Author: n.n. benn

n.n benn is fictional and autistic. this is their diary. new poetry and philosophical musings every tues, thurs and sat direct to your inbox. and while you are here, check out my videos on youtube and spoken word poetry on spotify, apple music etc (search for the love epochal)

getting there—a tired prayer to monotony

i used to hate the phrase ‘getting there’. i have encountered many utterers of it. particularly when i was younger, in my first few, low paid, jobs. someone would say, ‘howzitgoin?’ and the response would come back, ‘aye, getting there.’

i suppose as an autistic person it struck two problems for me. the first, it is not well enough specified. how far along the road to where, are we? and, the second, much more significant, problem: it is unoriginal. everyone seems to say it.

then i was in the pub one time with my dad. i suppose he wasn’t long retired. and he say a guy, let’s call him jimmy, who he used to work in the yard with. ‘alright jimmmy,’ he said.

‘alright bill, howzitgoin?’

‘ah well, getting there,’ he said.

so that made me a bit more sympathetic. and then i lived another twenty years, and now i understand a bit better: ‘getting there,’ is the essence of the human condition. it’s a lazy protest against the monotony of existence. it is a blasphemous prayer. we ask god to release us from the drabness of life.

it is necessary that life weighs us down. that as a species we in a doom loop of futile repetition. it has to be good enough that we want to do it, but bad enough that we don’t really mind that we will be leaving one day.

regarding the snake eating its tail – that’s called an ouroboros. my friend i. has a tattoo of one thinking ‘i’ve had better’

in purgatory every pain and every pleasure you caused will be inflicted back / and you will judge yourself

i don’t know where this came from. frankly, i can only assume some deity or other was using my mind instrumentally to communicate a new policy of the afterlife.

this is my problem with religions, they aren’t selling the product hard enough. now, i’m a good candidate for salvation. i’m keen to cause no harm. i know that only the devil can offer in-life boosters and that the whole deal of belief is for the afterlife. so if they want my custom, they need to start banging on about what facilities etc are available in their afterlife plan.

i need the info on why proddie heaven is better than the hindu rebirth thing and why neither stack up to valhalla or whatever. i need to find the religion with the right afterlife for me.

i am a loaf of bread, origami, a process

we think that the world is full of things. but it isn’t. it’s full of processes. a building is a process. it goes through construction, then it enteres into a dialectical struggle between decomposition and maintenance. even the stone it’s cut from it degrading. atoms dislodge into the air.

the universe is unimaginable chaos. did you know that due to the solar system’s transit through the universe, the dinosaurs who lived millions of years ago also lived trillions of miles away? while it seems like the earth is a constant, actually it is moving very quickly through the unimaginable void of space.

this isn’t a cover up, the red rose, the guerilla’s fist

trigger warning: self harm

well it was a cover up really. i had a bit of a mental health crisis when i was younger, in my late teens. one result of that was self harm scars on my arms. i know realise i was going through a period of autistic burnout on the transition from high school to the new expectations of early adulthood. an experience a lot of austic people go through.

i don’t know why it took me so long to realise i could tattoo over the scars. maybe i just wasn’t ready to move on. but then suddenly i needed to. to make them a polished part of my story. i love my arms now. until very recently, i guess i preferred just not to think about them. and the message they sent out about me, and my mental health.

post-prandial down-dumpsy meek remainderman rain run

i was listening to a lot of podcasts about health. i’d had a couple of health scares. i ended up going down a few false paths. got misdiagnosed with various things. i wouldn’t recommend, it was all quite stressful. turned out i didn’t have copd or an inflamed prostate or whatever but i am autistic.

anyway. post-prandial means ‘after eating’. i kept hearing it in podcasts and i liked the way it felt to say it. i’m prone to echolalia. and i must have been feeling down in the dumps. must have went for a run. and meek remainderman is an ironic biblical reference.

friends, what we are dealing with here is melodrama.

smell tomato paste and cheddar, my da’s cooking, my home

i was just making some toast and cheese and i thought i’ll make it a bit fancy since, let’s be honest, this is what i’m having for dinner.

so i mixed some seeds and tomato paste and olive oil and salt and cheese into a lumpy paste, spread it on wholemeal pitta bread and bunged it into the oven and make a sort of turbo-pizza snack. and i remembered cooking with my dad when i was a wee boy.

we would buy pre-made pizza bases from the supermarket. or even just a crispy morton’s roll. and then tomato paste and cheese. so my version is a wee bit fancier. but that’s just a generational shift. there’s more stuff in the supermarket now than there was when i was a kid. nobody cared about mixed seeds and whole grains then. the food my parents eat now is different from the food they are then.

that’s why nostalgia is so emotional, and can hit so hard. it’s that longing that you didn’t know you had for a thing that you cannot have, because it just doesn’t exist anymore.