Category: Section I

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 01/07/2008
Rev. 01 - 08/06/2013
Rev .02 - 03/27/2014
Rev .03 - 03/07/2022

 I write these words in the book of truth…

I am a liar. 

I have lied to you. 

I have lied to my mother. 

I have lied to children and I have lied to women I have loved with all my heart. 

I always lie to the men. I do not trust them enough not to.

Admitting that I lie won’t make the guilt go away and I’ll make no promises to tell the truth from now on. There is too much at stake to sacrifice this opportunity for the excuse of being able to die with dignity, or a sense of moral superiority. 

Dying.

I am dying. 

Lies.

The truth that inspires my fingers to dance these words into being: 

THE END IS NEAR.

but it is not where this story begins. 

This story begins with the lies:

***

I/O. 

I am. 

a jew.

an atheist. 

defined by my beliefs.

defined by the beliefs of others. 

I am a perfectly healthy human being.

I am a human being. And not falling a part.

I have 

stories to tell. 

a birthday. 

things.

I like 

baseball. 

pretty girls.

myself.

men.

 fireworks and french toast. 

my work. 

I work. 

with survivors. 

with computers, or circuit boards, or cables or as a TV Repair man. 

with students, or other faculty, or as a professor. Professors know things.

I know things.

about politics, art and culture. 

about math

about machines and how to build them…and not destroy them.

about writing. And how to be a writer.

about my own limits. 

about love.

I’ve been in love. 

I’ve made love 

with dreams, and skin, and sweat, and blood…but not with my hands my body my words my actions. 

I don’t love you anymore.

I ever did. And these feelings I call love are not a hunger.

I live. 

in Seattle.

in Michigan.

in Missouri.

in Arkansas.

in Missouri.

in Southern California. 

in Missouri.

in Minnesota.

in Missouri.

in Colorado.

in a house with a spouse.

on my feet in the street.

I have any idea what it means to really be alive. 

But, fuck the lies, I am alive. 

I am that I am. 

I will be what will be. 

I will never go back. 

I ever could. 

Ok, I’m definitely getting ahead of myself. 

This is the book of truth

not lies. 

But I am only beginning to scratch at the thin panel of glass standing between them.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 03/24/2008
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

In the beginning, a god made a man…

I was born upon this earth for a purpose.

I am almost confident that that is true. I always knew I was a Jew, and that that meant that there would be no easy answers. To be a Jew means to question: to question loudly and in the face of dire consequences. It’s why we make such good lawyers and assholes. Be it Eve or Abraham; Lilith, Moses or Jesus. We just cannot leave well enough alone. We leap at any opportunity to peel off scabs that disguise grim realities behind promises and pretty words. 

That is why God made us. 

Because every time we bleed, the world knows there is still blood left in its veins, and we all know that somewhere in our universe, wherever that universe may be, life goes on. 

This is a war between life and death and there are no second chances to get things right. 

Words. 

You think a liar would be good with them, but there is a difference between knowing what wants for the hearing and saying what needs to be heard. There is too much to say to get lost in the beautiful ambiguities of ‘almost explanations’ and ‘open to interpretations’. In the interest of clarity, it behooves the task at hand to define my words now, at least one or maybe three that are one before I can ask you to take the leap of faith necessary to make this a day not lived in vain:

God:

Question: Why is God a man?

Answer: Easy, God is dick.

 Maybe too easy.

 So let’s look at the relationship between men and love and violence.

Love

What is love? 

Stop singing.

To love is to risk. It is to surrender to the possibility that there may be more to living than we can box up or control or bury in the ground.

At its best and at its worst love makes us beg. 

It makes us ask what we can do for others even as we experience what others can do for us without needing to exert our egos over what the experience will be. In that, and many other regards, it is the exact opposite of being a man. 

But there is more to both love and men than their relationship to each other; because there is also violence. 

Love.

Masculinity.

Violence.

A holy trinity of bullshit and atomic particles. 

Like forces repelling each other while opposite ones are drawn together into nuclear collisions. 

Yes. Sometimes they give birth to sons that can shed light, warm the flesh and carry with them the promise of tomorrow. 

But they can also destroy. 

Spontaneous explosions, they leave behind nothing but shadows. A slow creeping death that saps our strength and chars our skin until we turn first to leather, then to stone, and then to dust. 

Men do not own the monopoly over this kind of power or destruction.

Kali is a wonderful and terrible goddess. But she is not mine. Mine is the God of the Old Testament. Of laws, and jealousy, and wrath, and promises yet still unfulfilled. 

A rose growing wild out of a pile of shit. 

And yet beneath all those layers of pain and feces, there lies love! 

Little larvae consuming excretion and decay, turning dust back into dirt. 

Dear God,

All of this will be yours before this journey is done,

but please

for those I leave behind,

please

  leave the maggots in the ground.

Let hope hide somewhere

these robots will never think to look for it.

But even to hope is to risk. And thus I must beg you to have faith. 

Not in my god, but in my words. 

The god of this testament wears his belt in his hand and may be the only one left who can save us all.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 03/05/2008
Rev.01 - 03/08/2022

Life, death, and the promise of everything that comes between…

This is a story of us against them. 

The old Rooster versus robots.

“Give ‘em hell” or live trying. 

Repetitive? maybe, 

but this is: 

THE WAR BETWEEN

LIFE AND DEATH.

A war older than gods or men–and after more error than trial I have finally learned my role in it.

In galaxies far and wide, God chose Jews to be his people in the struggle against inevitability–an unending quest that could no easier be refused than it could be accepted. We are trapped in a conflict that would pit many against us, while pitting us against only ourselves and time. That’s right, our crusade would not be against any group of people, for all people share in exactly that which we are fighting for. Life. 

So cliché. 

So Die-chotomus. 

Its pathetic really–and I’m sorry. 

I know a lot of you had far greater expectations for these archives than to find out that all of it is nothing more than a prayer book for the “we ain’t dead yet” generation. But there it is. Yes, in these ramblings I will waste your time recounting how I spent my days rampantly running, jumping and ultimately dying along the random streets of America praying to live just one more day. 

ABSOLUTELY PATHETIC.

But I must insist that this quest to record my follies has not been undertaken on my own behalf. 

Liar.

Ok, not entirely on my own behalf.

To grasp beyond the self-importance of this undertaking I must point out my enemy:

Logic, reason, even fantasy and dream cry out for an escape–a promise named Death. 

Many are the lies are told to justify our prayers for an end to come. 

We even gut our corpses and hide them in sanitized prisons to deceive ourselves from the obvious: 

That everything that dies, one day comes back. 

It sucks, but there it is–the reason why the robots with all their servos and whispers along wireways can’t win: 

Life is inevitable. ¹

Death is only an afterthought. 

This has made him, Death, white with bitter rage. 

It is possible that this is where this story truly begins. 

Foot Notes

1. Many will argue the claim that “Life is inevitable.” I invite them to try. Planet earth is amazing. In this life time, I would have no other planet beneath me personally. But planet Earth is only one part of a living, breathing ecosystem of planets, stars, galaxies and universes. Even if humans or the Machines manage to destroy ourselves, or all life on planet Earth, Life will go on. Atoms will move, interact, change, and create something new again.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 03/05/2008
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

Lessons learned living beneath tyrants…

When I was a child I used to pray. 

Every night before I went to sleep I asked God to show me the world that would become. 

To show me the world in which the women I loved lived through tomorrow. 

The world in which absent father figures stayed absent. 

The world in which Indians rode horses across unending plains. 

The world where the wild things still are. 

I was young and stories of wrath and Leviticus had yet to scare me as much as the stories I saw in 5 o’clock shadows or the eyes of my best friend KC every morning when she stepped out of her step-father’s car. My god was not forgiving, but he was just. Where covenants were made, they were not forgotten, and thus I made mine. 

Barukh ata Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam pokeiach ivrim…

But I knew even then that promises are never given freely, they are always traded. Thus I made two concessions for the sight I sought:

The first was for my life. I dedicate it always to the service of those I love. I will put their happiness before my own and never balk at a direct request for help from someone I care about. 

The second was for my silence. Granted sight to see what would be, I will say nothing but that which never could. I will share my glimpses into the future with no one and use these glimpses only in pursuit of my first promise. 

I had learned my codependency by the age of six–I sanctified it–and I would spend the rest of my life learning that seeing the headlights does nothing to push you off of the road before the truck gets there.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 03/08/2008
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

A dream in which rain never came…

The first dream I remember went something like this:

I am on an indoor soccer field and my team is losing. Our jerseys are purple. Our team name is the Aardvarks. There is a creature on our chests, but I cannot tell if it is an aardvark. It is a creature half way between a dinosaur and a donkey, wearing a turtle shell, blasting a soccer ball into a goal. It is buff as fuck.

KC is not there, and I am scared. 

I know where she is and I do not want to go there. She is a thousand miles away, pulled along by electric webs. The spider is old and gray. She is 10 or maybe 11. He is raping her, repeatedly. Instead of clouds, metal skulls floating in the sky are laughing and making promises that KC will wrestle with the rest of her life.

Because this is what I have chosen to fight for.

Life.

Where the worst things I can imagine

are not as terrible as the things that are happening.

Not to me.

Never to me.

Always to people I love.

Because the covenant was sealed in blood.

But not my own.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 03/17/2008
Rev .01 - 03/08/2022

The day on which the rain falls…

I woke in tears. 

It was Saturday and the game was at 2:30pm. 

KC had run away a week and a half earlier. I did not know what to do so I cried all day long. Grown-ups saw my tears and asked compassionately, 

“what was wrong?” 

I said nothing. 

We lost. 

On the drive home, my step dad was trying to explain about how there was no such thing as bad soccer players, only inexperienced ones. Donny pulled the van into the driveway and we could see something black and white dangling from a tree in the backyard through the slits in the splintered fence.  

It was my dog. 

Frisky was a bagel: part beagle, part basset hound.

He was both the smartest and horniest dog I have ever met. He could ascend monkey bars, railings  and little boys playing on the play ground with ease. He was a climber, and that Saturday–sometime after we left–he climbed the tree his runner leash was tied to, and fell off. 

Donny coldly told me that Frisky hung himself because I had forgot to feed him that morning.

***

2 days later my mother received a phone call.

The police had found KC’s body. 

She was alive, and in New York Ssss… 

That was all I heard before my mom took the new cordless phone into her room and shut the door, but I already knew. KC would come back–she was a fighter, she would always come back–but only part way.

I was too late.

Author: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett
Rev History
Rev .00 - 06/01/2009
Rev .01 - 12/01/2014
Rev .02 - 03/08/2022

One van to rule them all and into family drive them…

Just after he married my mother, Donny bought a 1986 Chevy G20 Mark III Hightop conversion van. Blue–bright and navy–THE VAN had 3 silver pin stripes and large tinted windows on the sides and in the back. It had four bucket seats with a table between the two in the middle, and a plush bench seat in the back that folded down into a bed. THE VAN even had cup holders. 

I was going on nine and–as we drove off the used car lot–for the first time in my life I thought about the relationship between movement and identity:

The Family Car.

Before “the house”, THE VAN was the first material symbol of group identity that was forming between my mother, me and this man whom still felt too much like a stranger.

• When and how did THE VAN acquire this this developmental signifier in the relationship between people looking to materialize the relationship of family?
• Can the rebirth of the family voyage really be traced back through its linguistic roots to the word “caravan?”
• Or was this inference a diabolic yet brilliant ploy by the Ford company of the 1960s to usurp the defining family vehicle away from the Volkswagen Microbus?

American Nazis supplanting German ones had become a common theme for over a decade, but perhaps the answer to all of these questions lie not in corporate influences but in sub-cultural ones.

Hippies had claimed the Microbus in their delusional vision of “conquering the open road,” along Eisenhower’s racist freeways which inevitably plowed through vibrant urban communities-of-color in order to pave the way for sundown-suburbs to spread out in radials of hate from city centers. This left white-flight folks striving for middle-class respectability to look for a new vehicle capable of transporting their growing families back and forth from the daily locations that were no longer within walking distance of home. Chevrolet borrowed heavily from Volkswagen in the designs of its 1961 Corsair platform, which was the Americans first attempt at a fully enclosed utility vehicle with cargo space that could be easily converted to extra seating. As American cities redefined themselves around their expanding interstates, building wider and wider automotive-centric streets, the compressed nature of the microbus made less sense outside of Europe and the East Coast. Both Ford and Chrysler joined in the up-sizing revolution that summed up the illusion of prosperous growth of Baby Booming USA. 

Regardless of the convertible van’s roots as a vehicle of a white supremacist expansion of US Imperialism, frustrated and disillusioned Rock n’ Rollers took back over the counter culture from the hippies, slam dancing punk into the late 70s and early 80s. They said “Fuck You, DAD!” And stole his ride with them, as the conversion van was the perfect vehicle to fit your band, and their equipment into whatever arrangement was necessary. The full-sized conversion van had to be cut loose by the respectable families of white suburbia as it was painted with Heavy Metal wizards and unicorns. By this time the auto industry was already happy to have a new version of suburban bliss ready to sell in the form of the soccer mom minivan, a clean cut respectable vehicle to neutralize any threat to nuclear family/waste management.

 By 1988, Danny’s Big Blue conversion van would have been out of place as a white family vehicle anywhere outside South City St. Louis. Souf City, too urban and poor to fit the resurgent vision of the not-so-black and entirely-white Beavers, nuclear families here were relegated to the toxic sludge of Ninja Turtles. In this light, it perfectly understandable how THE VAN became Donny’s relationship to the family he was trying to create. THE VAN, which he would drive through seasons of soccer games and family vacations would also be the implement of his and our undoing.

One morning, before heading into work, Donny received a call from a work buddy of his at the brewery. Buddy was working the M-for-Midnight-leg of the MAD shift rotation, and wanted to let D-for-Day and Doped-up Donny know that his upcoming shift was getting hit with “random drug-testing.” Out of sick-days and vacation, Donny weighed his options in the parking lot looking for a way out less costly than another failed drug test. He settled on “accidentally” slamming the door on himself hard enough to break his left arm. 

In the end, THE VAN died before our collective dream of family a few years later. Another warning that we failed to understand until it was long too late. THE VAN, gone missing with no explanation from Donny, was found by the police in a parking lot, left running, interior stripped, smashed and torched to oblivion. The cops figured it had been stolen for a joyride and then abandoned and set on fire after the thieves crashed it into a few too many dumpsters and brick walls. “The Thieves” were never going to be found.  

A-sher na-tan’ la-sech-vi’ vi-nah’ le-hav-chin’ bein yom u-vein’ lai’-lah.

Who gave to the rooster understanding 

to differentiate between day and between night.