Garris

THE COLOR WHEEL ZINE

My first zine is nearly ready.The central theme is becoming.I would love for you to contribute.I look for stories from ordinary life with a connection to BECOMING.Which, technically, I guess that’s most stories. And that’s the point.Here are two contributions from my community that will be featured.__________# 1 - TINA
In 2004 I was working with the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office. I was a deputy sheriff and a certified Detention Officer.I was working in the jail on night shift 7pm to 7am, in male housing. Our day shift crew briefed us what inmates had come in and if there were any incidents. There was a gentleman that came in that day that was put in what we called medium housing.After our briefing and day shift left, one of the inmates had pushed the call button in his cell. He was screaming. I had grabbed a pair of cutters that we had hanging on the wall, and to this day I cannot explain why I grabbed them.Myself and another officer ran to the cell where we found his cell mate had hung himself with his sheet and he was already turning blue. We grabbed him and cut him down as other officers came to help us. The other officers took him to booking and revived him.  He was taken to the hospital and survived!His name is Anthony. He was taken to a mental institution for thirty days where he was treated and released back into our custody. When brought back to jail he was placed on suicide watch in our booking area, where I was on night shift. I went to booking to see who had come in that day, and discovered Anthony had returned. Everyone was running around trying to get the inmates from booking to their cells. I was picking up some paperwork, and stopped to check on him and see how he was doing.I asked him if he had any kids and he said yes.He started to cry. I said to him that his kids needed their dad, and to be a dad that they can look up to. Through his tears he said thank you and said that I was the only one to take time out to talk to him. I worked another two years, but I never saw Anthony again.Sometimes we need to have some compassion, kindness and respect for others, because you never know what someone else is going through. I think about Anthony and his kids from time to time. You can never go wrong with a little kindness and compassion for others.-Tina Ballard__________#2 CARL
The Origins of BecomingBecoming first surfaced in my life about 20 years ago. I was writing what would become Last Tuesday’s third full-length record, BECOME WHAT YOU BELIEVE. One of our favorite bands, Midtown, had released Become What You Hate. I loved the cadence and defiance enough to answer with a punk rock jab of our own: Go on hating. We’ll work on refining what we believe.My twenties were full of basic questions I couldn’t answer. Who are you? Where are you from? I had grown up within the fundamentalist Judeo-Christian world of The Salvation Army as a missionary kid in Chile. I knew what I was rejecting. I was less sure what remained.Something else was changing too. I was becoming less interested in making everyone else believe what I believed. Travel, world religions, and cultural anthropology had opened up Islam, Buddhism, and other traditions in ways that made difference fascinating rather than threatening. My dissonance would then shift. It was no longer with people who believed differently. It was with those who had nothing worth becoming. Believe what you want. Wrestle with it. Change it. Call it God, or don’t call it God. But whatever you choose, let it shape the person you are becoming.Some of my own beliefs were unwavering. LOVE was one. From there, a guiding idea began to emerge: belief should not remain abstract. If something matters to you, you have to practice it until it becomes part of who you are.I had no idea I was naming something I would spend the next 20 years trying to do. Believing in love is easy; becoming loving is harder. The same is true of marriage, family, friendship, faith, art, and community. It is one thing to say these things matter. It is another to let them change the way you live.So when Garris recently placed becoming at the heart of the Color Wheel, something fired backward through 20 years of my life.__________The zine will be published every 3-4 releases, with community stories and my own writing and highlights included. Please don’t hesitate to get involved and share your own storyFOR CONTRIBUTIONS DM me on socials like TikTok or Insta

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