ben
tapeworm’s
almanac

May—Aug 2023 (i)

the summer will not write itself

I always complain about writing in the summertime, so this year I will not. That season most prohibitive to writing. Pollen stinging your face, fingers slick with sweat, phones overheating into useless slabs of glass. Head sluggish in the heat like a poisoned rat staggering across the sidewalk. The heat the slow creep of summer’s kingdom.

The need to write is a strange thing. Not just to notice things but to have them mean something, as if that might make them exist more fully. A weekly practice regiments this need—and it is a need—with the hope that it might gradually articulate something, that it could lead to something else. But it also produces a kind of signifying mania, a serialized obsession with having something to say. Repetition both emphasizes and erodes its usefulness.

So this summer, I won’t write things like this. I won’t describe, for instance, how I crashed my bike on the way to work last week. Diving over my handlebars, bruised but relatively unscathed, serene with shock. I won’t write about how the man looked at me and, rather than asking if I was okay, said: Did you lose anything? It was probably just the whiplash, but I thought it was a preposterous thing to ask. Did I lose anything? Like what, my wallet? My life? These past three spectral years? Of course I fucking had. But trembling, I looked down at the asphalt. I hadn’t lost anything at all.

ben tapeworm

ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

To get new entries in your email inbox, please email bentapeworm@gmail.com to be added to the mailing list.