Category Archives: Literary

Most of our lives we hear stories about how the human race must defeat nature to survive, how the climate, the wild animals, the plants, viruses, everything in our world wants to destroy us. Corporations have public relations departments that work year-around telling us stories about how they exist for our benefit to overcome theContinue reading “A War for Survival”

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato taught an allegory about prisoners in a cave that appears in his seminal work, the Republic. I’m not a student of philosophy. I’m not smart enough. But sometimes an idea will pop into my heard when I’m reading—if you want to call my struggle with philosophical texts reading—that causes aContinue reading “Spelunking with Ideas”

You Can Never Go Back to the Turtle Back Inn (Rochak Publishing, 2022, 15.00 dollars) Available at Amazon or your local bookstore by order. In Jim McGarrah’s sixth collection of poems, he questions what it means to be human by looking at the world around him, turning to memories, and searching his own mind andContinue reading “Review of my new book by Robin Wright:”

My long life has been blessed with a seeing a multitude of inventions and new products developed to ease the burden of being human. In our fast-paced, often ruthless, society where Job-like suffering condemns most of us to the miseries of working for a living, paying a mortgage, dealing with the fluctuating price of gasoline,Continue reading “Velveetini”

Given my proclivities for excess and my delusions of romantic adventure as a young man, it isn’t much of a surprise that I found myself often on the fringes of normalized society and in the company of horrible and dangerous people. I can remember drinking in bars, sometimes in third world countries, where the termContinue reading “Our Vicious Education”

Is a State failed when it bans books in its schools and yet, despite the slaughter of its children in those schools, makes no effort to control guns, or even share responsibility for the carnage? This seems a worthy question Americans might need to consider at this stage of our history. A failed state isContinue reading “Failure Is Not an Option”

To have been born to live off our deaths – Caesar Vallejho             One of the most important aspects of maintaining balance in life, for me anyway, has been coming to an understanding of my origin and its influence on my perspective. I don’t mean the beginnings of being human, but rather, the beginnings ofContinue reading “A Family Tree”

As many of you already know, I have always included a few poems in my books relating to my experience and other veterans’ experience in combat and reflecting on those realities. I’ve been doing it for the past twenty years out of respect and out of a hope that one day people will understand theContinue reading “Memorial Day Review”

History of the Bible in an abridged opinion that leaves out a lot of stuff, has a cynical tone sometimes, and is being written by a man of questionable character – James McGarrah. First of all, churches of the Christian religion list Jesus as the Christ, or anointed one, that has always been the headContinue reading “A Summation of Religious Influence on Western Civilization”

This is a New Poem written at the end of the Covid apocalypse: News of the World January 15, 2022, in the ancient country of Ceylon—called Sri Lanka today— a mother goat gave birth while stranded in a blizzard on the side of a mountain. A child from the nearby village carried this goat upContinue reading “News of the World”