Author Archives: authorbengarrido
Is Meaning Possible in a World Without God?
Originally posted on Truth Is Elusive:
I was going to do a series about meaning but as I was studying and writing the series on morality I realized that there is a whole lot of overlap in the 2 subjects. They are both based on values which would explain that. Many of the things I…
The Stupor Bowl
In trivial news, the New England Patriots lost the 2008 Super Bowl to the New York Giants. In non-trivial news, I celebrated that day by attending the momentous, historical Stupor Bowl VI. The Stupor Bowl is a more or less annual exhibition of mutant bike culture and extreme- skills contests put on by the Reno […]
The Blackguard – My Novel in Ten Sentences
My first published novel, The Blackguard, is about 60,000 words long. I’m going to try and explain it in ten sentences. Props to Diotima’s Ladder for this idea. The Blackguard is about oppressed minorities getting run over by the march of modernity, except here those minorities are white supremacists who practice Chinese-style foot-binding, East African-style scarification […]
You Don’t Know Jack
Science tells us the capital”T” Truth. We don’t think it, we don’t believe it, we don’t suspect it. We know it because science is repeatable, it’s systematic and we can verify everything science says through empirical methods. We’re smart, us scientific people, we aren’t a bunch of creation scientists or fortune tellers or primitive Amazonian tribesmen […]
But Money CAN Buy Happiness
My guest post on A Holistic Journey about cash, scratch, dinero. Check it out. A Holistic Journey Does money buy happiness? I’m not sure, but I do know it bought the $200 dollar suit, $40 leather shoes, and $20 dollar hair cut I absolutely needed to get hired. Money bought the civilized means that erased […]
Arrhythmia In a Can
This article was originally published in the Reno News and Review. It appears here in slightly updated form. College means five years—four, if you’re lucky— of burn out, poverty and scary neighbors. Intelligence means less than endurance, ingenuity means less than perseverance, and noble purposes mean so much less than chemical stimulants that it’s kind […]
Cheap-ish Cars For People Who Regret Their Tribal Tattoos
Only a decade ago, we who prefer to look down on the vulgarians could enter the nearest car dealership and reliably find something to snicker at. Women with $300 shoes and tiny, annoying dogs flooded dealerships in order to buy Cadillac and Lexus SUVs that combined the efficiency of oil field fires with the road […]
Columbus and the Indigenous Peoples
The fair city of Seattle recently abolished Columbus Day and replaced it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. It is tempting, then to embark on an impassioned polemic about how Columbus was either a monster to be reviled or bemoan the continual attacks on our traditions from those ornery and persistently unassimilated minorities. As much fun as […]
Naked Fantasy, Naked Power
The Deep South. Dixie. The Confederacy. The Bible Belt. How is it that every name I can think of for this region carries with it emotional baggage? If you are a liberal, black or committedly secular person, the words with which I began this essay probably make you angry. They make you think of Bull […]
My Ghost
On a surface level, I just went on a ghost hunt. However, if I really think of what I was doing on the levels of symbolism and cognition, it was really closer to an act of war. Since this is a story about ghosts, according to the Most Holy Book of Cultural Cliché, I’m supposed […]
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