What Is We To You?!

Copyright © 2023 by Larry Odell Johnson

ISBN: 979-8-88615-162-6 (Paperback)

979-8-88615-164-0 (Hardback)

979-8-88615-163-3 (E-book)

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The views expressed in this book are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Sex Wit Already Made (Matrix)

Chapter 2: Do You Want To Hear About It?

Epilogue

References

Introduction

Introduction

I have discovered that for certain kinds of academic communication, it is impractical to use the formal or traditional style of writing to convey information. Using multiple quotes from various sources and making the requisite citations to grant use of the statements of others is a technique designed to help one explain—by way of description and explanation or by comparison and justification—what one is attempting to say. This approach is what is typical of academic-styled literature. However, that is not what this treatise will do. I am going to use an autobiographical and narrative style to introduce what I have chosen to illustrate in this project. I will not use many quotations and reserve my citations. In the second and critical final chapter of this treatise, I will more readily use a keyed cipher to provide a content analysis of some limited scriptural text. To wit, items limited primarily to the first four chapters of the book of Genesis, in the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Scriptures. Being aware that the Scriptures use a variety of techniques to convey its messages, I decided to investigate what had been my long-standing curiosity about a segment of what has traditionally been represented to me—in the Scriptures—by numerous scriptural pundits, a.k.a. preachers. Consequently, there will be some surprises forthcoming. Bottom line, I am simply seeking a fair representation of the proximate textural truth of what scriptural scholars have translated and not mere popular hearsay or other people’s opinions. I decided that if grown folk cannot tell me a simple truth, then I am obliged to discover it for myself, now that I have developed skills of my own. The notion that mankind was condemned to sin because two people ate an apple from a tree never even passed the laugh test with me. However, on the spiritual side, I have always viewed the Scriptures for what I believe they are overall: our moral compass as used together with the proven fair laws which govern society. Yet while accepting these ideas—in the spirit of George Santayana—on animal faith, I have maintained a healthy degree of skepticism with respect to those who feign absolute and literal certainty regarding the immediate content in scriptural text.

In what follows, I will ease you into a process of content analysis using a key-cipher that I have developed over years of study. Within the narrative, I will randomly select words and phrases—which you will observe to be underlined and then immediately followed by bracketed comments—the ciphered content. Occasionally, I will repeat the process within the brackets themselves using braces or parentheses as interior grouping symbols. I will use these additional grouping symbols in the same way that I use the brackets to extend the immediate content, commentary, and meanings. Thus, they will act as punctuation marks when needed, and each will be appropriately opened and closed. Although I will not systematically define my key or other necessary techniques used, I will demonstrate their revelations by way of their application in punctuated textual materials. In other words, you will be obliged to beg the question (a.k.a. take my word for it)—with respect to the meanings—as the narrative will unfold. In the end, I will use my key to unpack portions of what is revealed in the early chapters of Genesis as delineated [educated eat end do lie] interpretations. Additionally, I should note that when I use the word or and the forward-slash symbol / (solidus; oblique) for the word or, I will mean the inclusive sense. That is, either-or, or both, as contrasted with the exclusive sense meaning simply either-or.

My goal here is to arrive at some unbiased objective truths about scriptural content and—at the same time—not proselytize. I do not need to tell people how to behave. However, I do believe that a more complete and fair set of facts will potentially aid them in their choices. When I am done, the Scriptures should assuredly remain our guide to a moral compass, and one will likely have greater insight to work with.

I will begin this narrative by introducing you to the earliest years of my life, yielding a few biographical facts about myself, while providing a sampling of the random content expanding revelatory technique mentioned and exampled earlier in this introduction. On this point, my approach is to position my style on the side of C.G. Jung’s psychology as the disinterested observer. A position that Sigmund Freud—the moralist—denied was possible and which caused and defined the socio-political rift between these two giants in the studies of psychology. Consequently, I will be able to provide you with a demonstration of semiotics and hermeneutics without dragging our heads through the murkier waters of these studies.

Chapter 1: Sex Wit Already Made (Matrix)

Chapter One

Sex Wit Already Made (Matrix)

I was born in Harlem, New York. In fact, I was born in Harlem Hospital and—I am told—either on a gurney in a hallway or on a gurney in an elevator. In either case, I never made it to the birth room. No matter, I am here born to wonderful parents and surrounded by multiple caring aunts and uncles. My parents and I lived in a multi-family tenement building in the middle of the fourteen hundred blocks of Amsterdam Avenue in Harlem: along with the families of one of my mom’s four sisters and three of my mom’s six brothers, their spouses, and their kids. I remember the building in vivid ways. It was heated by a coal furnish that a super (superintendent) controlled in the large cellar. A coal truck would pull up and deliver the coal through a double-sided set of sidewalks leveled metal doors, down a metal slide onto a smaller pile on the cellar floor. As needed, the super [are we people you seen] would shovel coal into the large fiery furnace down there. There were three or four floors of apartments, where individual apartments at opposite ends of the landings were separated in the center by the shared lone hallway toilet. To the right of the lone entrance and exit to each apartment was a very large and wide countertop beneath that doubled as the apartment bathtub and counter space (in our case, a counter for my parents to cut out patterns when tailoring new clothing). The entrance/exit door had one of those steel bar locks, where one end of the bar was inserted into a metal brace secured in the wooden floor and the other end inserted into the metal lock attached to the door. The type of locking mechanism that made it virtually impossible for someone to force the door open from the outside. One would enter the apartment into the kitchen/bathtub area moving through a doorless entrance to the first bedroom and then through a second doorless entrance to a second bedroom/living room. When you entered the building on the ground floor, you had to walk at least, I would guess, twenty-five feet to the staircase that led to the first level of apartments. The cellar door was to the rear and beneath that ground-level staircase. To me that is where the scary super man lived, under the long dark hallway staircase. I recall having to enter the hallway by myself once when the super deliberately scared me as my dad sat outside on the sidewalk. When I came back outside, I told my dad what the super had done, and he immediately went and spoke to the super. It never happened again! He is fortunate that I only spoke to my dad. Had I told my teenaged male cousins, he might have been in some serious trouble, because they were kind of tough and very protective of me.

Unlike one of my mom’s brother’s wives, my mom kept the roach problem under control in our apartment. That aunt, who lived in our building, never appeared bothered by all the roaches that ran unchallenged around everywhere in her apartment. Her roach problem was so bad that one day when she sprayed while my sister and I were standing in her kitchen [enter we itch okay], she had to light some old newspaper on fire to quell all the roaches that started literally flying around in her kitchen. (I would be willing to bet that you did not know that German roaches could fly.) It was a nasty and frightening situation! My sister and I had to go outside her apartment and into the hallway until the roaches calmed down. I am sure that she sprayed in front of us trying to leave the impression that she really did try to control the roach problem in her house, but the reaction of the roaches to that little bit of spraying exposed the lie. What was odd about her was that she seemed kind but docile [we lack . . . I see do]. I only recall one other very brief time ever reentering her apartment, along with my mom, and I stood in one spot in the middle of the floor anxious to leave.

Separately, I recall my dad’s frustrated efforts to keep large rats from periodically getting into our kitchen. He would be stuffing mesh wire around pipes and placing metal pipe fittings over that; still rats would occasionally get in. My sister and I slept in the first bedroom off from the kitchen, and we would hear my dad scramble through our space into the kitchen to use a straw broom to kill a large rat. And he was good at it! After some commotion, he would often show us his dead prey to assure us we were safe. As for my mom, if she ever heard or even heard of a rat, we kids would have to fend for ourselves. I also recall that my mom was so afraid of caterpillars that she would not sleep on sheets with butterfly images on them. I know because, as an adult and awaiting a visit from my mom during a time when I was living in LA, I spent some decent money, at the Beverly Center in Beverly Hills, California, on some beautiful butterfly patterned designer [new game is we do / hour we sign . . . we do!] sheets for her, all for naught.

My relatives were a major presence on our block. Of course, there was also the really mean lady who used to always yell profanely out her window to the oldest one of her sons to summon him home. He was always only allowed to stay outside ten to fifteen minutes max. She would yell what sounded like, George Raff, get your so-and-so expletive back in this house. And she would beat him a lot. He eventually ran away from home. The next time I saw him