As I may have mentioned, I am experiencing a bout of bad boredom at the moment. Boredom is not quite the right word. If it was mere boredom, it would be easy enough to deal with. Read a book. Surf the web. Watch some porn. But this is that stubborn brand of boredom with everything. Everything is contaminated.

Before you roll your eyes at me, understand that I realize it's largely my fault. Boredom like this is decadent and self-indulgent — don't think I don't know that. It's partly a function of mental hygiene. I should be more disciplined. Indigence takes incredible discipline. I know. Smart people have strategies.

It's not all my fault. Still, boredom like this is not only a species of despair (but then most things are), it's an admission of defeat in the face of it all. Boredom is surrender. It is the way the world defeats us, not when we are struggling to survive (the world has plenty of other ways for those times) but when we're thriving. Boredom is the cancer of surfeit.

It's true, even profound boredom has its revelations to impart. It is, after all, a mental disturbance. A kind of pain. And pain, at its most benevolent, is a warning. The body's way of telling you that if you don't change course quick you're going to wind up with third degree burns, or bleed out, or lose a limb. Likewise, boredom, before it reaches the critical stage, is telling you to get up and walk out of this awful movie, or make your excuses and hang up that phone, or tell your blind date you're having an attack of IBS and have to leave RIGHT NOW.

But if you decide not to listen, if boredom isn't nipped in the bud, and is allowed to go on and on, it becomes immobilizing. Everything is so hopelessly, transparently boring that the sham of society, the pretense of individuality, and finally the futility of all human endeavors is exposed. And if you think there is something acrid in this smug, flip dismissal of the whole human project, you're right, but that's predictable and boring, too.

You see where this is going?

There is nothing, in the end, more boring than being bored, or than someone who is bored (same difference). And just as people shy away, by natural inclination, from the diseased for fear of contamination, they're inclined to avoid those who are profoundly bored, and by extension boring, intuiting that boredom is contagious.

We know that boredom is a social disease, that in its pre-paralytic stages it can lead to things like dressing your pets, joining a Morris Dancers group, ordering strange hybrid martini drinks whenever you go out, and posting photos of your genitals on the internet. It proceeds from there, gradually but inexorably, to poisonous celebrity gossip, shoplifting, destruction of property, reckless endangerment, and senseless violence.

It is mental consumption. If unhindered, it attacks memories and hopes and desires with equal vigor, laying waste to everything in its path. Boredom, like all ravaging diseases, is all business. It's humorless. It has a job to do. Feed.  Fester.  Immobilize the organism. Profound boredom neutralizes that gauge of human health, that singular adaptation that has allowed us to survive as we flourish — a sense of humor — without which societies self-destruct.

I am, naturally, bored with The Boredom, myself. Impatient and desperate for the fever to break, hoping I will recover. It's something like being in the middle of a great, dead lake on a foggy day, in a little rowboat, with nothing but a packed lunch (two PB&J sandwiches on white bread, and an apple) and a book (Chuck Palahniuk's Choke), without any oars (I'm sure you saw that coming). And then there's that hole in the floor. And all I have to bail myself out is one of those precious little coffee cups I'm so fond of because I'm too snooty to drink out of a mug. But I forgot to bring my thermos of coffee, anyway. Yawning and sinking, I check my watch. I'm going to miss Project Runway.

This is the boredom that the French poets — Châteaubriand, Alfred de Vigny, Baudelaire — spoke of, that langueur morale, la maladie de l'âme, la maladie spirituelle de l'ennui.

You know how sometimes you're not sure if that scratchy throat is the beginnings of a cold? Well, you'll recall I complained of mild symptoms of ennui last week, when I was still reading The Pesthouse. I blamed the book. But when I finished Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, which is a sensitive, but ultimately superficial study of the surface of things, and got halfway through the aforementioned Choke, by the madly talented Chuck Palahniuk, and was still bored, I started to think this was something more than just a touch of The Boredom.  This was serious.

I had tried to mix it up a bit, reading Still Life while feasting on savory crepes at my beloved Mr. Crepe in Davis Square, for instance. It just made the book all the blander. Tried to sex it up a bit, reading Choke on my commute on the T. It's already a book about a sexaholic, mind you, that includes hypervivid descriptions in the true Palahniuk tradition. Here's one that was a genuine revelation: "The guy rubbing his semen on the flaps of deposit envelopes at automatic tellers." And I thought I had heard it all. And there was plenty more where that, um, came from. You don't want to read this shit around strangers on the T, trust me.

Chuck Palahniuk is never boring. I'm still bored, though.

OK, so it occurs to me that this kind of mental activity is just not going to assuage my boredom. And TV is beyond boring.  The news is dreadful to watch.   Netflix sent me Boogie Nights (which I saw years ago when it came out, but thought I'd watch again, since seeing There Will Be Blood), but I can't get past the first five minutes (actually, I watched the last scene first, just to check if I was still as unimpressed with Dirk Diggler's dong as I was all those years ago when I saw it on the big screen — and I was). 

Work sometimes helps keep profound boredom at bay. And I'm working now. That's like a four-hour vacation from myself three days a week. And I'm making money to boot, so it's like paid vacation time. But it's not enough.  I've amped up my workout routine, but the gym, with its treadmills and Sisyphean Stair Masters is designed for despair.

I realize that part of my greater susceptibility to The Boredom this time of year probably has to do with the fact that outdoor activities are more limited. I can't ride my bike safely with snowbanks on the shoulder of the road. The garden is shut down for the winter (I walked through the Fens the other day, and the gardens looked naked and shrunken in the barren snow). I'm not getting my daily dose of endorphins.

The company of friends can be a salve.  I had a lovely dinner last night with friends at Casa Romero. But while the food and conversation was good, and the atmosphere warm and comforting, something was missing.  It didn't help that the last time I was there was on a date, and this time I was sort of a third wheel.

Shopping.  Goodwill can't but be interesting.  It was not a banner book day, but having nothing better to do I rummaged around the home goods, and found a little blown glass vase for 99¢...


I generally don't venture into this area at all, especially since taking up residence in The Orphanage (I've decided it's more of an orphanage than a flophouse in the final analysis). It's not only that my space is limited here, it's that buying home goods, if not triggered by the nesting instinct, has the effect of triggering it in me. And the only sort of nest I could build here is a rat's nest, I'm afraid.

I've lived here a year now, and while it has been a welcoming environment, peoplewise, and the other orphans are friendly and fun-loving sorts, I am not confident that the structure we share will be standing in another two years' time, or frankly that it should be. So I've sworn to myself that another year and I'll be on my merry way, onto the next chapter in my zany picaresque of a life.

In the meantime, the bunker mentality prevails.

Buying the vase might seem to have violated my spartan standards, but I am thinking of it as a small house-warming gift to myself. A year in advance.

And the vase was not my only score.  As I made my way through the basement, picking through the tchotchkes, I came across another lawn chair in mint condition, for $3.99...


I thought that was a good sign. I mean, now I've got facilities to entertain at the garden come spring.  But then sometimes a lawn chair is just a lawn chair.  Useful, but boring.

I came home and logged on.  The LOLCat Bible has lost its allure.  I checked in on some blogs in the gayborhood. Gavin, at YOY, had been busy taking online IQ and personality tests, and there was one offering what they called your "personal DNA" that had kind of a groovy graphic, so I decided to take it, too. Here's what, after an irritatingly interminable exam I resented having to take to get my graphic, I ended up with:


Benevolent Dictator — er, I mean director. Yeah. That's me. Aside from the fact that the label they gave me sounds suspiciously like a euphemism for "bossy bottom," I liked the results. I don't really know how "accurately" I gauged agree/disagree items like "I have difficulty knowing how babies and children feel". Is this a trick question? They bounce, right?

I haven't taken many online personality or IQ tests recently. Been there, done that.  Went through a jag or boredom almost as seemingly endless and awful as the one I'm currently mired in back in '03, and wrote about my results here.  What do you do when even online personality tests can't assuage your boredom?

What's missing here? 

I was trudging off to the gym, past a building that's being gutted and remodeled, when it came to me, scrawled riotously on the frosted glass by some construction worker/poet inside...


Ah, yes.  That's it. 

Now, there are signs, and then there are SIGNS.