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August 11, 2008Are you bored?Or are you boring?OR AM I BORING YOU?Is your brain not being stimulated? And I am the one not stimulating it? Or are you the one not stimulating it? I can’t imagine having nothing to do. Not because I always am doing something–I’m plenty capable of doing nothing and often do–but because, really, there is never not anything to do–you’re just not interested in doing it, or don’t have enough imagination to think of it, or enough passion to pursue it. The world and the people in it are in theory endlessly fascinating, but in practice, boredom is an element of the human condition. We don’t engage our minds, perhaps because our minds are overloaded with the crap of the day and the age, and we want a break from paying attention. Or, we are too engaged with our minds, which demand entertainment. We don’t know how to relax out of our minds, and experience stillness. One faithful reader, Eddie Muller, Czar of Noir and self-proclaimed “noir-cheologist,” at least, is not bored with me yet, he said, after my expressing my suspicion that people are tiring of my mind journeys. (Sorry, Eddie, I had to scoop you on your own spontaneous clever coinage while introducing “The Burglar” at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Pacific Film Archive. Funny ha ha.) Or am I tiring of my mind journeys? I spend a lot of time in my mind, having ideas and thoughts. I raised myself on words. But the time comes when I must put them away. They make my head spin. They lead me astray. They are not, ultimately, who I am. Who I am is nonverbal, preverbal. I AM OFTEN CONTENT,as an activity, to lie on the couch with a cat or two or three resting on my chest or stomach or feet. I do consider this to be “doing” something–breathing, or resting, being with my cats, listening to music or just thinking, because I’m engaged with what I am seemingly not doing, and deriving pleasure or relaxation from it. BLAH.Before I left Philadelphia for parts west, I fell into a habit of spontaneous complaint expressed as the impromptu “blah.” Blah! I’m bored with everything about this city and my life in it, I felt. “I have bled these city streets dry,” I reportedly said. So I hopped on a Ryder truck and left the east behind in search of newness. Any time I feel the “blahs” approaching, I’m thinking it’s time for a change. For sure, I left Philadelphia, Portland, Berkeley and the Lower Haight, because of boredom, the need to refresh my perspective. Someone named Rob L., commenting on a Dick Cavett New York Times column, referred to “that dreadfully-named Internet term ‘blogging,’ which is defined as the result of what happens when someone gags on their own bile.” That’s what “blogging” sounds like to me, “blah-ging.” “AMBITION, SCHMAMBITION,one man’s tale of avoiding the hamster wheel,” Chris Colin’s Chronicle article of 8/4/08, concerns a local fellow, Michael Skrzypek, who experimented with “jumping off the wheel of American Protestant work ethic and consumer culture — the wheel that says you must always be doing, always be achieving, always be motivated.” He was able to achieve this by making $100 an hour specializing in some legal trial presentation software, which work was sporadic, leaving him much free time. I think the guy was mixed up, though. It’s possible to jump off the wheel of the work ethic and still be doing, achieving and motivated. Say, by your vegetable garden. Say, by compiling your family history. Say, by educating your children. With any project or pursuit that has personal, not necessarily universal, meaning. “THERE ARE THOSE,”said Colin,” who step further off the wheel than Skrzypek. Some people don’t work at all, by design or chance. Some eschew money altogether. But Skrzypek’s arrangement had perhaps the widest appeal — he had gobs of leisure time, but also a good paycheck….The arrangement was part recreation, part science.” “I told myself there will be days when I don’t do anything at all,” said Skrzypek, “and that’s fine. I wanted to see what would happen.” Apparently, not much. No action in the petri dish. “IT’S EMBARRASSING TO ADMIT,”said Skrzypek, “but I don’t have an answer for what I did on an average day. Most days, I got up and wondered what I would do. It’s an anxious way to start the day,” he says. “A lot of days I wouldn’t get out of bed. I’d just read.” (The New Yorker, cover to cover.) Friends had all manner of suggestions what to do with his free time. Take up bluegrass guitar, read the complete works of Dostoevsky, try writing short stories, volunteer at a homeless shelter, get in really good shape, get centered at the Zen Center, go to museums, work on a web site. “Skrzypek tried to maintain his embrace of nothingness…He firmly believed that a person shouldn’t always have to be productive to be worthwhile. But each idea planted another seed of doubt. Why aren’t I learning to play guitar? he’d ask. Meanwhile, his empty days sometimes began to cry out for structure — especially when all his friends had full-time jobs.” “I HAD ALL THIS FREE TIME,”he said, “but no real motivating feeling, or direction. I was trying not to judge myself, but we’re so inculcated with a need for achievement. We need a way to measure how our lives are going. And if you’re not doing anything — where’s the scale?” In yourself, dude. And you apparently fell off your own scale. Finally, a turning point came. He wanted to be “as productive a member of the household–forget society–as [was his fiancee]. And partly, he says, he just wasn’t cut out to be a free spirit. ‘I sort of realized I’m a sheep. I need a shepherd.’” He now works 9 to 5 at the same work he did before, and was shocked by the ease of the transition. “SO WHAT ABOUT THAT BIG WHEEL?”asks Colin, “the Protestant work ethic, our obsession with productivity and goals?” asks Colin. “I see unchecked ambition as coming from neurosis. But in this culture, not having ambition might exact an equivalent toll,” says Skrzypek. …when you’re bored and boring. The guy had no respect for the present moment, and how to honor it. “He who kills time,” said Thoreau, “slays eternity.” “Once, in high school, Skrzypek conducted a similar “experiment.” He remembers thinking, “I’m going to do nothing today. I’m going to buy a bag of Cheetos — that was very decadent for me — and do nothing but watch basketball.” Well, he did it, and “was so incredibly bored.”You’re breaking my heart, dude. “AH! TO DO NOTHING–AND DO IT WELL.”- Veronique Vienne, The Art of Doing Nothing There was quite a bit of negative comment on this guy, calling him a loser, lazy punk, selfish, space waster, a slouch, a slacker. To me, he lacks imagination, is not at peace with himself, and has consequently not mastered the art of doing nothing. The guy doesn’t know any better than to be bored, because he bores himself. He doesn’t give himself anything to be interested in. There’s “doing nothing” and then there’s having no interest in doing anything. “THE MIND EXISTS,”says Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks,
I AM ONE OF THOSEwho do not work by design. Because I have enough money to live on for a while, I refuse to work for more of it. I must honor the now in which I am able to do this, because I have too much to do with my life to spend much of it working for others. What if I put my life off and worked for another year to enhance my nest egg, and died at the end of it? Truly living demands living now, even while preparing for an unpredictable and unguaranteed future. “NEW YORK IS WHERE YOU GOto live if you’re ambitious and smart,” quoted a commenter on the column, “Los Angeles is where you go if you’re ambitious but not smart, and San Francisco is where you go if you’re smart but not ambitious.” No wonder I gravitated here. To me, you see, work has always been anathema. “Work” has always been something I had to do to make a living, that robs time from my real work, writing. I have never wanted a job writing because I have wanted not to associate writing with money. They seem mutually exclusive to me. As soon as someone pays you, they think they own part of you. In fact I got an email from chitika.com, which sells website ads “designed specifically to maximize the revenue from your US search engine traffic,” and I replied, “Thanks, I just don’t want ads on my site. It’s all about words.” Then I discovered that Wordpress, for the most part, doesn’t allow them anyway. I, TOO, HAVE HAD LITTLE AMBITIONthroughout my life in the ordinary sense, of wanting always to advance in society’s eyes, of seeking more responsibility, challenge and money, of moving as high as I can within a company or field, of wanting to impress others by proving myself and my abilities in some capacity that doesn’t interest me. I do have ambition with regards to writing–but it is not to be rich and famous–it is to have the means to be free to write and live without ever working for anyone else again. It is to make enough money writing to be able to keep writing without selling my precious time to someone. How do artists do it? How do they keep body and soul together? Everybody’s got a different story. I, as I delineated last time, have given myself some years of freedom cashing out on my real estate investments, also known as “homes.” Without that cushion, I’d be stuck up shit creek, working some job I have no heart for, and possibly not in San Francisco. Yet I still need to pursue being published, or I will simply find myself closing in on 60 with no means of support. “IF YOU WANT TO HELP MANKIND,”said Andy Rooney in a commencement speech at Colgate University, “find a job you like and do it as well as you can. If you take care of yourself and your family and provide that one unit of well-being in the world, you’ll have done your part. If you can do more than that, great.” Of course some would argue that “your part” is not complete without civic participation, but first things first, I say. Happy people spread happiness. Happy people want others to be happy. Happy people are happy to work for the happiness of others. I SPIT ON YOUR MONEYA McClatchydc.com’s headline of 8/3/08, “Rift over luxury housing spoltlights rich-poor divide in Russia” describes the plight of Vorovino, a rural community outside of Moscow, that billionaire Aras Agalarov is bulldozing to build an 800-acre residential development, with some homes starting at $10 million. Agalarov is snapping up plot after plot of land, but not all residents are amenable. Retired cabdriver Vladimir Vegorov surprised an Agalarov rep: “I told him right away I will never sell this place. I said I have been here all my life, you are a newcomer and you want to be here with all of your money, but I spit on your money.” Is that not always the story of “progress”? The poor have to be razed from the land before it can happen. He’ll be out of there within six months, I predict. Sounds like San Francisco. WOULDN’T IT BE LOVERLYto spit on other people’s money, to eschew money altogether? MAKE UP YOUR MIND ABOUT IT!Know the D.H. Lawrence poem, “Kill Money”? Ya do now.
I love the line: “Make up your mind about it.” I often tell myself the same thing, when floundering about in indecision. Girl, do you want something to change, or not? Do you want to try something new? Make up your mind about it! Nothing will change unless you change it. Skrzypek changed his life, taking on full-time work, but he did not solve his boredom. He simply no longer has time to indulge in it. I have a shirt from the 2007 U.S. Social Forum that reads, “Otro mundo es posible. Otro EEUU es necesario.” Another world is possible. Another U.S. is necessary. The U.S. will never change, and another world come to be, as long as we are content to be bored and do nothing about it.
Sign in the 16th St. commune where Food Not Bombs prepares its Thursday afternoon meals proferred to any and all at the 16th and Mission BART station. ------------------------------------------------------------ "Later, dude"
Am I boring you? Reply with "remove." copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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