Realisation 1:3
Boredom is rotting me to my very core.
Boredom has slowly crept up on me or if not boredom itself: the realisation of its overbearing presence. And though one might argue that it is good, at times, to be a little bit bored, I fear that boredom has somehow swallowed me whole.
Sundays, dreadful Sundays. Much like all the other days of the week, I'm bored.
Imagine spending a whole day without TV, no phone, no computer, no video games, no friends, all alone ... with nothing other than the eerie silence of four white walls staring back at you. Now imagine filling that silence with whatever comes handy. With whatever may make time slip by seamlessly. Log on to Facebook, watch something on YouTube, smoke a fag, read a book, immerse yourself in an entire season of whatever show you haven’t watched yet that will undoubtedly make you smile, cry, cheer, and send a shiver through your spine at every well-timed cliff-hanger. I fail to see the difference. Whether it be pure, undiluted silence that consumes you or the over-exposition to constant stimuli, it is one and the same: it is boredom following you like a shadow. It is the dusk of boredom, cleverly disguised. A slow gangrene, malicious and obliterating. A constant repetition that drapes itself in bright colours to dazzle you away from your routine – this cyclic, never-ending, looping roundabout on which we all are – and, though it is there, though it is palpable, you do your utmost best to ignore it. But it is there, its essence is there.
There are those fleeting moments, passing flicker of epiphanies, when there is nothing to do and boredom comes crashing down on you like a burden you didn’t know was there. You brush it off dismissively but you know it was there, you know it has always been looming over your shoulder so you call a friend, you go for a drink, you fill the silence, you fill the emptiness and when you go to bed, some mere second before sleep takes hold of you, there is this sensation, this nagging feeling that your day had been wasted but sleep has already slithered its way through and tomorrow is Monday: loads to do.
Monday bows down to Tuesday which, then, welcomes Wednesday before Thursday makes an appearance and when Friday comes along, the weekend is almost there and you have made plans, oh so many plans, to fill the void. And we have become experts in the matter. There is the sacrosanct Friday night and its cornucopia of mind-numbing liquors, the drums of dance and the alluring possibility of intercourse. There is the magic pill of love which binds us to reality and makes us see ourselves through the eyes of the beholder, the beholder of sense, of meaning, because if he loves me, truly I am worthy. But love, like TV shows, like cats playing piano on Youtube, will come to an end and there will be, once again, the eerie silence of the walls which we will fail to blot out and we will have to face boredom in the eye, only to realise that we cannot. Because boredom, however present, however inextinguishable, is not something we can conquer. It is only something at which we can shout, in the hope that by deafening ourselves, we might not hear it. That we may drift along peacefully enough, surrounded by the noise of activities we impose ourselves because boredom will always win…
