The Drifter

Is There a Hell by The Drifter

(All images provided by the Drifter)

Is there a hell?

I generally don’t believe in hell until I think of someone like J. Edgar Hoover and what he did to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perhaps one of the most egregious things he did was send King a letter right before Martin was scheduled to leave for Norway to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.

It was an anonymous letter.

It started by stating that the letter-writer would not address King by the titles of Mr., Dr., Reverend, or any other honorary title because Dr. King didn’t deserve the respect.

J. Edgar pretended to be a black man who was writing the letter.

And in the letter he projected on Dr. King a whole host of perversions and sexual excesses that are clearly the fantasies of none other than J. Edgar Hoover himself, having absolutely nothing to do with what King himself had ever done.

The letter repeatedly calls King “a beast,” which is not a term a black man would likely have used to describe another black man, even if he hated him.

Hoover also sent the letter to King’s wife.

When Coretta opened the letter (which was of course accusing Martin of adultery of various kinds) in front of Martin then handed it to him, Martin looked at it and immediately said, “This is from Hoover.”

The letter also threatened to expose Dr. King to the world for being a sexual pervert even though King hadn’t done any of the things he was accused of doing in the letter.

Martin outsmarted Hoover at almost every turn, which was probably one of the many reasons Hoover hated King so much.

But the pressure got to Martin.

Being followed around, being wiretapped all the time, and now being sent this hideous composition from the madman could not have helped but make Martin feel paranoid, pursued, unjustly accused (of course), hated (for no reason), hounded by the devil. By the devil himself.

Hoover was a repressed, hateful and hate-filled man who also worked hard to kick Charlie Chaplin out of the USA, and finally succeeded in getting Charlie kicked out of the country.

Hoover justified all these horrors to himself by claiming that he was protecting the United States from ne’er-do-wells, radicals, revolutionaries.

He was not protecting the United States. He was helping to damage and ruin it in some ways like no one had ever done before.

He clung to power for 48 years.

Once Martin started to try to end the war and bring all poor people together in solidarity no matter the color of their skin, Hoover and all the others like him had had enough.

Last time I checked, the King family did not believe that James Earl Ray acted alone.

I do not believe it either.

(Neither did James Earl Ray himself, who repeatedly stated that he did not act alone.)

If there is a hell (and I’m not necessarily saying there is one), J. Edgar Hoover is in it.

…

John Meacham, the brilliant historian and biographer, recently told Charlie Rose in an interview that the reason Abraham Lincoln was great was because, at the critical moments, old Honest Abe always chose to do the right thing. Even when it was at great cost to himself.

Martin Luther King, Jr., did not choose greatness. He had it thrust upon him at the young age of 25. No one else could do what he did, because no one else had his talents to do it.

He had greatness thrust upon him.

But he always answered the call.

…

In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in Oslo on December 11, 1964, Dr. King said: “Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors, and brutality in the destroyers.”

He also said, at another time, “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

He also said, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”

…

I guess I don’t believe in hell, or definitely not the kind of hell where God officially sentences you to be burned alive forever, tortured in flames for the rest of all eternity. If I believed that kind of thing, I would probably spend even more time than I already do having various kinds of panic attacks.

But I’m not so sure there isn’t a hell where He makes you SEE, finally see, really see, just what it was you did and were doing during your tenure here on Planet Earth.

Maybe He makes you see and finally care.

(A Rather Demonic Drifter!)

The Drifter

The Drifter: A New Definition of Lynchian

(All images provided by The Drifter)

“She is gone / But she was here / And her presence is still heavy in the air. / Oh what a taste / Of human love / But now she’s gone / And it don’t matter any more.” – Willie Nelson

David Lynch passed away exactly one year ago today as the Drifter writes this (January 16, 2026).

He was a man who combined two strains of the American artistic spirit within himself.

He could create a dreamlike sense of horror within his works that reaches straight back to none other than our wonderful world-genius Edgar Allan Poe.

And he also had another side to his personality that reaches back to our other artistic founding father, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was an American Transcendentalist, and Lynch was a Transcendental Meditation teacher who spent the last twenty years of his life directly trying to bring peace to the world more than making movies. There is, except perhaps on the surface, very little difference between Transcendental Meditation and American Transcendentalism. And even on the surface, there is not that much difference.

Lynch was also a Hemingwayesque figure who could write dialogue like Ernest Hemingway. (Roger Ebert was for the most part drastically unfair to Lynch throughout Lynch’s career, but he got this part exactly right.)

And Lynch even looked a bit Hemingwayesque, especially in the film of him where he is painting – we can remember that Hemingway loved painting and always said that Van Gogh and Cezanne were two of his biggest, deepest, and longest-lasting influences, bar none.

David Lynch was born in Montana and lived in Idaho for some of his formative years. Hemingway died in Idaho and spent much time hiking and hunting in Montana.

David Lynch once said, “Big things become smaller when you talk about them – unless you’re a poet.” I could cry for gratitude when I ponder this quote. He meant that words destroy things that can’t be said or that are too big for words, and he also meant that poets have a special place in the human pantheon where they can get closer to the source than anyone else.

He did not consider himself a poet, and he was not a poet, and that’s another thing that makes me love this quote so much. All artists should love all the arts, no matter what their specific focus/es happen to be. They should also become aware (by degrees) of what they both can, and cannot, do. This is a life-long process. Roger Waters said he only discovered that he was able to write prose in his late 70s.

…

The Drifter had forgotten Lynch’s death date somehow when he recently became obsessed with Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive again over the holiday season.

I watched the film end to end at least three times and I watched certain parts of it, like the scene with The Cowboy and Adam Kesher or the scene where Rebekah Del Rio sings Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish while Betty and Camilla hold each other and weep, dozens of times (not quite literally). Rebekah died last year, just like Lynch, and she died two weeks after singing the song “Llorando” (“Crying”) at a Philosophical Research Society screening of the film.

Many critics have said that Mulholland Drive is the greatest film of the twenty-first century and it is also surely one of the greatest films ever made, even a candidate for THE greatest film ever made. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the only film I can think of that competes with it in the twenty-first century, and even there Mulholland Drive clearly triumphs, as much as I love and adore Eternal Sunshine. (Mulholland Drive is a faultless work of art and Eternal Sunshine is a truly great work of art with many faults to it.)

…

The friendship between Betty and Camilla is much more endearing and powerful than their erotic relationship, even though their erotic relationship is the most realistic and powerful depiction of an erotic relationship I have ever seen on screen. This fact alone makes this film so great there’s almost nothing more to say about it on that level. The paradox of art here bends the mind and changes the heart forever.

The Cowboy is a supernatural character. When angels appear in this mortal sphere, they often do so in a stern, or even a terrifying, guise (see the Bible, which has countless examples of this).

The terrifying homeless man turns into Jesus at the end of the film.

Diane Selwyn exists in ALL OF US.

This movie is about Hollywood, but it is not just about Hollywood. It is about the youth of every person and how youth fades and attitudes and beliefs change as this happens. We either adjust our great expectations, or we die a spiritual death we never recover from.

The crime-of-passion murder in this story is LITERAL in this story; and it is SYMBOLIC in the larger scheme of things (in many, many ways).

When someone breaks your heart and leaves you or forces you to leave them due to their possessive, controlling, jealous, and unhinged behavior, you either kill them off in your mind (NOT literally!) or you die yourself, literally or not. But you think you’ve symbolically killed them off, when you haven’t, really… (Listen to the lyrics of Roy Orbison’s song, “Crying.”)

…

Renee Good reminds me of a David Lynch character like Betty Elms.

Her last known words were, “It’s OK, dude, I’m not mad at you,” spoken with a deeply friendly and smiling sincerity that anyone with half a heart can understand if they’ve seen the video taken by the very man who murdered her seconds later.

I just don’t understand how anyone could have shot this person in the face, right after looking into her face.

She had a beautiful face.

…

We live in a time when the whole system appears to be breaking down. The current president is merely a symptom of that, not a cause, although he is surely hurrying it along, too. (We all need to remain aware, AND stop giving him so much attention.) A healthy society would never have let such a mentally challenged person of obvious bad faith ascend to the position of its “supreme leader” – not in a million years.

No one person is able to change this, or stop it.

There will be light at the end of the tunnel (as there was in Germany).

We don’t know how long the tunnel will be.

…

Drifter Notation Upon the Definition of SARGUN: The word “Sargun” (Sanskrit roots) looks very much like the word “Saragun.”

It’s a literary synchronicity.

If you don’t already know what the word, and name, Sargun means, and even if you do, you should look up the definition. And think about it! (And then think about the literary-synchronicity-connection to the word, and name, Saragun.)

And a repeat of the header for downloads that fail to show it

The Drifter

My Daughter’s Face; or, The Visitation by The Drifter

In the silence

in the nothingness

of the road

I could suddenly feel

the holiness

of my daughter’s face

of her spirit

and of her whole self

and I suddenly knew

while I was driving the car

in Illinois

down the road

with her sitting

silently

next to me

that I was sitting

next to an angel

a human angel

imperfect and stressed like the rest of us, yes,

and yet

angelic

nevertheless;

and it was only later

in a far field

when I was alone

that I allowed

the tears of gratitude

to fall

which are still tears.

And I can still

conjure up that feeling

at will

whenever I want to

wherever I am

and it’s worth

more

than all the empty

bank accounts

I ever owned.

And Someone

maybe the Stranger

is always hovering right

behind it all

in my mind.

– The Drifter, aka Dale Williams Barrigar, 12/31/2025

The Drifter: Love and Murder in the Mountains; or. Eleven Reasons

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.

The Drifter: Why Christmas Music in 2025 and Beyond?

(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.

Complainings by the Drifter

“If we live good lives, the times are also good. As we are, such are the times.”

– Saint Augustine

“The Drifter” wishes to complain this week.

Out of respect for potential hyper-sensitive readers, he shall limit himself to three brief topics.

His two kids and his three dogs can fairly attest to the fact that complaining is one of his fave hobbies.

Some folks call it “letting off steam,” so a gasket doesn’t blow.

They say Henry Miller was still complaining about his mother on his death bed, when he was 89, even though she had died 75 years earlier, when he was 14.

And yet, Miller always called himself the happiest man alive.

…

The other day on NPR I heard some clown (a well-known, well-paid clown) say that the “tech bros” are the “cool kids on the block,” and I almost chucked up the lunch I hadn’t eaten.

(The seven cups of coffee that were in my stomach began to swirl around. It’s usually half-caf since I had a stroke a year and seven months ago. FYI, zero side effects from the stroke and I’ve also given up any and all smoking of anything. But I still enjoy second-hand smoke whenever I can find it, like walking through the halls of my Chicagoland apartment building any time of day or night.)

The term “tech bros” is itself an absurd and ridiculous thing (even though, or especially because, “everybody” seems to be saying it now).

And yet, to say that these folks are “cool” is even more ridiculous, when one thinks of where the term was born.

MILES DAVIS was, and is, cool.

His album, Birth of the Cool, came out in 1957, the same year as On the Road.

Miles Davis was so cool that even Bob Dylan said he was the coolest.

Jack Kerouac was cool.

Charlie Parker was cool.

Shirley Jackson was cool.

N. Scott Momaday was cool.

I saw him live one time in Chicago, reading some of his things and giving a talk. I met him for two minutes afterward and it was more than enough for me to assuredly confirm that N. Scott’s coolness was at Miles Davis levels.

The “tech bros” are highfalutin, ruthless industrial capitalists (to the extreme in a world (seemingly) without accountability for the rich).

But they are not cool.

The NPR guy himself is “slick,” but not cool, as in: a bullshit artist. (Which is why Hemmie said the most important thing an artist of the real needs is a good BS-Detector.)

…

In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Fred Nietzsche wrote, “The public permission to choose between five main political opinions insinuates itself into the favor of the numerous class who would fain appear independent and individual, and who like to fight for their one-sided opinions. After all, however, it is a matter of indifference whether one opinion is imposed upon the herd, or five opinions are permitted to it. He or she who diverges from the five public opinions and goes apart, has always the whole herd against him.”

In the USA, we ain’t even got five. We have two. And one side is controlled by the generic corporate capitalists. And the other side is also controlled by the generic corporate capitalists, which is why they failed to enforce accountability when they had power, i.e. 2021 to early 2025, which is why we’re in the situation we’re in now, at the end of 2025. How in the hell can this be called “freedom” any longer?

Dr. Cornel West, if you’re reading this, PLEASE keep doing what you’re doing. Your admin skills may be lacking like some of them say, but you’ve got more soul than the entire US Congress put together. And SOUL is what is needed now.

(After Nietzsche lost his mind, he sent a letter to someone saying that he was traveling around Germany executing all the antisemites. He saw IT coming even then, and even though he was (according to “them”) insane.)

…

The last thing the Drifter wishes to complain about today is all the people who are in a hurry to get nowhere. They will run over innocent children or old ladies on the street without looking backward just so they can get home faster to sit on their fat asses doing nothing (fat asses are fine if you’re doing something). If you have done this or are doing this, please slow down and give it another thought, if you ever have thoughts. Also, Henry David Thoreau said, “When in doubt, slow down.” I can also recommend Leonard Cohen’s song “Slow” to all the folks who are in a hurry to marry themselves off to someone else. Living alone ain’t a sin. It makes you an outlier in our society, but some of the best people have been outliers.

Jesus, Buddha, Shams of Tabriz and Joan of Arc would be four examples.

…

THE DRIFTER’S SONG RECOMMENDATION FOR THIS WEEK (December something ’25):

The Drifter recommends the song “Still Think About You” by A Boogie wit da Hoodie, from his 2016 mix tape titled ARTIST (his real first name is Artist).

This song is rap as ART, and the piano in it will break your heart, as will the lyrics and the content of the song. The word on the street is that his girlfriend got preggo with another man, and left him, inspiring this beautiful, intense tune.

Boogie also worked as a pizza delivery person at one point. The Drifter sympathizes; he did the same thing (in the 1990s).

THANKS to Tressa and Elena and their friends for the knowledge of this song.

Signed, Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD

The Broom Closet by The Drifter

The worst punishment I ever received at that place was being locked in a broom closet, in the dark, for three hours.

The school was Our Shepherd Lutheran Elementary located in a suburb of Detroit. The time was the mid-1970s.

I was in third grade when she locked me in the broom closet.

I say “she” because it was her who did it – my third grade teacher, Ms. Caul, who actually wasn’t that bad most of the time and who I even thought of as a friend some of the time.

But this time we knocked heads.

She wanted me to go up to the front of the class and join the other five kids who were serenading the rest of the class who were sitting at their desks.

She requested that I join the singing, that I head up front and begin to bust out in passionate song, singing hymns to the rest of the class as if I were some sort of transported hymn-singer, which I wasn’t. And far from it.

I was the kind of kid who wasn’t too good at joining, or singing (except when I was alone).

I had been sitting there at my desk looking at the happy hymn singers and thinking how pathetic and sad they were when she requested that I leave the security of my desk, head up front, and join them.

When I said no, she told me again to get out of my desk and march to the front of the room, pronto, buster.

When I said no again, she started walking down the aisle toward me, and she was here (which was there) before I even knew what hit me.

She was hovering over me, helicoptering above me, pointing at the front of the room and demanding that I take my place with the singing group.

I crossed my arms, turned my head away, and said no again.

Now she grabbed me by the arm, yanked me out of the chair, and dragged me to the front of the room.

Then she swung me around and slammed me (accidentally) into the kid at the end of the hymn-singing line.

Next she informed me that I would now be singing, not with the group, but as a soloist.

I had refused to sing in the group and it astonished me that she believed I would now consent to busting out in a solo for these fools.

I set my jaw shut tight, crossed my arms, and stared out at my classmates in their desks, all of whom seemed more horrified than I felt.

She began yelling, telling me to sing.

The truth was, I could not have sung at that point even if it had meant my life.

That was when she yanked me out of the room by the arm and marched me straight down the hall to the broom closet. For some reason, the light switch for the broom closet was on the outside of the little room, in the hall.

She threw the door open and with a great shove she fairly hurled me into the tiny room filled with brooms, mops, buckets, and cleaning supplies.

Then she slammed the door shut tight, locked it from outside, and turned the light off from outside.

I was alone in the broom closet, locked in, in the dark.

Like I said, I was in third grade, so that means I was either 8 or 9 years old.

I state my age as a reason for why I spent my time silently weeping in there, in rage and terror.

I felt like I’d been locked in a dungeon and, indeed, to this day I almost feel like I know what it’s like to be locked in a dungeon because of my refusal to join the singing fools.

Some people enjoy being cheerleaders for the system.

Some people see absolutely nothing wrong with groupthink, following the herd, living the life of a passive approver of the ways things get done around here, no matter how they get done, as long as the group gets what it wants and the majority rule, in a societal system that wants slaves for its great devouring jaws, and not even IT knows why, except that’s the way it goes.

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

The three hours might only have been thirty minutes.

When she let me out, she said, “I’m sorry Dale, but you had it coming to you and I hope you’ve learned your lesson this time.”

The Drifter Presents: Joan Crawford at Midnight; or, Overacting vs Overreacting

(all images provided by The Drifter)

F. Scott Fitzgerald called Joan Crawford the quintessential flapper (which, for Fitzgerald, meant the quintessential literary woman) because she combined two qualities into one.

She had a desperate-hearted love of life, or a love of life that was tinged with desperation, and she had it more intensely than anyone else.

He also disparaged her acting abilities. He said it was nearly impossible to write for her. (He was a screenwriter who usually didn’t even receive writing credits.) It was nearly impossible to write for her because of the tendency she had to overact, he claimed.

But there’s a very fine line between overacting, on the stage or screen, and over-re-acting, which happens in life.

To me, when I watch it now, much of Joan’s overacting on screen seems like nothing more than the OVERREACTING that certain people are all-too-capable of when they find themselves in emotionally charged situations.

Joan overacts on screen because she overreacted in life half the time.

She did both because she was an artist. And artists are people whose moods sometimes, or even most of the time, get the better of them.

Because it comes with the territory.

Art is about emotion, moods, atmospheres, feelings (as well as thoughts and ideas but here we’re focusing on mood).

Joan Crawford had a genius-level intellect on many levels.

And one thing she understood far better than most people was the ways people’s moods get the better of them.

And she understood this even as her own moods would get the better of her.

All of this comes out very clearly when you watch her, with close attention, on the screen.

It’s best to do it in a partially darkened room when you’re wide awake in the middle of the night with good creative energy but not creating anything, just absorbing more for later.

Try to find your own sweet spot regarding medications that can keep you buzzing while not taking you over the edge.

Breathe the midnight deeply, relax, and be very alive.

It’s best to focus on some of the movies she made during the 1950s.

For me, this decade is Joan’s high point.

Before that, she hadn’t fully matured. After that, she started to become a bit of a parody of herself. (There are exceptions in her work in either direction in time.)

It doesn’t have to be a great movie (in technical terms). All it needs to do is have the great Joan Crawford in it.

Watch the way her face moves.

The beautiful way her face moves and never stops moving.

And what it shows. (And she knows it.)

Joan Crawford understands (all too well) when people are playing her (or trying to).

She’s always willing to give other people a chance to be their best selves (but watches very closely when they veer off the track – because she’s been hurt before).

She knows that the world is made up of people who need one another but also can’t live together (or not peacefully).

She can read the reactions to what she says as deeply as if she were reading a book (which she also did much of during her life).

She knows that more sadness is up around the next bend.

But she also communicates the Dickinsonian fact that hope springs eternally.

She knows that humans are beautiful and ugly by turns, and that being ugly inside is much more important (in the wrong way) than being beautiful on the outside.

And she knows that outer beauty is what Jesus called “the light of the body.”

This exists for those can see it. It is an inner radiation that travels outward even when the subject (its source) is unaware that it’s doing so.

It’s the reason Joan was just as beautiful at 70 as she was at 20, even though she chain-smoked and chain-drank for most of her years.

The Drifter on Dickens and De Quincy

…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.