Boredom
Boredom lives inside spare time. The phrase “spare time” itself suggests time set aside for boredom. They are bedfellows. In theory, time with no set purpose is precisely the best time not to be bored, since one has absolute freedom over how to spend it. But, it never works that way. Boredom will fill every crevice, like water. The best vaccine against boredom is to be busy, to constrain time in a rigid way so as to not allow boredom the vessel in which to inject itself. This vaccine carries the stipulation that one has to remember to take this “medicine” every day, which is hardly easy.
Boredom should not exist in a world of infinite choices. Given the means to choose, one can cure boredom by choosing something unknown, and given easy access to the means to choose, one is theoretically never more than five minutes away from a boredom cure. Yet it not only exists: it permeates. We are bored so often that we scarcely know another way to exist, and it seems almost as though we enjoy our boredom. Nobody would ever choose boredom, but wherever you look, there it is.
Boredom begins with a foot brushing against a loose flap of cardboard under the desk, or with a phone call, or by opening the fridge, closing it, and opening it again to get the pickles. Any gust of air. A phone call or an email, or a loud noise from a neighbour. Anything abrupt, shaking you loose from your moorings, sending you drifting into the sea of ennui. With persistence and a little luck, a mad scramble back to the shore is possible. It is easier, though, to drift.
Boredom is not laziness, because laziness is pursued, chosen, and even reveled in. Laziness can and should be active. There is a sublime purpose to laziness, and it can be treated as a high pleasure, even an art. It may seem that conscious intent or even consciousness is antithetical to laziness, but one must not mistake laziness for boredom. The purpose of laziness is to feel good, while to be bored is to cling desperately to life. One typically chooses laziness after a prolonged period of a draining activity. When exams are over, one makes the executive decision to veg out, sometimes even making a show of it. After a busy week at the office we take to parks, beaches, and thick sofas, to pursue the craft of laziness. Boredom is not expressly chosen. It is channel surfing, or letting some yappy mouth have your ear for an hour, or thumbing through a magazine looking at the pictures waiting for one of them to leap out of the page, bringing you out of your haze for an instant. Boredom need not be idleness, but it must always be passive (one can “laze”, but one cannot “bore” unless the object of the verb is someone else). Done properly, laziness is the worship of the principle of minimal exertion. If boredom is a desperate search for stimuli, then laziness is a (perhaps romanticized) respect and fondness for the stimuli one already has.
Boredom is a depreciating contentment with the known. Creation can never be boring. It is impossible. The unknown is the uncreated, and the unknown is never boring. Not all contrivances are “creative”. Perpetually creating the known does not cure boredom, though it may serve other purposes. It could even mutate into a form of laziness, like comfort food.
Boredom is a habit. Depression is merely practiced boredom. It is a skill, arrived at with serious engrossment, and stored chemically in the brain along neural pathways, as you might store recipes or the directions to the office. The ways depression is introduced to the brain vary greatly, but all forms of persistent depression involve cognitive reinforcement. The skilled practitioner rehearses daily with allegations at himself, weaving a narrative of futility inside which he can bind his life. Depression strengthens through repetition, entirely of one’s own doing; it is the depressive’s imposed duty to not only enslave himself but deepen his enslavement. That is not to say the depressive is at fault for setting off this chain of events. One often learns undesirable skills without trying, and some are deemed neuroses. There are some things about which it is possible to know too much.
The depressive can hone his craft night and day, whenever the muse strikes. Unchecked, he will learn to place his fundamental energies there. Any stimulus can be passed through the muddy lens of defeat, and this becomes second nature. Just as the computer programmer effortlessly lays his fingers on the keyboard in perfect home-row position, so too does the depressive slide effortlessly into melancholy, his practiced trade. He is, after all, on his way to becoming an expert.
Before long the he sits in a thicket of his own skilful making, and lives within reach of his primary expertise. To him, boredom suffices. It is comfortable. The depressive says “this is good enough for me”, and may even refuse to abide society’s pressures to drink deeply of life, to be carrying on like those people who go to the gym daily, or write novels to show off, or act out roles of meaningless ambition. He likens his condition to a worn armchair under a favourite lamp, and he lives from a sitting position. Staring at a tree in his front yard, or the lit apartment across the street, he says “there is more than this, but reaching it would involve getting up.” Eventually he discovers he can’t.
When life obligates him not to be bored but alert and responsible, his boredom may gnaw at him, haunt him, and grow slowly over his world like an invasive species. Left to grow, depression is a weed that permeates the cortex and melts over the eyes. Lights seem dimmer, and a stultifying grayness permeates everything. The cure involves the breaking of habits. Expertise cannot be purged from the brain; one must simply choose to learn new ways and hope to forget about the old ones. To the man sitting in the armchair covered in constricting vines, summoning the energy to shake off his bonds is easier said than done. He decides to try one day, and each vine is hacked back slowly. Casting off a few small branches gives him the confidence to try bigger ones. He may not get them all. Nobody ever does. But he can move his elbow now, and start stripping the leaves off. With every crack and snap, the plant dies. He gets an arm through, and then a leg, and before long he sees a light peeking through the vines, not from his favourite lamp, but from the moon outside.
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Goodnight, Friend
When I am feeling restless and jittery I do the following breathing exercise. Push all the air out of your lungs, every last bit. Inhale deeply for four seconds, diaphragmally, in such a way that your stomach (not your chest) rises with the breath. Hold it for seven seconds. Count while you do this: one, two, three… build a rhythm. Then exhale for eight seconds, staying on beat. When you hit “eight” you should have no air left in your lungs, as when you started the exercise. Then repeat for as long as you want, but no less than five times. No gaps between each stage of the exercise; keep a steady beat. Imagine you are an aspiring urban music professional in the inner city, and someone is rapping over your breath for their demo tape. This technique allowed me to sit down and write instead of rummaging through my cupboards for snack food even though I am not hungry, drinking a bottle of beer even though I am not thirsty, sleeping though wide awake, jerking off though as far from horny as I get.
My mind is preoccupied with the big questions. Will I ever find love? What will it look like when I am utterly, transcendently fulfilled? Is there room in my life for hockey games or beers after work? Will there be a “work” or will days blend into evenings in a continuum of bliss?
A sequence of rhetorical questions is a sign of poor writing, one of my professors once said. Writers answer their own questions, and anything else is either speculation or sensationalism. I don’t believe this but I agree the technique is tired.
A tough week and weekend. The creaks of styrofoam take-out boxes rip through my apartment at night as I bathe in the computer screen’s glow. Silly Flash games and jazz music and the old bottle of cheap whiskey [sic], like every other middle-class lonesome spirit who ever had a bad week. Each noise, rustle, and cough is meant as a communication with people on the other side of these walls, calling out for some empathy from the dwellers of this shitbox building. A dishwasher moans upstairs. An Indian man next door strode through his front door to find a box of his belongings at the entrance with a note from his girlfriend saying to please move out. I heard raised voices in the hall, not quite screaming. There were accusations that trailed off into dead ends, the voices smooth and restrained as if the conclusion were inevitable and mutual. Two days later she moved out instead. A schoolmarmish woman who looks older than she probably is. Margaret, a schoolmarmish name. She asked for help with a few boxes. In one of them was an old Macintosh computer, a Quadra, resting on some floppy disks. Margaret gave me a lamp she couldn’t take with her. “It’s his,” she joked.
The other day as I locked my door, the superintendent emerged from that apartment with a pair of wirecutters in his hand, and I saw the place was empty.
Asian students, single moms with three kids living in a 3 1/2-bedroom unit, teenagers reeking of marijuana on their way to Battlenet 24 to play networked Counter Strike until their eyes bleed…. I am in here with them all in blissful cohabitation. The air is thick enough to be worn as a blanket. Urgency is everywhere but it’s all outside, in the street.
There are times when I long to be the sort of person who keeps a menagerie in his home, a thousand pets and plants and treasures. None of it should have meaning or express a sentiment. Not an ecosystem; a curated thing. It would light up anyone’s eyes. Dogs and koalas and an old, wise owl. Serpentine leaves dangling from strange ledges. Dusty sunbeams touching branches that sway perpetually under tiny gusts, seeming to make a noise as you watched them. The snakes would crawl into my lap and around my thigh, their motivations only to strangle me and eat the body. “Oh, Lancaster,” I’d laugh as the boa curved around the back of my neck. “That’s enough, now!” I’d do kissyfaces with a tapir named Mosey. A parrot would land on my arm and say a few curse words, and I’d give her a piece of green apple. At night I’d hit a single light switch that would dim everything, signalling to the animals that it was bedtime. I’d go around to each one and say “goodnight, friend” and each would sleep without a worry.
Or a plain barn with a hundred geese and guinea fowl following me around as I sift handfuls of cracked corn into little piles in the mud. Close the barn door and hear the squawks. The birds could sit and eat quietly because there’s enough food for all of them, but they don’t, because feeding time carries rituals of territoriality, of pecking-order iteration. It is a form of play. I want to enjoy meals as they do, with glee and primal primality. As a human being I’ve never fought over a single crumb, and thus do not know what fear is, choosing instead to fill the fear-urge with dirty, invalid spectres of economic uncertainty, of losing my job or never finding a soul mate, the standard spooks and bugbears of the big cities. At least nobody punches me in the jaw while I eat a cheese sandwich.
Have you ever been around a hungry dog and made a motion towards the biscuits? Even the insinuation of biscuitry opens a stopper in the dog’s brain, and in flow the reagents of joy. The sight of that biscuit imbues a grave danger, a fight-or-flight reaction. Perhaps I’ll cultivate territoriality in my feeding habits, shoving my coworkers out of the way as they reach for my Tupperware containers in the microwave. I will eat boiled corn kernels and claw at the bottoms of jars with gnarled fingers. Then I will steal theirs and run off to a corner with it.
Tonight I ate leftover stir-fried chicken doused in hot sauce and did not taste it. It was a bad week and from now on I’m going to eat all my food aggressively, naked and noisy, in good hungry company.
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Yulblog Voucher
I am one who writes a weblog and who lives in the city called Montreal and I’ve not met anyone similar. Do you know how long this sad charade has gone on? Tomorrow there is reason for us to meet. I will wear my usual glasses and sleeved shirt and perhaps even buy you a drink. I will not touch you unless you ask, or offer your hand. Let me sweeten the pot: I will definitely buy you a drink, if you attend the Yulblog meeting tomorrow, Wednesday 8 PM at La Quincaillerie, selon le courriel. “La Quincaillerie” might mean Hardware or Hardware Store. Have we met? Do you read this site regularly? Have I seen yours? I don’t care. RSVP in the comments and you get one (1) drink from me tomorrow night. IOU. I will show up at 9 PM or 10 PM and will wear basic colours. Stay until the end or else I hate you. See you tomorrow!
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Smell This Law
I have been reading with great interest the posts over at The Smoking Section concerning Bill 112, the ban on smoking in public restaurants, bars, pubs, and what have you. Its formal enforcement began May 31 midnight, marking the first concentrated effort in the history of mankind to get the Frenchman to butt out his cigarette (oh, those wannabe bans in France don’t count). My interest in this law goes back a few of years when cities and towns across my home province of Ontario began tabling similar legislation to curb the unruly smokers’ behaviour. Smokers are a dangerous bunch—looking at their filth-encrusted hair (w/ snakes) and gnarled teeth you get the disquieting sense that they could snap at any moment, even in the times when they get their fix on schedule. The cumulative effects of these smoking bans might not be known for another thirty years, but the damage to the smoker’s psyche is done. They are filth, scum, flaneurs, reprobates who probably have long hair and who partake in extramarital coitus. But now we’ve made them angry, and while we’re all fussing over our health and spending our days at the gym and our nights marinating in our post-industrial existential torment, smokers are sitting on fire escapes and plotting our bourgeois demise.
My defining moment on this issue took place on a cool evening in Ottawa; my home town, The Town That Fun Forgot, and perhaps the world’s Capital for hamhanded nanny-statism (they banned street hockey, e.g.). My persistent, delusional good thoughts about Ottawa were shattered once and for all, as if struck by a hammerblow, on this one incident. A friend, Matt, and I were on a windy patio in the Byward Market, the kind that is partially roofed under a white tarpaulin with little slits for the windows. It was otherwise a nice evening, cool and dry, but the wind shook the plastic hard all night, the little beer-logo flags flapping helplessly. That wind kept most of the crowd inside at the bar or the fireplace. The effect was such that an occasional good gust would catch the tarp at an angle that would cause a concentrated blast of air to hit the patio with a great reverberation, sending coasters flying and loose shirt fabric sticking to sides of faces. We didn’t like it, but Matt wanted a smoke so out we went, backs turned to the open air. Matt is a no-nonsense guy, and he is perhaps the most popular of all my friends. He carries himself with a certain swagger, a persistent sureness of foot in which you see glimpses of yourself during your finest moments, and with it an instinctual perception of the sheer rightness of his manner. He has the right jokes, the great politesse, and the endearing loutishness. You feel like you are always in his hand, and that you love being there. He had his back turned to the wind and was talking to people I didn’t know. Entertaining them, probably. It was a short blonde woman and her boyfriend. An unlit cigarette dangled from his hand; a break in the conversation allowed him the idea to light it. He turned his back to the wind and, not having had a lighter handy since he’d left his white Zippo on the table in a pool hall, he lit a match, and before he could lift it the flame caught a gust of wind and extinguished. He excused himself and took a step back towards the door, opening it and wedging his foot in. He leaned inside to light his smoke, got it lit, and without any warning a small white hand yanked the cigarette from his lips. Matt looked to his left; there stood a member of Ontario’s finest, an OPP officer who saw it all happen. She promptly presented Matt with a $200+ fine and a stern lecture about the nature of “zero-tolerance”. We wandered back inside to soak ourselves in ale, our evening ruined. Justice yet again served within the borders of Ontario. Great to be home.
Police will snatch many more cigarettes out of mouths in the months to come. The law has told them that is what they must do, and enforcment is all they know. The legislative bodies-that-be will continue to impose standards of private, consensual behaviour under the banner of “zero-tolerance”, and will give the rank-and-file their orders. These standards will not only serve a combination of pragmatic, bureaucratic, partisan, ‘classist’, and political aims, but will represent a successful experiment in shaping the public illusion of consensus. For not only have the parameters of the debate been set by the elites, the public has filled its role perfectly as willing agents of mass hysteria. Smokers are just backlog inventory in the great socio-political warehouse, being clandestinely dumped into the sea, to uproarious cheers.
You can get a sense of the one-sidedness of the debates by how often you hear the words: morality, civil liberties, rights, law of the land, ethics, government intrusion, consensus, private property. Not very often. You are more likely to hear stories of people who hate coming home smelling like smoke, cries of smoking being one of the major killers and a burden on the health-care system, citing of lung cancer rates, heart disease rates, excoriations of smoking as a “useless habit“, and the loaded phrase “passive smoking”. When did this tireless vitriol towards smoking suddenly jump into the front seat of the public consciousness? Did people feel this way about smoking thirty years ago? Cigarettes haven’t changed much since then, but the opinions of the non-smoker certainly have.
(To blatantly stoke fears: if you’ll accept the assumption that smoking bans were unthinkable thirty years ago, what will they propose thirty years from now? A return to Prohibition [only not called that, obvs.]? A tax levied on flu carriers? Mandatory blood donation? Your liver to the State? However slippery the slope may be, the possibilities cannot be dismissed out of hand. Thirty years ago you could smoke at your seat in an airplane. Today, they’re banning peanut butter in elementary schools.)
In any case, one must understand the stakes of this ban. It is more than a formality, or something that was bound to happen anyway. And it is more than a simple outlawing of a dangerous behaviour. It is nothing short of a governmental revocation of a right. That right is for people to engage in a specific, consensual activity on private property, which happens to be harmful, and harmful to a degree that is unknown. That is the nut of it. Imagine the government held a snap referendum on that question, using that exact terminology, without telling you they were talking about smoking. Which way would you be more likely to vote?
Look. I won’t pretend like the anti-smokers don’t have valid points about smoking. It is harmful, it costs money, and it can make bars and restaurant decidedly unpleasant. Who could question the facts? Whatever the controversy over second-hand smoke, the best the smokers can hope for is a draw. Inhaling smoke can’t be any better for your lungs. And the best part of the trick is… it’s so easy! Just ban it! Few, if anybody, will protest, and the savings—of life and budget—will be vast and shared by all. Even better, the smoking ban has the auspicious trait of being easily enforceable. Laws aren’t worth a thing if they can’t be enforced, right? Well, this is no such law. Threaten huge fines and plant a few rat finks in casual clothes to keep ‘em scared, and bar owners will snuff patrons’ cigarettes out on their own tongues if they have to.
The laity has already spoken: they don’t like being smoked upon. Fine. Most people don’t. The first question becomes, then, under what circumstances must you permit yourself to be smoked upon? Where twenty, thirty years ago the answer might have ranged from “not in my home” to “nowhere” to “anywhere”, the answer nowadays is a definitive “nowhere.” Not a single cloud of smoke should climb into another’s lungs without consent, is the pervading popular view. The liberal counter-argument is simple: if one doesn’t ever want this outcome, he can stay home, or hang out in a place that doesn’t allow smoking. And those who are willing to be smoked upon can go to a place that allows the smoking-on of people. By showing up in a smoke-friendly place, you grant consent to be smoked upon. Too simple?
In a sense, yes. See any smoke-free bars around? There aren’t any. I don’t know about Montreal, but Toronto has tried a few times in the distant past to open non-smoking bars, and failed. One might say the demand for non-smoking bars cannot support a market in these places. This is clearly not an issue people are particularly militant about if they pack the bars every weekend. At most the ban represents an expression of a preference on the part of non-smokers, and even some smokers. A large group of people would rather not be smoked upon, if they had the choice between “smoke on me” and “don’t smoke on me”. This is a perfectly legitimate preference, and I don’t doubt it represents a majority of the popular opinion, incl. among smokers. They have another choice, though, which is “go to bar” or “don’t go to bar”. Theoretically, they could have a third choice too: “go to non-smoking bar”. If they existed. That is, if people were willing to go to them. Those last two don’t involve the government stepping in and passing laws. That is the liberal argument. It makes a lot of sense to me, but it’s true that the “invisible hand” isn’t everything. We allow regulation of industry where there is a clear responsibility for the government to do so. How often do these regulations interfere with the rights of the common citizen? There are also questions of shared values, of protection from “tyranny of the majority”, and of morality. These are questions that are not only unanswered, but unconsidered.
The anti-smokers’ ace-in-the-hole, the trump card, the bomb, is workers rights. They slam it on the table like the winning domino. The real reason for this ban, you see, is not about their own preferences, but rather that they are deeply concerned about the health of Juan the Line Cook who has to toil all day in that awful smoke. This is the slam-dunk sales pitch, and this is how the law was packaged and sold. It is cotton candy, to get you in the door. Melts in your mouth.
If I could quote Vila, from a Metroblog comment:
“As for the health and safety of bar staff, I feel compelled to point out that service industry workers, as non-unionized employees, make less than the minimum wage; receive no pension benefits or health insurance; and deal with the threat of alcohol-induced violence every time they go to work. Although I have no doubt that some would prefer to work in a smoke-free environment, you’ll forgive me for being somewhat skeptical about ‘pro-worker’ arguments.”
Hear, hear. And while I’m at it, raise your hand if you’re pro-smoking-ban because you think provincial health care spending is just gettin’ crraaaaaaazy these days? Anybody?
Perhaps the saddest spectacle of our times is the image of a dozen or so smokers huddled exactly five metres away from the entrance of a building, behind a few signposts or a cordoned-off “safe zone” strung up with cheap yellow rope. My office building has legislated this bit of segregation as a rule of their property. We are willing to live in the worst conditions of air quality brought on by a century of industrial pollution, but we cannot abide a three-second traipse through a thin haze of tobacco smoke. We inhale car exhaust and sulphur dioxide and all kinds of nasty particles all day. Can we hold our breath for a second? No, that won’t work. Someone will come up with a reason for why they can’t do this. It causes them an allergic reaction, perhaps, or it blinds them temporarily, or they feel a deep revulsion that starts in their soul and draws life from every cell in their body, causing them to shrivel into a dessicated husk which is only alleviated by the the sweet, life-giving fresh air they gasp for on the other side. And that means the government needs to step in. All around us we see the spectres of infection, and we want them to be legislated away. I can only assume that the citizens of my country have gone crazy.
Footnote: To be fair, I have no special love for smoking or smokers. Stepping into the shower and smelling the smoke being steamed out of my hair is not a preferred morning ritual. Furthermore, the habit is romanticized a little too much as some kind of neo-bohemian tonic of the spirit, a philosopher’s stone and aprhodesiac all in one. It feels unnecessary. I’m reminded of the cannabis activists who steep their arguments in a kind of nature-based pseudo-philosophy, extolling the cannabis plant as a great giver of life and industry, invoking George Washington and the early agrarians, and barely stopping short of drawing a bold line between Man and Gaea herself. Is it disingenuous to argue that you like smoking a bowl every now and again, because it makes you fly? Nothing against vice, but call it what it is. It feels good and it calms your nerves, and gives you a pleasure to look forward to, sometimes, and that’s why you smoke and that’s all the reason you need.
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