The New Normal is primarily fiction. The autobiography part of it is that I really did have a worm crawl into my ear and after a few terrifying moments my father removed it with tweezers. That vignette sat around for decades until around 2016 when Trump began campaigning and eventually was elected as the president of the United States. There was something about his abrasive manner, the toxicity of his words, which made me think of that worm from so long ago. I have nothing in common with Trump, instead, he is everything I fight against, everything I dislike in another person, the posterchild for what is wrong with masculinity, maleness, interpersonal relationships. There is nothing about him which speaks to what it means to be a good and decent human being. I began to see him, and mostly his words and the feelings that choked them, as a worm burrowing inside the public’s head, lodging somewhere deep inside and refusing to leave. I came to believe that we hear things throughout our lives, and they get buried deep within us. Sadly, those thoughts and feelings nestle there and are ready to be expressed at the most surprising times.
I remember an extended family situation where a very sweet grandma, gentle in everything she did, in every interaction she participated in, became very sick and incapacitated. Through her suffering, her children listened to her spout endless racist judgements. She had never spoken that way throughout her life. But in her final moments it was like the flood gates were opened and those words and thoughts cascaded outwards. A burrowed worm waiting its chance to appear and direct its host’s behaviour.
With Trump and the actions of grandma, I began to see that worm which crawled into my ear as something a lot more sinister and thought it might make a good story. However, I got some things wrong. One thing I did wrong in that story is that I did not portray successfully the incipient nature of the worm: how it could enter the brain, burrow deep inside, and impact how we view the world. I was wrong in my premise that the worm finally left. It stays there eating and defecating looking for a viable method of expressing its existence. It may be dormant but it remains even still.
The other thing I got wrong is that I do not believe I portrayed my metaphor of the worm successfully. And to be blunt now so as not to miss the point, at the time I saw the worm as the hateful, racist, misogynistic, and criminal verbiage coming from Trump’s mouth, as well as his stooges who stood by him and allowed his diatribes to run unfettered. I believe that people for the most part disregard what he says and somehow justify that he is still a good presidential candidate despite his incendiary words. (Though it is also true that there is a large part of the population who support the man and every word he says. They believe the same as he does and would love to see him follow through on his promises.) But in supporting the man’s economy or border control, or whatever lets them sleep at night, I believe people have also supported the worst of him. That niggling worm he implanted years ago lived on with all its hatred and bitterness, and destruction and selfishness and negativity. And we will now pay the price.
I don’t blame the worm. I believe it is possible to reject its destructive goal. There are plenty of people who have heard the same message coming from Trump & Co. who have not sunk to his level. But sadly, over half the nation has embraced the man and his message. The worm worked his destruction in their brains and they acted no different than the man himself.
That’s the back story for The New Normal. I would title it differently today but I don’t have the energy to create a better name and certainly not to rewrite the story to be more fitting for the 2024 fiasco. It will have to stand as my defiance, weak and insufficient as it may be. I hope you enjoy it.
The New Normal
by David H Weinberger
It’s rotting inside my head. The remaining part. Lived there over six years, the life expectancy of a night crawler. Burrowing through my brain. I could feel it that whole time. Tunnelling and exploring. And then it just stopped.
I was seven when the first worm slithered its way inside my ear. I was caressed by the grass as I relaxed on my side in the front yard, listening for sounds deep within Earth. I felt a slight tremor, which tickled more than startled, as something seemed to move from the dirt beneath the grass into my ear. It was pleasant enough that I did not move. But whatever it was continued on its journey into my ear, and then actually dangled from the depths, free from the confines of the soil. The pleasant feeling quickly turned to a sharp pain and I jumped from the ground and ran screaming around the yard. I could feel the thing penetrating, wriggling deeper into my ear canal. My father ran out of the house, grabbed me by the shoulders, and looked me over to assess the damage. He asked me how in God’s name I managed to get a worm in my ear and I started crying. He told me to hold still as he grasped the worm between two fingers and gently pulled. The worm stretched taut and I was afraid half the worm would remain in my ear forever, left to burrow into my brain, causing lifelong damage. But the worm finally released its grip inside the ear and sort of popped right out, like a cork released from a champagne bottle. My father held the worm up in front of my face and I vomited.
I slept fitfully that night, staying on my back out of fear of putting my ear against the bed. I knew there was no way a worm would rise up out of the pillow but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I dreamed of a major worm attack in our city, where millions of worms attacked and ate people and left their droppings to fertilize a new city. Each time I woke up covered in sweat and short of breath, I could see giant worms crawling on my bed, laughing hideous laughs, and crawling towards my ears. I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling with my hands covering my ears. Early morning, I started worrying about worms entering my nostrils and my mouth. Lacking enough hands to cover all my holes, I got up early for breakfast.
I told my friends about the worm incident. No one believed me. How could a worm move from the ground and up into a person’s ear? Just not possible. Even though I swore it was true and promised that my dad saw it and actually pulled the worm out, they ridiculed me and called me a liar. My teacher, who gently patted my hand and told me she was glad I was okay, seemed sceptical. But I continued in the telling because I had the lingering, disturbing sensation of a slim, slimy object entering my ear.
The nightmares and worries faded quickly but my fear of the grass and what lies below it did not. I saw it as the representation of the hell we learned about in Sunday school, where everything bad and evil exists. I could walk in grass but I would never linger. When my family picnicked, I sat in the car and ate my food and read. I didn’t play in our yard any longer for fear of the pervasive creatures capable of invading bodies.
Eight years later, when the second worm slithered its way inside my ear, I was lying in wild grass and dandelions with my first girlfriend, Anne. Her allure clouded my young, hormone addled mind and I forgot the frightful memory of laying in the grass with my ear against the ground. This time, I was holding Anne’s hands, our knees touching, and staring into her eyes. I was experiencing a lot of new feelings right then so I did not perceive the slight tickle in my ear as different from the rest of the tingling going on in other body parts. But when the worm had reached a one inch entry into my ear, I knew it wasn’t love or desire I was feeling. Once again, I screamed, jumped up, and ran around the field. Anne watched me, and when I approached her in tears, she stared aghast at a four-inch piece of worm sticking out of my ear. I could feel the worm inching deeper inside of me as I squeezed Anne’s hands and begged her to do something. But Anne was not as adept at removing worms from ears as my father was, so she hesitated and actually took a step back before I fell on my knees and beseeched her to pull out the worm. I watched her hesitant reach for the worm and the look of disgust on her face as her hand neared the worm, just before she turned and ran.
I closed my eyes and searched for the worm sticking out of my ear. I felt its coldness before I touched its wet, messy body. I grasped the worm and slowly pulled, once again fearing that half of it would remain in my ear. Just like when I was seven, the worm stretched taut and I grit my teeth waiting for the pop. But there was no pop. No release of pressure in my ear. No dangling worm. I held in front of me half a worm. I quickly stuck a finger in my ear and searched for the missing worm half. I felt nothing, but I still had the sense of an invader in my skull. I could feel the incessant wriggling of the worm half that was burrowing into my ear.
I ran home and my mom immediately took me to emergency, frantically speeding through red lights and stop signs, ignoring the irritated blare of other drivers’ horns. A nurse took me to a bed right away and a doctor was attending to me shortly. I explained what happened, but in spite of his powerful little light and nifty tweezers, he was unable to find any worm half. With a cynical chuckle, he explained how a worm would have to get past the middle ear, move into the Eustachian tube, and then the nasopharynx, before it had any possibility of reaching the brain, which was short of impossible. He claimed he had never seen an earthworm enter a human ear, and definitely not travel past the middle ear. He saw no need for further tests. In spite of his assurances of non-travel potential and my mom’s subsequent relief, I could still feel the worm moving deeper into my head. The doctor suggested that I was experiencing a psychosomatic reaction to a traumatic event and prescribed Xanax to calm me down and help me sleep. All would be better in the morning.
But it wasn’t better. I woke with a scream, forced awake by a constant vibration behind my nose. The worm was alive and moving in my nasal cavity, right at the top of my throat. I violently blew my nose over the side of the bed, trying to extract the creature. Nothing but a bit of snot blew to the ground and the internal rumbling continued. My mom suggested I take some Xanax, but I refused because I knew it was not just nerves. The worm was active in my head and moving upward. Regardless of my pleas for help, my mom trusted the doctor’s diagnosis and did her best to push the drugs and calm me down.
Once again, people did not believe that an actual earthworm lived inside me. They automatically thought of tapeworms, those parasitic, spaghetti-like fiends associated more with the intestines than the brain. I assured them that it was, indeed, an earthworm, but they just laughed at me. I’m sure people called me crazy. Like the crazy man I knew as a kid who always told me at the bus stop that he had a plate in his head protecting his brain from extra-terrestrial radiation. I didn’t believe him. Why would anyone believe me?
The worm continued to move. It came as a slight sensation in my skull, like a breeze blowing over a bird’s feathers. I felt a new freedom in my nasal cavity with a concomitant squeezing in my cranium as the worm moved upward. I could feel my brain contracting, both in size and structure, making room for the worm. Like an untreated wound, the worm festered in my head. If it wasn’t crawling around, it was busy defecating or nibbling away at my brain, digesting microscopic bits of me at a snail-like pace. I imagined it would take decades for it to work its way through my brain, if I survived that long, but I worried about what would happen to me as it removed critical neurological matter.
Later, in my high school biology class, my teacher presented a glistening tray of earthworms, ready for us to study and dissect. A feeling of sweet revenge cascaded over me as I thought of the retribution I would exact over my personal invasion. But as the tray was passed around, and finally arrived in my hands, I was revolted, both by the sight of the wriggling worms, and my feelings towards my comeuppance. I no more wanted to touch those worms than to dissect them to understand how they operate. Their evilness was abhorrent to me, but I lacked the willpower for personal revenge. This disgusted me as much as the worm in my head did.
Over the coming months and years, I contemplated seeking alternative diagnoses and help. Maybe a CAT scan or an MRI would reveal something to someone who would operate to remove the invasive creature. Perhaps there was a drug I could take which would eat away at the worm but leave me intact. I never really believed in these possibilities though and so I never pursued them. Seeing no alternative, I reluctantly accepted the existence of my uninvited resident and went about my life as best I could, even though thoughts of labyrinthine wormholes in my brain and putrid worm shit scattered throughout my skull left me melancholy and agitated. It became my new normal, part and parcel with the perceptible changes in my personality and worldview. I seemed to lose the ability to decipher truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and a deep fog engulfed the subtle similarities between different people. But no physical manifestations of a flesh-eating earthworm.
So now the end of my worm, or at least its life. Six years is a long time to live with another life inside of you. Although disgusted by it, I grew used to having it around: the slow niggling in my brain as it was under way, the slight burning as it deposited its waste. My ability to accommodate such a hideous creature is abominable. What I could have done differently is still unclear to me, but I feel less of a person for having habituated the worm’s activity. As it decays my body might expel its remains. But I fear the carcass will be forever, a slow degradation lasting longer than me.
END