The Kickoff

I have been sitting at this computer for hours. The project at the onset was to write three thirty second radio commercials for the café and produce two full page color ads for the local rags. So far I have arranged the margins in illustrator. I have spent the remainder of my morning arranging playlists, tweeting, emailing, and fruitlessly instant messaging people to try to start a conversation about anything. When I found myself actually thinking “I really should update my myspace page” I knew my boredom hit the kind of terminal velocity that is generally reserved for carpet shopping.

Tool once cautioned us in their 1998 opus “Stinkfist” that “Boredom’s not a burden anyone should bear.” Of course that song is an invitation to jamming fingers up some dude’s ass. Now I have been very very bored in my life, and not once had I considered that the cure to that boredom had anything to do with convincing someone to let me go wrist-deep up their dirt button. I don’t even know how to start that conversation let alone close that deal. I think I can be charming at times but I am nowhere near that convincing. That requires stores of personality that simply cannot be filled by my personal well, which is fed by aquifers of video games and regular visits or urban dictionary. Bottom line, if Maynard James Keenan was singing the truth I am shit (PUN!) out of luck.

But this is a toxic kind of boredom. This is the kind of boredom that actually makes you dumber. It is exactly this kind of boredom that has directly contributed to the creation, proliferation, and sensational success of Tyler Perry movies. I am going to admit that I have never actually seen one but I will say that based on what I have been able to determine from the box art and titles alone I will avoid them like a chancre. I place them in a special category right alongside Larry the Cable Guy movies in that they celebrate all the worse things about modern American culture and attempt to make the unacceptable behavior of some the standard of decency by lowing the collective bar rather than challenge us to live up to the lofty standards set forth by our more civilized past. Then I shut myself in my mantuary like Don Cantankerous Judgmental McCranky, draw the blinds and laugh at socially damaging movies of entirely different genres. I mean, come on. The dude abides.

Doubt the destructive power of boredom? Look no further than The Godfather Part III. We had two movies that were absolutely amazing and can, and have been, watched time and time and time and time again and shown to my three year old nephew as exemplar of how real men resolve confrontation. Then Frances Ford Coppola got bored. Now we have to reconcile the fact that Michael became a wuss by forgiving Annie Hall and pining for her, not to mention the god awful Sofia Coppola cousin-lovin’ subplot. In the span of two hours they had forever stained the otherwise pristine escutcheon of The Godfather into something resembling a story arc from The Bold and the Beautiful. It felt like they dug up Mario Puzo’s corpse and raped it over and over again with fire.

Boredom is your brains way of saying STIMULATE ME. So it is curious that when you sit on your stool in front of your desk and complain in high pitched falsetto that you are indeed bored, people invariably suggest that you do something that is also boring. “Well if you are so bored, why don’t you clean your desk?” Because that doesn’t solve the freaking problem now does it? That activity wouldn’t alter the situation away from boredom. It would simply change the activity that is causing the boredom. If people where really interested in making the act of desk cleaning a tempo changing activity they would suggest it when you are in the middle of something fun and exciting. Whoo! This activity sure is fun! And exciting! How about we get rid of those catalogues you don’t look at and clear away the old coffee mugs?!

Maybe I should take up blogging.