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)

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.

i cut a lana del rey tattoo into my arm, is that self harm?

it’s actually only sort of a lana del rey tattoo. i got the idea when the queen died, and there was a new king. there was stuff in the news about the king’s new cipher, c iii r, which replaced the queen’s e ii r (charles the third rex, lizzy the second regina.)

i thought, what would the american cypher be? so instead of the british crown it would be the one from the statue of liberty. and the monograph… l d r, for lana del rey, or, alternatively lana the 500th regina.

oh and also. i love lana del rey.

never socrates unsatisfied nor pig in shit: / we are socrates in pig shit, always and 4 real.

would you rather be socrates unsatisfied or a pig in shit? the life unexamined is not worth living… but the pig is actually happy isn’t it? at least, it is in this philosophical paradox.

but ultimately, even if you choose the socratic life, ultimately you will still need to clean your toilet and take the bins out.

i remember distinctly an evening of childhood. my mum had made pork. i was chewing the pig in my mouth. overcooked. dry. tough. i left the dining table and went to the kitchen and spat the mouth-full into the bin. i thought about mortality: this was a dead pig i had desecrated. what a waste. i too would die. and i was scared of that. but if this pig could do it, maybe it wasn’t such a big thing.

a few years later i became a vegetarian, and i have mostly been vegetarian for most of my adult life.