Reading
Summer's plague.
I read much more in the summer. That’s a habit that goes all the way back to elementary school. During the year, it’s assignments, obligations, work, grades. Then the foot comes off the pedal and you can do whatever you want. So I did. So I do. That means reading lots of popular books, which I tend not to like, and not just because they are popular. I have issues, I think, with right-up-front-ness, a kind of bright lighting in some prose that seems eager to please a reader. It is probably related to the way that TV changed cinematic lighting or the way that compression changed pop-music production. But that’s an essay, and this is an introduction.
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TESTAMENT
I am sitting on a raft that has more holes in it than I can count, which means that I have less time than I can count, which means that it’s time for me to say all the things I never had a chance to say, or was too proud to say, but also means that when I say them, I will be the only one to hear them, and I already know them, and also know that my inability to say them has caused me problems from the moment knowledge and inability found themselves existing uncomfortably in the same mind, a mind that advertised itself as honest but practiced only situational candor, pointing out momentary phenomena and pretending they had something to say about the larger situation, which they rarely did, while at the same time neglecting and even refusing to investigate that larger situation out of sheer fear, and it was that poorly conceived mix of exhibited probity and harbored terror that tripped me up in picking friends, picking partners, turning my back on others who should have been both, which you know, which you kept saying, that spurred me to only half-listen to you while I planned this rafting trip, though “planned” is something of an exaggeration, as I undertook it without vetting the vendor that sold me the raft, moved forward with the dulled judgment of arrogance when it came time to sit with the maps and the charts, and since I feel a certainty that verges on perverse pride that my own flaws are what put me here, on the raft, on the sea, fairly certain I can hear the air escaping through the holes, I guess I won’t say a single thing. [©2026 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas]