ben
tapeworm’s
almanac

July 2021 (i)

KEEP THIS FAR APART

The signs look like they’re melting. The now-iconic and now-useless KEEP THIS FAR APART signs—six-foot-wide red plastic banners erected by NYC Parks at the onset of the pandemic—are still posted throughout the City. In Prospect Park the other day, I noticed that some of the white lettering on one sign—FAR AP—was starting to blur into the red background. The sign looked tired, its neat municipal sans-serif sagging in the heat.

As good an image as that might be for this dazed post-COVID summer, I quickly realized it wasn’t due to the heat at all. Other signs I had seen throughout the Park had FAR AP painted over in red so that the signs read KEEP THIS_____ART. Presumably the warped lettering is from Parks personnel repeatedly cleaning off the red paint.

In some ways, this is a much better tableau for the post-COVID City: a lazy, cheeky graffito of erasure and a City continuing to maintain the legibility of a sign that is no longer needed and was likely never needed at all. That the back-and-forth is slowly eroding the sign also feels fitting somehow: neither side has much to say, and gradually the message gets lost.

Some signs still have the red paint—KEEP THIS_____ART—and others are farther along on their way to incoherence: KEEP THIS_____A reads one. I imagine it continuing until the signs are totally illegible, blasted smears of reddish pink with only the encircled leaf of the Parks logo beneath it. At that point, perhaps, it might actually be a kind of art worth keeping, a banal monument to all the things not cared about or kept.

More likely, of course, the City will merely replace them. Or one day, soon, we will find them gone.

ben tapeworm

ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

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