coffee, hard liquor, or air, was a love affair. It was a time when motels were cheap, diner food was good, and cheap, books, cigarettes, and alcohol were affordable and there was more than one good novelist being regularly published.

What was good about the writing programs, for me, was an unparalleled camaraderie that touched the heights of the beat writers in America and stayed there. Wichita, Kansas, and Chicago, Illinois, were lit on fire by us and we burned down both towns. And then, behind us, the towns burned down. And that developing alcoholism that would shape my life for good and ill. And all you beautiful women (enough said here) who broke my heart gradually and then suddenly. And great libraries. Somehow I never stopped reading, never. Hours daily before the bars and sometimes in the bars. And two or three days a week, all night and all day, reading. Falling asleep on the floor with one’s head in the book. And it was good again to see your friends after such self-educating seclusion. There were also trips to New York City. One time the plane almost went down. Another time we arrived in a different car than we left in, which would be a novella-length tale if all the important details were included. In NYC, I usually stayed with a friend in a cockroach-infested tenement across from Tompkins Square Park that had a guy who looked like Lou Reed sitting on the stoop 24/7, bottle in hand and sunglasses hiding the truth even at night. And I was young. Not too young, not very young, but young enough that I look back there now with longing. Not a torturous longing, more like a sweet longing that sometimes turns painful. Aging is for the birds and birds are poets. Our complicated, interconnected, lonely, over-evolved, over-commercialized, over-advertised, alienating, and fractured society where nothing of importance appears and nothing stays for a day or an hour happens to produce late-blooming artistic geniuses in out-of-the-way places. Walt Whitman, following Ralph Waldo Emerson, wanted the American writer to spread and not be only an exclusive East Coast thing. They have done so.

My talent in fiction-writing was cramming a character’s head with thoughts and their heart with feelings and eschewing the formal outward trappings of a mechanical plot device even though there was plenty of drama going on beneath the surface, or so I believed. Writing in no genre, in other words, straight from life, just like I took the Jack Daniel’s straight as well (or the lines of cocaine). I learned it first and foremost from James Joyce, who took it from Laurence Sterne and Francois Rabelais, among others, who I later also learned from, and Bob Dylan was also a massive and messy (in the best senses) influence on my style, of both life and writing. I was advised not to do it, then told not to do it, then asked not to do it by a couple of big-name folks in New York City, both an agent and a publisher. But I couldn’t not do it. “Write the other way I cannot,” said Melville, meaning he couldn’t write the formulaic, crap, restricted, hack way. Not will not. Cannot. And then will not, too. It may stem from an overactive critical imagination, an imagination which is only increased by drug use, if you target and restrict that use. There is a difference between deliberate, targeted usage and the sloppiness and self-pity of abuse. And a million gradations to be explored in writing at another time. When I was a teenager Pete Townshend was often my idea of what a writer was, along with Dostoevsky and always Shakespeare (still) as well as King David of Bible fame (his psalms, and his psychological slaying of the monster Goliath). Right now (at this moment and often at other moments) I believe the dead writer I resemble most is TED BERRIGAN, especially Ted in his fourteen-line poem masterpiece, “Whitman in Black.”

I’m old enough now to know that the slick party-going folks who run the book industry desire formulaic, commercialized, seen-before, dressed-up-as-if-new, recognizable products – cheap products. Products they can sell. You usually can’t sell what no one has ever seen before but it’s the only way to produce something original, too. The Irish weekly paper that commissioned James Joyce (for a pittance) to write the series of stories for what later became Dubliners stopped publishing his stories because they received too many complaints from all the faint-hearted readers. Good Christians, so-called. It took him ten years to find a publisher after the book was finished. It is a candidate for the greatest short story collection in the English language of all time, or it just is that. Other candidates include In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway and A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor but of these three for me Dubliners rules though the other two are so close. One of the bars we used to drink in in Chicago was called THE JAMES JOYCE. We rode the train and burned it down. Another one was called: NINE MUSES. Also THE FIELD HOUSE, BIG SKY and ALBERT’S PLACE. And dozens, literally, of other bars. More books than bars but many, many bars. While in NYC, we drank at the WHITE HORSE TAVERN because of Dylan Thomas.

I also wrote dozens of short stories while in the writing programs. Every single one was a piece of juvenilia. I banged them out on the computer while smoking and drinking either liquor or coffee or both and at least half of them were over fifty pages long. I’d show up late at the writing workshop smelling like smoke and liquor and with fifteen copies of a fifty-page story ready to hand everybody with a grin on my face. And sometimes I’m so quiet they think I’m autistic. It’s artistic, Mister. And Ma’am.

No one wanted to read it. I didn’t care. Which isn’t quite true. But isn’t untrue, either.

When I was 46 years old I became a poet. The story of how that happened cannot be told. Yet. It is only of interest, I suppose, if you’re interested in the writing life as participant or observer. All you who are already studying your own process. Jesus said, Only those can understand who already know. The rest are the proverbial swine you’re not supposed to throw your pearls in front of, harsh as it sounds. There are thousands upon thousands of well-known and/or well-paid writers (which is very often not the same thing at all) who don’t know, and by “don’t know” I mean don’t know what’s important. Or care. Some day The Drifter will write a further analysis of why their crap is crap. Mostly, half the time, I was just happy to have survived, I think…

(TO BE CONTINUED. This sort of thing could go on for years. The official title for this specific series is THE DRIFTER CONFESSIONS.)

WRITING ADVICE: Make it a lifelong (right up until the end) goal instead of a short-term payout and it will never leave you. Reading and writing are two sides of the same golden literary coin, far more precious than literal jewels. According to Harold Bloom, the literary is the personal and the Personal IS Literary. Even for those who don’t know it. It is manifestly NOT an elitist thing: while also being only for the few with the strongest hearts.

The Drifter

Love Itself? The Drifter

(Images by the Drifter)

“Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving / Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.”

– Leonard Cohen

“Both in this world and in the Hereafter, I am the nearest of all people to Jesus, the son of Mary. He was not crucified.” – Muhammad

“Literature will lay truth open upon a higher level.” – William Carlos Williams

Our definition of love has grown too narrow, where we are now and here (2026 USA).

We say we love our spouse (if we are chained to one), our family, our new toaster, our new car, our latest luxury vacation. We say we love our new toaster, and the new (latest) technology they are always jamming down our throats. And all these things can be good to love. But loving them is not enough.

We say “LOVE” is about romance between two people (or three). We say we love the way our new lifestyle is turning out.

It is not enough to love but a few things.

The crucial message of Jesus, the one and only real message of his, the message the early Christians truly began to understand only AFTER he was gone (wherever he went), the message which completely contains all the other messages, the message that should be the ruling principle of the whole world, is this:

We should love LIFE ITSELF.

Even if we are being crucified.

On the cross, Christ cried out: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Loving all of life itself does not preclude getting angry at God and asking WHY when right seems right. Jesus showed that too, as did Job before him. But in their despair, they were talking to God, NOT turning away from life.

There are many ways to talk to God and many moments, hours, or days remain for an opportunity to do this. It is NOT necessary to call it “prayer.”

Talking to God is loving life, no matter your method of doing so and no matter how angry you are. We are supposed to turn toward that when we are desperate, despairing or angry, if we can. God has a twisted sense of humor much like our own, it just may be. And just because someone doesn’t answer out loud doesn’t mean they’re not listening. Sometimes the best listeners never say anything at all. (And when She does speak, She speaks in a whisper, usually…)

Whether we are at the end of civilization or at the birth of a new civilization that is (almost invisibly) being built upon the ruins of the old one matters not one tiny jot.

Now is the time we have and now is the time we’re going a-swimming in. It never stops ticking by even for an instant even though it seems like it does, sometimes, if only for an instant or two.

It is good to love individual people, animals, plants, places, and even things, if you don’t go overboard on this last item, or for that matter any of the former items, either. Leonardo da Vinci loved water. He loved water, looking at it, dreaming over it, drawing it, writing about it, personifying it. Loving water was, for him, like loving all of life itself.

Loving only a few specific people or things is not enough. By far it is not enough.

We must LOVE all of LIFE ITSELF no matter what.

Those who do this are called by the Taoists “seed people.” Jesus also talked about those who sow the seed. There are many of these among us, but these days they appear to be in the minority BIG TIME as well.

Seed people love life even when they hate it.

They never limit their love to a single nationality, a single sexual identity, a single source of economic security, nor a single spouse who is your favorite personality.

WE HAVE TO LOVE IT ALL. All of life. Like we always continue to love the people who have left us no matter how they have left us but are still there in a different guise (as their spirits are haunting us in those things called MEMORY and DREAMS).

Jesus also said, “Do not throw your pearls before these swine.”

Because all they will do is trample them down into the mud.

The Drifter