BORED

I want boredom. I want to be bored out of my skull. I want to wake up in the morning and have no wheedling asshole trying to outrage me or lie to me or tell me some stupid as fuck fantasy about people growing horns, sucking blood, stealing children, spying on my wife baking cookies, saying she laced them with fentanyl and put them in her children’s lunch boxes because she’s a Democrat. I want to be bored by the federal government whirring along like a Swiss watch with thousands of dedicated civil servants who could give a shit about what the president thinks because they’re doing their patriotic duty, trying to make the country better using their expertise to move A to B to C because they know things like the difference between build and destroy. I don’t want idiotic people trying to tell me not to do something for my health because they woke up in the night and thought, Oh my God, somebody has rigged the game and if I vaccinate my kids, they’ll turn splotchy green or yellow. They’ll never speak English again, they’ll never know what the American flag looks like, and their limbs will drop off before they’re in the 5th grade. I want to be so bored that I have to wonder what is going on in the world. Things are so quiet, I have to guess about what to do with my own stupid, pathetic life, so I can get on with it and not be distracted by terrifying messages every six minutes flying across my phone. I don’t want to listen to the Evening News telling me horrifying stories about what somebody did to whom, who shot whom; I want to know that nothing fucking is going on in the world that needs my attention. I want to be so bored that I have to dig deep into my own life and decide, am I doing anything worth the candle to why my parents birthed me so they could be a tiny bit proud of doing it in the dark panting between the sheets, dreaming, we’ll have such a wonderful child who’ll do many good things. Look at him now, sitting on his ass barely disturbing the air, or the molecules that could actually lead to something useful in the world. I want to be so bored that I have to look at the people close to me and say, “Mary mother of God!” Who are you? Do I really know who I am living with? I’ve been obsessed with idiots, fools, knaves, thieves, petty crooks, brain-dead murderers, and blowhard incompetents. OK, the world should run along on its axis without us paying attention all the damn time to whether someone will stick a giant fucking piece of wood in the spokes of everyday life. I want the smart people on the news instead of constantly describing a meteor crashing into our civic order to dissect instead how the world can move toward a greater harmony of scientific, cultural, and civic integration, where people feel at peace, useful, and engaged because politics has stopped being a form of terrorism. Dear God, make the chest-pounding shit-for-brains causing trouble in the world shut the fuck up. Voodoo their dicks dead, so they run crying to mommy, who shoves them in a closet for an eternal timeout. Wake up! We want to go about our lives, figuring out what’s best, what works, and collaborating to make it happen. It’ll be so dull that newsies will stop talking, talking, and talking doom. Put on programs of get-on-down music, cats doing tricks, dogs doing anything, dancing, singing, speaking to our hearts to make us weep. The bored who can’t take another minute will invent things. Focus on things that give pleasure to be with, or make the forest happy, the water so pristine, we’ll see to the bottom. I want to imagine the fish, in a school, studying quadratic equations and stand-up comedy. I want this! Don’t start, not listening! You’ll say it can’t happen, we’re stuck with all this crap. You’ll tell me I’m an innocent who should wear diapers and suck my thumb. Let your brain rub two cents together. If you keep doing what you’re doing, your skin turns scaly, your ears grow big, your hair falls out, your teeth crack, your neck sinks into your shoulders, you smell bad, and nobody, even after a few, will come near. They’ll leave you in a corner and tell you to be quiet. Me? I’ll be bored, tossing back a cold one, and ease on over to Betty Lou, get lost in those brown eyes, slip a quarter in the jukebox, and feel her cheek, cool and alive against mine as we slow dance on the old wooden floor as the moon slips under the door.