Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Boring

How bored can I be and for how long?

I consider all the things I could do: feed the dog, go work on my bike, read a book, research suicide methods on the internet.  None of those, however, are interesting enough to move me from my seated position here on the couch.  I’m not even motivated to rise and turn up the heat; it’s not boring enough to be warm; I’d rather sit here being bored with being chilly.

What is boredom, anyway?  It’s a feeling that there’s something more interesting to do, that the world holds greater charms than one is experiencing, and that you deserve better than you’re getting at the moment.  It would seem, therefore, that one ought to be bored at every moment.  And perhaps we are.

There’s also an aspect of fear that goes alone with boredom; it’s a fear that this is all there is—that this is what you’ve got to look forward to for the rest of your life.  I’m afraid that if I’m bored now, imagine how bored I’ll be as an even older man with really nothing to do.

Mom used to say, as all moms do, that there isn’t really anything that’s boring; there are only boring people.  So, if you’re bored, it’s all your fault.  I’m not so sure.  Surely, I wouldn’t be so bored if I had something interesting to do like lying on a beach drinking a pina colada between bouts of body surfing and beer-drinking.

I also wouldn’t be bored if the Steelers game was on right now.  So, clearly, I’m only bored because the future holds better prospects.

If I were dead I wouldn’t be bored, unless I go to heaven and have to hang out at the right hand of God for all eternity.  Even if it’s pure bliss all the time, it’s going to be boring, simply for lack of variety.

Kind of like this, only without the chill.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

Warrant

“Seeing is believing,” they say, but just as often, you hear, “You won’t believe your eyes,” so which is it?

I’m sort of skeptical of eyewitness accounts, especially in the kingdom of the blind, where the one-eyed man is king and since ours is a world in which people continually turn a blind eye towards suffering, it’s easy enough to see (even if you’re sightless) that just because someone believes they saw something is little reason to believe they saw it.

I could show you what I mean, but that wouldn’t prove anything other than that you have eyes, a fact you’d never have known unless you looked in a mirror.

Being nearsighted, I may have a myopic perspective on all this and I’ll be the first to admit (especially after the water-boarding) that I probably don’t see things as clearly as I should.  Nevertheless, even if I can’t see the nose on my own face, I am able to discern between the forest and the trees; the latter being mainly conifers, the former including winding paths and lots of mycelium.

Moreover, I’d rather take the long view, which affords me a God’s eye perspective; the problem with that is since God is not Cyclops, I fail to perceive depth accurately and run right into a telephone pole I had visualized as somewhere much farther down the street.

I used to think there would come a time, where, as my presbyopia worsened, my nearsightedness would be perfectly counteracted so that, for a brief period, I wouldn’t need glasses at all.  It hasn’t quite worked that way, although, as luck would have it, I am finally at the point where not only are things blurry up close, but they’re also fuzzy far away, in addition to being cloudy in the middle.  Consequently, I never have to worry that I might be missing something—the way things stand now, I can be utterly confident that I am, sight unseen.