Tag Archives: boredom

Non-fiction

On Boredom

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I’ve been in a phase where nothing interests me lately. Even past interests have become a huge bore. I can’t explain anything, such as the symptom where I lose my breath–what I call a phenomenon. Every night after work, I leave my apartment and go for a walk downtown for an hour and a half. When I come back, the sun is down, and my legs are spent. Whenever I take a shower, I’m short of breath when I wash my hair, like I’d run a marathon. Not to mention, when I get up too fast, I get dizzy. My doctor has tried to wean me off some medications. I’d been taking too many for too many years, and I believe these are withdrawals. Medications are a bugger. I looked up bugger in the online dictionary, and one definition is a person who penetrates the anus in sexual intercourse. Well… there you go. The dictionary folks don’t hold back, do they?

Maybe the medications are a bugger if they’re the cause. If not, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, in the middle of October, when all I have to look forward to is football, my therapist suggested I pick up a hobby. I don’t have enough. When it comes to them, I think of crocheting or some shit like that. There’s a store called Hobby Lobby. On the outside, the store looks like the size of a Walmart. I’d never been inside one and never planned to. I asked my therapist what the hell was in there, and she confirmed it was what the name implied. Not that I took her advice seriously, like I never do, because she’s not that great, but most aren’t. Once a week, I have to sit for fifty minutes with her over a telehealth session, and after the first ten minutes, I run out of things to say. Her insights don’t help. So I asked her how her weekend went to kill the time before the fifty minutes were up. She’d driven with her boyfriend, whom she called her partner, to Bakersfield to watch the car races, and she also ate barbecue instead of going out to eat. What a boring way to spend her days off. I’m always eager to go out eating rather than eat someone’s cooking if they’re not a professional chef. If there’s one hobby, I eat at restaurants. I should be a food critic.

Anyway, I can’t kill the boredom, which is here to stay. Bukowski once wrote, and I paraphrase, that all excitement is either illegal or too expensive. Who can argue against that? After all, who wouldn’t dig a night of illegal street racing? After attending traffic school, I learned you could serve up to six months in jail for participating in such a hobby. Not that I plan to. In the Rodney Dangerfield movie Easy Money, he sat in the living room with his wife and expressed his boredom. She said whenever she was bored, she would take up knitting. “Why don’t you knit me a beer?” he said. I could vouch for that.

Boredom kills. Maybe people die not from old age but from boredom. They just get too bored and die. Too many laws have set the stage for people to be bored. You can’t do anything anymore. I sit in a coffee shop where a sign out front says NO LOITERING, NO SOLICITING, NO PANHDANDLING. Shit. What can you do? You can’t even stand outside of a coffee shop anymore. A few minutes ago, I stood out there and felt like I was doing something wrong, just existing. So I came back inside and sat where I was.

Some people like camping. I went camping when I was eighteen and visited Chicago, if you could call someone’s backyard a camping trip. Still, we set up tents. Wouldn’t that have qualified? I’d come to see my long-distance girlfriend. She’d dumped me right before I got there, but I saw her anyway for the first time from California. She fooled around with her new boyfriend in front of me in the tent. At least I could escape to a lake behind the house, which also justified it being a camping trip. Ever since that time, I’d never been in the mood to go camping. Besides, I hate mosquitos and bears.

Non-fiction

Juxtaposed in Daylight

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Everywhere I go, I see them texting. Anger follows. People pissed off at everything, and it shows, and they aren’t to blame.

Yesterday, I paid my speeding ticket online. Over four hundred dollars that included a fee for an online school. I don’t know when traffic school will start. I’m supposed to call a number for school. It will be on the internet, and it will have comedy, that which won’t be funny. But that’s okay.

I can feel my hand again, but the doctor hasn’t called to make an appointment. I’m beginning to think he won’t because of the possibility of worker’s comp. He would rather not deal with the headache. I’ve experienced enough to know, like my therapist who won’t accept my insurance, and so I pay her full price. It sucks to lose, but at least I’ve taken the day off from work. That’s a victory, like yesterday, which was a day off too. My stress isn’t as high as usual. Go figure. I can walk around with less of a bother. Although today it will be hot. It’s hot already, and it’s not even eight in the morning. I’m waiting for the weather to cool down, which won’t be for another month.

My next work deposit better be significantly higher than the previous, or I won’t know what I will do. And what will I do if I come back and see all of the work piled up because no one has taken off the load? I would be extremely upset, but I’m not free of doubt.

The month is almost over. One more week before September, and I’ll be glad because it has been a hell of a month.

I wallow in boredom because in boredom I’m consumed. I’ve heard that boredom is for boring people, so that’s how it is. I waste away my time and hear that time is meant to be wasted. Evidence shows little in regard to nothing. What should I do? I’ll call the doctor and see what’s the problem. Do I have to search for another? What other can I find?

I stare into space and look for words. I’ve run out of ideas, stuck in a cloud.

I took an assessment last night for a new job, and I believe I failed because the exam was multiple choice, and the answers were too similar. They had to do with sales of water. I didn’t know sales would be that in-depth. I just thought I would test water, but it appears that water has to be sold. They just call it water tester to attract more applicants. I can’t see myself selling water, but it has to be a better job than the one I have now. They might actually train me rather than hand me a bunch of documents to read and expect me to know the material right away. I was untrained and set up for failure. That’s important to know. I’ll just sit in this chair and watch it unfold.

Non-fiction

At Avila Beach

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Here I am, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to think about. It’s only a few days here. No big deal. I’ll survive.

I’m at a coffee shop, drinking an iced espresso because they don’t serve a cold brew in this small town. I’m in San Luis Obispo because the little town where my parents talked me into staying doesn’t have a coffee shop for miles, and it pisses me off why they would want to stay here. It doesn’t make sense why they would want to stay somewhere far away from civilization like this in California. But, like I said, it’s for a few days. I can live.

But anyway, I’m wearing my gray woolen coat because it’s cold out here in June. It’s sixty degrees, and my feet are freezing inside my deck shoes. But I’m not complaining, just a little bit.

I had a dream last night when my old friend, whom I don’t talk to anymore, gave a speech in a full auditorium about himself. And I sat in the back row. Don’t ask why I was there. I can’t control my dreams. But he was there to promote his book of poetry. I didn’t even know he wrote poetry. But it was a slap in the face to me. All I know is he talks on podcasts, performs music, and produces movies. Now, he wrote a book of poems, something I’d dreamt about doing.

I never went up to him and congratulated him because he doesn’t talk to me anymore, and it would’ve been super awkward to begin the conversation. And that was how the dream ended. He finished his speech about himself, and I woke up in the hotel room I was staying in.

It’s not really a hotel—it’s an inn. I could tell by the state of its closet, in which the walls are torn, but I’m not one to judge that the old inn needs renovation.

I left my keycards inside this morning. What do I tell the inn staff? I’ve done it before. I imagine I just tell them what happened, and they open the room for me. They’ll probably have to check my driver’s license.

So what am I going to do today? My mother said that I could maybe hit the tennis ball machine at the tennis courts they have in this little village, but there are no guarantees. Other than that, what else is there to do but write? I can’t find anything else here with my time. I’m turning forty-seven on Sunday. What does a forty-six-year-old do? I’ll just sit in here until they kick me out, which won’t happen.

I’m in a coffee shop in a shopping center. It has Wifi, which is all I need to save my material to a cloud in case I lose my computer. That’s what the cloud is for. I have my whole manuscript in there, so everything is where it’s supposed to be.

I ate so much yesterday. I began the day with an iced Americano, a cheese Danish that they never warmed up, and a peanut butter milkshake for lunch. I waited until dinner to have a cup of clam chowder and an order of fish and chips on the boardwalk. The clam chowder was creamy with lots of clams but mostly potatoes. My parents ordered a basket of sourdough bread, so I would dip the bread in the chowder as if it came in a bread bowl. And then I ate a small order of fish and chips. Small, as in, they gave me only two strips of fish with an entire basket of fries. The fries were battered, just like the fish, and I could barely stomach them. They gave me so many of them because it’s cheaper to serve fries than it is to serve fish. It would’ve been a whole hell of a lot nicer to serve a bunch of fish and only a few fries, but, like I said, they were cheap. That’s why when I go to an Indian restaurant and order chicken tikka masala, they give me two pieces of chicken and a pound of rice, or the same thing happens when I order orange chicken at a Chinese restaurant. Restaurants have to be cheap.

Anyway, I complain a lot. It’s why I write. Get used to it.

Non-fiction

Another One of Those Days

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Here I sit in the coffee shop, another feckless bore, typing on an iPad. That’s right. Ha ha. I’m typing with a keyboard for an iPad instead of touching the screen a bunch of times like most people with iPads do. That’s because I bought a keyboard from Best Buy. They makes those now. I find it easier to write with an iPad for some reason, similar to when I’m texting someone on an iPhone. The words come out more fluidly. I don’t feel the need to censor myself or get uptight about things. It’s just like I’m texting my neighbor. Meet me at the pond by eight. There, that’s it.

I dream big dreams as I’m typing, but I won’t tell anyone what those dreams are. It’s my dirty little secret, you see? If I tell everyone, the dream might not come true. And then what? More medication for me to take? 400 milligrams of Gabapentin, 300 milligrams of Trileptal, 1 milligram of Klonopin, 15 milligrams of Abilify, however many milligrams of Adderall. I may have forgotten some. In a perfect world, I’m taking none of that crap. But I need it to keep me going. I take amino acids to reduce the withdrawal symptoms because I’m getting off one of those drugs. My doctor says she’ll prescribe me something that will lift my interest in activities again. As of now, there aren’t many that bring me joy. I work my dead end job, take a walk, and go to sleep. Those are how my days transpire.

Now and then, I’ll have a day off. Like next week, I’ll see the dentist on Monday. Wednesday is Juneteenth, so my boss told me to go ahead and take Tuesday off as well. There’s no use in working on Tuesday and taking Wednesday off again. So I’ll work only two days—Thursday and Friday. And then I’ll take the whole week off after that.

It’s for my birthday when I’ll turn the ripe old age of forty-seven. I’ll drive to Goleta where my favorite coffee shop is and stay for the night, and then I’ll drive to see my parents in Avila Beach the day after. I’ve been to Avila only once or twice in my life. My parents swear by it because of how gorgeous the weather is. They just want to escape from the triple-digit heat here in the desert. I don’t blame them, but something tells me Avila Beach will be overrated. I’ll stay there for a few nights. The drive there is over four hours. That’s why I’ll stay in Goleta for two nights: on the way there and on the way back. That way, I can break the trip up into an hour-and-a-half drive and a three hour drive.

And then the Fourth of July is the week after. So you can say I have it pretty easy for the next few weeks. But it’s back to a full week on the week afterward. Oh, well. Nothing lasts forever. What else do I have to look forward to? Nothing, really.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop, and nothing interesting is happening. I see the same old men sitting at the long table in the middle: the guy who looks like an Italian hitman, the guy with the tattoos on his neck who rides a wheelchair. Who knows what they talk about? The nice old man in the corner who always smiles at his iPad as if he’s looking at some endearing pictures of his family. The same baristas I see almost every morning, hustling about behind the counter. And me, trying not to be nosy, but I can’t help myself.

Non-fiction

Just a Wednesday

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I wake up and bemoan at the fact that it’s just the middle of the week. It’s difficult to adjust after a short vacation, but now I work all five days. Next week will also be a full week, and then the next two weeks will be short weeks for my birthday. I just hope nothing disastrous happens today, tomorrow, or Friday to totally sabotage my weekend. And disaster usually does strike in some form from my job. I keep telling myself not to let whatever occurs bother me. It’s easy as a reminder.

I’m sitting in the coffee shop. They’ve installed a TV with a styrofoam sheet covering it for some reason. And there’s a green pen lying on the floor with a straw wrapper lying next to it. The old lady with her dog on the pink leash has walked in and found herself a table. The dog wags its tail quickly and snoops around for any crumbs. She wears a red top with honeycomb designs on it, white cotton pants, and pink running shoes. Her dog is hyperactive. Customers walk by and pet it.

There’s a newspaper on the table in the middle of the shop. I didn’t even think they had newspapers anymore, but someone apparently was reading it.

An email came yesterday from WordPress saying a new version is coming, and I would have to change my interface, or else my website won’t function properly. I don’t know what that means. The email instructed me on what to do, and I followed those instructions, just hoping for a positive outcome. The last thing I need is for this website to lose its functionality.

It’s almost seven in the morning. A long day is ahead of me. I have to field inbound calls for my job. Who knows what personality will be on the other end? I wish I didn’t have to do it, but I have to, so I have no choice.

Wednesdays, ugh. At least tomorrow is the street fair in Palm Springs. I wander through it after work and never buy anything. It’s usually trinkets and junk food: two things I can’t afford to have. But the street fair seems so far away.

It’s all based on perception. Time is different from perception. At one moment, time moves quickly, but at another moment, time moves slowly enough to where it freezes, and I stare at the clock, waiting for the next minute to pass.

Not much is happening at the beginning of June. Summer starts. Boredom sets in. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. Summer used to be something to look forward to when I was in school. Now, with work year-round, what else is there to look forward to but dinner?

I eat tacos every night. That’s all I know how to cook. I suppose I could cook a steak, but I need a grill for that, and my kitchen can’t fit one with all the other stuff in there.

Anyway, it’s just Wednesday, and I’m spent. Maybe I’ll rearrange my shoes in the closet.