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.
I’m working on other projects that need more of my time, and this newsletter has always been a significant effort, hauled up from the margins of my life. Its weekly cadence remains overambitious. I plan on resuming in the fall, but I’m taking the next few months off. I am deeply grateful for all of you, for everyone who has read this newsletter for any part of its two-and-a-half-year run.
Besides, maybe it’s not such a bad thing that I won’t write about this summer. I won’t write about the El Niño that will likely occur, intensifying global temperatures. I won’t write more about the Biden Era, the US Presidential campaign trail, the crowded Republican primary, or the hallucinatory possibility of another Trump-Biden debate. I won’t even write about the birds in my window, the stink of summer trash, or the lanternflies that will soon swarm the City like enchanted trinkets.
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
Note: The next issue will be in late August or September, though there may be a stray missive before then. Thanks for reading.
on the turntable
☞ I’ll be adding to this playlist throughout the summer if you want to save it. I made a copy on Apple Music here as well.
☞ Also, the return of daiquiri season:
weekly wiki
Read back about Biden and Trump, Mexico and Sakamoto, roaches and beetles, Marías and McCarthy, North Carolina and Tennessee, Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption, a dead phone and a dead cat. If you’ve enjoyed this almanac, subscribe and share with friends!