The details in this essay may shock you.

Don’t read on unless you want to understand why some people commit multiple murders. In order to understand, we will have to go into the grisly details. Steel yourself or turn away and pretend it isn’t true.

Everything in this essay is absolutely true nonfiction, 1,000%.

…

It was not too long after the Civil War, in the remote mountains of eastern Kentucky, USA.

A woman murdered her husband, by poisoning him.

Then she preserved his body, and kept him sitting in a chair, fully dressed, in a locked room, eyelids closed. (They had a taxidermy business, well-known in the area.)

Then she murdered two other men, both of whom asked too many questions.

She preserved both and also kept them in the locked room, sitting in chairs with their clothes on.

She convinced her 17-year-old son that he was no longer himself, that he had literally become his own father.

And she became pregnant with her own son. She believed that both the new baby and her 17-year-old son really were her dead husband returned to her – even though she was the one who’d murdered him in the first place.

Her other son, a 14-year-old, was also made to believe that he played a special role in all of this.

But he never really bought into any of it, although he was loyal to her and played his role to the hilt, probably in the same manner as the 17-year-old sometimes.

The sheriff discovered these horrors, by sneaking in through the window where the three preserved bodies were kept, pistol in hand.

The woman and her two sons caught him in the act.

The 17-year-old tried to attack him and the sheriff shot him dead on the spot in terrified self-defense.

The mother and the 14-year-old now went peacefully as he handcuffed them and took them away to the nearest town, which was three hours distant down the mountain trails.

Of course, he brought the baby with them as well.

The baby was sent away to another state, for adoption or to the orphanage.

The mother and her 14-year-old son were given their date with the hangman.

The answer of the town was more murder. Four people are dead because of you. Now you die too.

Hundreds came out to see it, just like people always did back then. Hangings were social occasions, among other things.

The boy apologized, wept, begged forgiveness.

The mother remained firm.

She never thought she had done anything wrong at all.

She was a true believer until the end.

The sheriff never got over it.

…

I don’t want to cast stones at this woman and say how evil she was.

Everyone knows that her behavior was “evil.” (Not everyone, in fact. There are many just as mad as she was among us even now – or especially now.)

…

I don’t want to cast stones at this woman.

I want to know why she did it.

…

The Drifter has compiled a list of eleven reasons why she did it.

Only when ALL of these reasons are combined and considered, separately and at once, can any kind of rational, scientific explanation be made for her actions. (The entire essay is just under 1,200 words in length.)

But if you add all eleven of these up, put them together in different combinations, and think about them deeply, her motivations do indeed become exceedingly clear.

…

She was an artist. Her house was filled with bizarre art which visitors described as looking both overly civilized and demonically primitive at the same time.

Some visitors ignored it.

Others were unnerved by it, and described it as “unnatural,” although they didn’t know why.

…

Rural isolation. The family lived three hours away from the nearest town, an hour away from the nearest village, and almost as far away from their nearest neighbor, as well. They went days, and sometimes weeks, and sometimes in the winter, months, without seeing other people, except themselves.

…

Preservation and butchering of animals. The family ran a well-known taxidermy business. And they also ran a farm, where they daily killed most of the animals they used for meat. Such closeness to death inures the subject to death on more than one level.

…

DEATH ITSELF. We live in a universe of death, and it does weird things to people.

…

Religious mania. One of this woman’s responses to living in a universe of death was to become fanatically religious, so that she no longer believed in death. After someone was dead, they weren’t dead. At least not in her mind.

(And on the other hand, almost no one didn’t believe in the afterlife back then. Even Darwin himself was only ambivalent, not a hardcore unbeliever. Because believing in evolution doesn’t mean you don’t believe in a Creator God. His timeline is, to say the least, different than ours.)

…

Childhood trauma. There is a high likelihood that she was the victim of massive trauma during childhood. God knows what was done to her, by whom, or where and when, when she was an innocent child.

…

Genetics. She was almost surely born with a mind predisposed to go insane.

…

The patriarchy. She was forced to follow her husband’s orders to a large extent. And if she didn’t follow those orders, and keep her mouth shut about it, too, physical beatings and other punishments (like involuntary confinement) would not have been at all uncommon.

…

Love AND hatred. She clearly hated the man or she wouldn’t have poisoned him. And she clearly loved him since she couldn’t get rid of him. Her last words on the gallows were, “Now I’m going to where my husband is.”

…

The will. Her will and her willpower made her want to rule her own world and to elude capture.

…

America. She lived in a time right after the bloodiest war in human history up to that point, where modern warfare came into its own, where the South had been ravaged and destroyed, and also the American world of outsiders, gun fighters, outlaws, desperadoes. And a world that had seen the Native Americans decimated. But where your own family (if you were white) could also be decimated by angry Native Americans. And a world of slavery (although the area in which she lived didn’t have slavery), a world of the most brutal slavery humankind has ever invented. And also a world where the individual was very much encouraged to do whatever you wanted (if you were white at the time), an idea that was technically made for men by men, but that surely influenced the women, too.

…

When we add up all these reasons, we might even ask ourselves why it was that everyone didn’t go insane.

…

Digression Coda: In America THE GUN means “no one can tell me what to do.” It’s one reason why people who’ve been bullied and beaten down turn to the gun. Until we can convince the average populace that their true freedom really lies in other means, we’re gonna have a gun problem.

Final Detail: Her artwork was burned.

(All fine images by the Drifter)

In the Year of Our Lord 2025, many good-hearted folks can indeed be excused for being cynical about Christmas music.

So much of it (like so much else in our society) is used for nothing but Sell, Sell, Sell; and so much of it has a quality of sincerity which matches the sincerity of Amber Heard on the witness stand (sorry Amber).

But as Scrooge and the Grinch (among others) have eternally reminded us, the real spirit of Christmas is not meant to end on the day when the Christmas shopping is over.

The real spirit of Christmas is supposed to be about the way you live your life all the year ’round.

…

In this short little essay/column, The Drifter shall offer brief musings upon four Christmas songs that can be enjoyed and returned to all the year ’round.

…

The first song is “Samson in New Orleans,” by Leonard Cohen, from his 2014 album Popular Problems, a brilliant album all the way ’round.

Leonard was 80 when this record was released. His final, triumphant world tour had ended in 2013, but Leonard wasn’t finished making art, and he wouldn’t be finished making art until he was finished being here in the flesh in autumn of 2016 (and maybe he continues to do so elsewhere even now).

“Samson in New Orleans” is not an official Christmas song. But it should be thought of as one.

This song so much reminds me of John Milton’s great poem Samson Agonistes that it makes me think Cohen must’ve been familiar with Milton’s poem. If he wasn’t familiar with it, it was a familiar case of two great artists coming to the same idea on their own, a common phenomenon, which justifies Tolstoy’s famous quote about art’s core being about linkages, connections through time.

This song contains these lines: “The king so kind and solemn / He wears a bloody crown / So stand me by that column / Let me take this temple down.”

Leonard was a practicing Jew, but he also made a call many times for his people to remember that Jesus was one of their own. As such, he was a Christian in everything but name, as well as a Jewish Buddhist.

Listen to the song. It explains why we should follow the real Jesus, and what doing that really means.

…

When Bob Dylan released his Christmas album Christmas in the Heart in 2009, many people made fun of him. And indeed, much of the album was made in the spirt of Christmas fun. But some of it is deadly serious.

Dylan’s version of “Little Drummer Boy” is one such performance.

If you listen to this song in a highly advanced flow state, or with your favorite medicinal substances enhancing (not impeding) your imagination, it will take you back 2,000 years.

The song contains the line, “Little baby…I am a poor boy too.”

It reminds us that the real Jesus was nothing if not a law-breaker, a rule-smasher, a son of the lower classes who was smarter than everyone in the upper classes and who stood on the side of the downtrodden and oppressed his entire life, even though he could have easily joined the other side any time he wanted (which is the symbolism of the devil offering him the whole world if he would only bow down and kiss the devil’s feet – which, of course, he wouldn’t).

Like Cohen, Dylan is a Christian Jewish person or a Jewish person with an unbelievably deep feeling for Jesus.

He knows that one thing does not preclude, nor exclude, the other, and that goes for everyone.

(“All Religions Are One,” wrote William Blake over 200 years ago. You would have thought the human race might’ve caught up to him by now.)

…

Now that all the members of The Band are gone from the world (in the flesh, anyway), anything by them becomes that much more beautiful.

But “Christmas Must Be Tonight” has always been one of their most beautiful songs, a song so beautiful it brings sadness and joy, tears and quiet internal laughter, at the same time.

Rink Danko’s voice is gorgeous in this song. Robbie Robertson never wrote better lyrics.

Its first words are, “Come down to the manger, / See the little stranger…”

Everyone in The Band knew deeply why it’s appropriate to call Jesus “The Stranger.”

It’s a knowledge that has been lost by mainstream culture in the USA.

…

Finally, one more song, which, like “Samson in New Orleans,” is not an official Christmas song but should be seen (and heard) as one.

Toward the end of his life, Harold Bloom was asked to name his own personal favorite song of all time.

His answer was, “The Weight,” by The Band.

…And one thinks of the elder Charles Dickens (in his 50s) embracing his new, or renewed, favorite hobby: exploring London’s opium dens.

We don’t know if the esteemed author ever developed a habit, but we can be sure he partook, and not lightly, of the primary wares in the opium dens.

Such behavior resulted in several immortal characters who are contained in Dickens’ last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

This book is a murder mystery which became a true murder mystery for all future history, since Dickens never finished the book, never provided a clue to who the murderer was (he never left notes nor told anyone about it, either), and since he died of a stroke right in the middle of the book’s composition, at the age of 58.

Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer is one immortal character from this novel.

She’s a haggard-looking woman who runs an opium den and who the world thinks is also disabled and in need.

But she’s neither disabled nor in need in reality. And I say “haggard-looking” only because her haggard appearance is a costume she deliberately dons.

She spends her time looking like she’s pretty out of it while secretly gathering info on all the customers of her establishment, just in case she ever needs any of it. A spy, in other words.

Over the years, many literary scholars have pointed out that Dickens’ last tale, Drood, almost reads like a rewriting of one of Dickens’ all-time favorite books, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, by Thomas de Quincy.

The Confessions is a short book (or long essay) that first appeared in The London Magazine when Thomas was around 36 and Charles was around 9 years old, in 1821.

(The population of London and environs was just over two million in the early to mid nineteenth century. Most English writers lived in London, and most knew or had at least met one another. At the time, London was, by far, the largest city in the world.)

Within a year or so of its magazine appearance, the Confessions appeared in book form. It made de Quincy an immediate “celebrity” (of the dubious variety) and remained his best-known work for the rest of his life, even though he completed many other works just as worthy as this one. Later, he blew up the text to four times its original size and republished it once again, this time in a much slacker, weaker, more verbose version probably influenced by none other than laudanum.

De Quincy’s book would later go on to have an explosive impact on American writers of the twentieth century as well, including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Hunter S. Thompson. The influence extended through them, of course, onto entire counter-cultural movements continuing through to our own time (2025).

De Quincy was a lifelong laudanum user and addict (he discovered it as a teenager). He cycled back and forth between just using and being hopelessly addicted. He was 4 feet ten inches tall, and thin. He lived to be 74 (which would be like at least 84 now) and often walked 25 miles a day, including on heavy use days. He had eight children; Dickens had ten; such numbers were normal back then.

Thomas took his inspiration from his pal and mentor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another lifelong user who cycled between addiction, use, and abuse.

De Quincy called it “eloquent opium!” and said it gave him the feeling of having “hands washed free of blood.”

But he also depicted the horrific, terrifying, nightmarish aspects of the drug in his writing.

He wrote about it as if using opium were like dropping into a pit.

In the same way, Dickens very much had a dual view of the world. His characters in Drood are still hilarious and horrible by turns, just like De Q’s depiction of drugs.

Thomas de Quincy was also an author who (in many ways) started what we now call the “true crime” genre of nonfiction writing, when he began to explore London murder/s in his works, like people getting their throats cut in their own beds over their own taverns on the edge of town and the crimes never being solved.

In The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens gathered together the triple obsessions of De Quincy with crime, drugs, murder and put them all on display in a way he never had before. One way he did this was with the prose style.

Before Thomas de Quincy, prose was prosaic. There were exceptions, like John Donne and Samuel Johnson. But prose was considered to be far below poetry and its nature was merely functional.

In his Confessions of 1821, De Quincy talked about wanting a new thing in the world: what he called “impassioned prose.”

And then he proceeded to make it happen, as did Herman Melville 30 years later in America. De Quincy took opium and Melville drank wine.

Dickens had a massive stroke after a hard, full, fulfilling day of working on Drood, and never regained consciousness.

(Wonderful images provided by The Drifter)

In the present age, the writer has one single solitary job to do which is far, far more important and crucial than all other aspects of the writer’s work.

It is a job so important that if the writer fails in this, she or he immediately loses all credibility and all right to call one’s self a writer.

It is a job so important, too, that it’s more important than any other job anyone else in society is called upon to do – by far.

It is a job so crucial, and so difficult, and so nearly impossible almost all the time, that it shows us why so few people in this world have really earned the right to call themselves writer in the highest sense of the word.

Without this job, which the writer must do alone, totally alone, society itself is utterly doomed. Utterly doomed as in destined to fail, to completely collapse, if this job of the writer, this one key job of the writer, were to completely disappear from society.

This job of the writer is so important that it’s even more important than the writer actually writing anything, especially today in a world drowning in meaningless words.

And it’s far more important than the writer gaining any kind of mainstream “success.” (Fame in a land of zombies is about as solid and valuable as air, as thin, thin air.)

This job will sound simple. It will sound so simple that you may even be amazed – at first.

THE WRITER MUST STAY SANE.

THEY MUST STAY SANE, BE SANE, REMAIN SANE, ALWAYS BE SANE, AND NEVER NOT BE SANE. THE WRITER MUST BE, WITHOUT PEER, THE SANEST PERSON IN HIS OR HER SOCIETY.

An AI computer, no matter how intelligent it becomes, cannot do this job for humans. Only humans ARE humans, and only humans can think for humans about what it means to be human.

The writer is a thinker who sees more nuance than anyone else. Without nuanced thought, which is profound thinking, which is against “black and white,” “us and them” thinking, the writer’s work becomes mere regurgitated entertainment, a thing the world is literally swamped with, a thing that may cause a flood so bad it will make the Noah’s Ark story look like child’s play.

The real (human) writer must stay sane and be able to see reality for what it truly, really is.

All other jobs of the real writer are utterly subservient to this.

…

The irony is that, in this society, USA America 2025, the writer looks like the nuttiest person on the block to most folks in mainstream society.

Staying apart from the herd, refusing to believe what almost everyone else believes (because they are lies sold to us by snake oil sales folks), drifting around with your eyes wide open, living “underground” (literally or metaphorically), and keeping your inner eye so clear that IT IS NEVER DELUDED, NOT EVEN FOR A SINGLE SECOND, are all jobs that are so hard to do it can actually cause one to lose one’s footing again and again and again. And to fail, and to fall, again and again and again.

But the real writer never stays down; or not for long.

They may stay down long enough so they can rise again once rested.

And that too is sanity, though it surely looks like madness to the rest of the world, as the writer lays there in plain sight with eyes closed, refusing to move, almost as if paralyzed.

But the writer is never paralyzed. Not if they really are a writer.

The inner vision, the eye that sees beyond the party line, the other eye that can see around corners, the eyes that can see through walls, the eyes that can see someone who is thousands of miles away, the eyes that can see the future and the past as clearly as they can see the present, are always the sanest eyes in town.

…

Many millions of American men stand around outside with their leaf blowers now in November determined to obliterate every beautiful fallen leaf from their well-manicured lawns. And they will stay there all day, with their blinders on and their leaf blowers blowing, creating horrendous noise pollution and other pollution, and do it. Meanwhile the world burns with global warming, rising seas, species extinctions happening before our eyes, climate change – faster, much, much faster climate change than has ever happened on the Planet before except from extreme events like an asteroid hitting the ground and blowing up the dinosaurs.

Many millions of American women sit around online, watching each other take fancy vacations and shop endlessly at the most fun online locations, whether that be shopping for goods or services or romantic partners. Meanwhile, seven hundred thousand Americans live on the streets and don’t know where their next meal is coming from (and in many cases they are much happier than the people within the houses, which also says something profound).

Many millions of American children live their lives chained to tiny, dominating machines that shape, mold, shrink, and rot their brains, and turn their eyes into useless orbs of nothingness reflecting unreal, lifeless screen dreams manufactured by technological monsters. And getting a pat on the head from mom and dad before being sent back to their rooms for more screen time.

And those three examples are just a tiny few of the surface symptoms.

There is something much, much deeper and more profound going on. It’s so evil it doesn’t even have a name.

…

And people in the United States have lost touch with themselves.

And they have lost touch with reality.

And they have lost touch with each other, too.

Our cold and distant and sometimes even frozen hearts have gotten the leaders and the systems and the lifestyles that we deserve.

Only the writer, or people like the writer (and there are many of them, although they are a vast minority), can see through it all, beyond it all, within it all, around it all, and over it all – above it all.

The writer must stay the course, remain sane in an insane world, and tell the human truth.

Great fiction itself is nothing less than a lie that tells the truth.

Great poetry is the truth boiled down to its essence in beautiful language.

Great essays are poetry in the form of prose.

Staying sane in an insane world is the hardest thing in the world to do.

It’s a thankless task but somebody has to do it.

The reward for the writer is inner wholeness, and ultimately, inner peace, an inner peace that can perhaps only be matched by someone like a genuine Buddhist monk, a Tibetan Buddhist monk – who is a kind of writer.

“Only that day dawns to which we are awake,” wrote the writer Henry David Thoreau.

(Images provided by the Drifter)

“Tenderness of heart started the Buddha on his journey to awakening.”

– an anonymous sage from his mountain cave

Benevolent-hearted Reader,

(Parenthetical opening salvo: Beware. A column has a right to be an essay and an essay has a right to be a meandering thing (like the mind of the writer), going from point to point for 1,100 words seemingly almost without direct connections. In this case, the Reader can assume that this essay has a destination like a river reaching the sea; and all the parts along the way needed to be there even if for sometimes mysterious (or veiled, hidden) reasons.)

For three decades, ever since I first heard it, one of my favorite quotations about writing, and life, comes from the US writer Harry Crews: “Walking the wire is everything. The rest is just waiting.”

It’s been so long since I first heard the quote that I don’t even know if I have it exactly any more. I do feel that I know the spirit of it.

For pondering purposes, life can be broken down into two aspects, or halves.

One is where we feel “on;” where we’re “in the zone;” where we feel life intensely, and beautifully; where all the connections are understood and there is relevance and meaning aplenty, even an overflowing of this for some of us. This is the higher side of life.

The other side of life is the low side. This is where the meaning and faith disappear. It’s where the doubts come in, and the serious questioning starts to happen. This is when the drudgery returns. Call it a test of faith. Think of the ancient Jews wandering in the desert for forty years – and never giving in – although they were driven to despair and various kinds of starvation many times.

The first half of life is Jesus giving the Sermon on the Mount, where he couldn’t make a mistake even if he tried to.

The second half is him in the Garden of Gethsemane. As all his friends sleep comfortably, he knows very clearly what will happen tomorrow. “Let this cup be taken from my lips.” But the cup of blood was not taken from his lips. He had to drink it all the way, and then some. Even him – the one and only son of God.

Edgar Allan Poe said that he wanted to write a very short book that would say it all. The title would be MY HEART LAID BARE. He never wrote the book because he didn’t have it in him while he yet lived, and he was dead after. Charles Baudelaire, the Frenchman who became Edgar Allan Poe’s most brilliant and universal disciple, said he wished to write the same book with the same title. He did write it and left it unfinished (because he died, in his mother’s arms).

Nietzsche, the German philosopher, wrote, “Of all writing, I love only that which is written in blood.”

Nietzsche also said that the true artist needs to combine both Dionysus and Apollo within her or himself. This is the part that Jim Morrison knew best about Nietzsche (he surely would have learned more had he lived longer).

Dionysus stands for nature, wildness, energy, anarchy, the wind, the waves, pushing the boundaries, breaking the limits, being wild and free, having agency and vast willingness to break the rules.

Apollo stands for Reason (that term has many meanings, including a-reason-for-being, motive), order, focus, unity of purpose, control, form, shaping, sculpting, selecting, leaving out, knowing what to bring in.

If an artist can’t channel the Dionysus aspect of their personality, their work will be dry, boring, tame, cheerless, conventional.

And if they can’t channel the spirit of Apollo at the same time, the work will not be Art; it will be a formless mess, a pile of something lying lifelessly on the floor of the hapless would-be artist.

It’s like the tightrope walker of Harry Crews, doing something utterly wild that calls for the utmost in self-discipline.

And the poem appended to the end of this essay is my example of all this.

The term “troubadour” in this poem both does and does not mean that which it usually means in the literal sense. Since both of the main characters in this poem are and think of themselves as troubadours the definition/s of the term throw light over the whole work.

The first eight words of this poem summarize a period of years, as does the entire poem.

The phrase “ragged at the unemployment office” in the poem stands for a single moment and an entire way of being that is both chosen and forced upon one at the same time, as does the action “frowned and fled fast.” It’s this kind of reach and doubleness in the speech of this poem which give this poem whatever value it has.

The phrase “she, she, she” means her continuous changing.

Her monologue, in this poem, is the single most important thing she ever said. This verse/stanza changes its meaning every single time one reads it, as it should.

This poem, “Oklahoma Homeless 2015,” is the entire story of a relationship, beginning, middle, and end.

The casual nature of the narration in the poem (if it is casual) arises from its after-the-fact nature (which is called here: distance, or an escape from an overload of desperate-hearted emotion).

This kind of poem is best read aloud (even if that means silently in the mind) very, very, very, very SLOWLY. (Ideally many times, over years, after the first few readings, and thinkings.)

A writer, an artist, a poet, can say whatever they want to about their own work. They are entitled to at least that much in this world of painfully little rewards.

There have been famous cases where a writer belittled their own masterpiece and readers believed them for decades, only to discover later that the writer had been wrong about their own work all along (or had been being too humble probably in the aftermath of another high).

I say that this poem is my “Tangled Up in Blue.”

It is written in blood; it is my heart laid bare; and it is a place where Dionysus and Apollo come to a beautiful truce, holding hands and complimenting each other.

…

Oklahoma Homeless 2015

We were two troubadours for quite some

Time and i, i was ragged at the unemploy-

Ment office again when i

Frowned and fled fast

And she, she, she was a piano player in

Kansas fading on the line, a cowgirl

We rise, she said, if at all, only slowly,

And lonely, and only

One at a time…

Later we were cruise ship stowaways.

And always two troubadours,

Night and Day.

…

END NOTE: The Drifter wishes to here thank Irene Leila Allison for rescuing this ten-year-old poem by the writer who called himself Dale Williams Barrigar from dusty obscurity.