Catwyrms
ISSUE #64
Meow.
I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone,” one of the greatest songs ever written, back in 2005, when it came out. I was a tasteless rube then, with only a few dollars for iTunes singles. No, I was not listening to “Hope There’s Someone” yet, but when I did, I felt could have written it. It’s all the 12-year-old me felt at the time: “Hope there’s someone / Who’ll set my heart free / Nice to hold, when I’m tired.”
For over two decades, Cabbagetown—also known as my neighborhood—has held an annual chili-eating festival in the first week of November. The chili bell rings at 12:30 sharp! You get to eat from as many homemade batches as you can reach before they run out. The Dixie cups end up stacking 20 or 30 high.
In all 7½ years of Earwyrms, Halloween has yet to descend upon a Friday… until this year, baby! Oh, we’d gotten close to completing the bloody ritual in past years, but all it took was one meddling leapfrog from 2019’s Thursday to that Saturday in 2020 to completely waste a decade.
The first sentence of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was written in German, which can neither be completely nor unequivocally translated into English. This sentence, which was written exactly 100 years before 2015, has echoed throughout a century of literature:
“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”