Hello, Boredom, My Old Friend

You've come to make me want to find the OFF switch again

I clearly remember the first time I suffered boredom. I was in the living room of our little rented house on Flight Avenue in West Los Angeles watching the occasional car go past. I thought to myself, “What’s the point?” Prodigious six-year-old me!

I was bored senseless much of the time in high school and college — as who is not, trying to will to ring a dismissal bell that seems to have no intention of ringing — but it wasn’t until I’d graduated that I suffered materially for the first time for my boredom. In college, I’d had a succession of horrible, rotten-paying jobs. I’d applied between my junior and senior years to sell art for a company called Starving Artists, and been rejected for not being sufficiently gregarious. I had no prospects. And then I began to write, and within a few months had been offered a glamorous record company job that paid a fortune ($125 then, $1,080.09 now). I’d been earning $15 for eight hours of parking cars at Malibu restaurants.

Come late afternoon, I’d review the list of recording artists about whom I was supposed to write a bio or advertisement and would think instead, because none of them interested me in the slightest, about how bad the traffic on the Ventura Freeway was getting. Minutes later, as though by magic, I would find myself behind the wheel of the VW microbus my parents had bought me as a graduation-from-college present.

I lasted two months.

Miraculously, I became something of a celebrity in Hollywood rock circles, less for my own music than for my hilariously merciless disparaging of others’, but it was on behalf of my own that the record company to which my band was signed flew me up to San Francisco to schmooze radio station program directors. Several were palpably impressed to be meeting one as tall and dashing and famous as I, as, for instance, Bernie Taupin had been a few months before. My girlfriend was the most beautiful in Los Angeles, and I had a house in Laurel Canyon and a snazzy red Porsche, and my looks. And the afternoon I returned from San Francisco, in many ways at my life’s peak, I sat on the edge of my bed in Laurel Canyon, and sobbed at how meaningless everything seemed, and how powerless I felt.

I’ve lost jobs beyond counting because of boredom, and no few life partnerships. And it’s worse now than ever, with no sign of abating. I have a wonderful marriage, but no income (except a monthly Social Security stipend whose paltriness owes to my awful employment history), and the strong sense that everything I do is futile. A pocketful of petty cash is what I’m feeling worth, and I’m falling off the face of the earth.

The world is in a meeting every time I call, and I feel much of the time as though an aircraft carrier is being lowered onto my head. I’m not spending my time. My time is spending me.

For a while there, Substack gave me hope. I can write, I thought. I’ve always been able to make people laugh. And here I am stalled for months at fewer than 500 subscribers, with ever-fewer, from week to week, actually viewing what I write.

Noting that another Substacker has sold almost 1000 copies of a rock novel she’s forever crowing about, and which I have no doubt isn’t as good as my own, because that’s who I am, I created this:

Not a single inquiry. Not. A. Single. Inquiry.

The various existential boredom inventories one can take on line ask if one is bored by work. I am quite the opposite. I adore working hard, at least when I think there’s some chance of what I’m working on being appreciated. It very rarely is anymore. The world keeps taking the pen out of my hands, and the keyboard on which I compose my songs, and the microphone with which I record my comedy podcasts.

For the millionth time in my adult life, I feel as though out of ideas. There is no boredom like that born of the feeling of irrevocable hopelessness.

This morning, I reported right on time for my audiology followup. Right on time, but at the wrong hospital. I hesitated to go home, knowing full well how quickly boredom and purposelessness would take me into its clammy embrace. I’m almost tempted to resume doing unpaid design work for nonprofit groups, but then I’m almost tempted to chain myself to a concrete block and dive into the Thames.

Realizing that going weeks at a time without interacting with anyone other than my wife was jeopardizing my mental health, I signed up for a social networking site called Snitch, and within 48 hours was on probation for providing forbidden contact details (all I provided was a link to my comedy podcast, so prospective pals could get a sense of my sense of humor) and using Offensive Language. (I told the women whose ads I responded to that, being married, I wasn’t trying to get laid via Snitch. I’d hoped they might find that reassuring. Nope. Offensive.)

I returned emotionally yesterday to the high school class I hated most, as I do so many days. My days are numbered, but I ache all afternoon for it to be late enough for me to stop pretending I have something meaningful to do and can instead go down and make dinner. I was ashamed of myself, and my shame made everything worse.