Bored?

I’m bored. I’m always bored. Blur were right: Mod­ern Life Is Rub­bish. There is noth­ing left to dis­cover, nowhere left to explore, noth­ing left to say. Noth­ing is new any more. There is an answer to every ques­tion and a ques­tion to every answer. God is dead, long live sci­ence, says Niet­z­sche; sci­ence is dead, long live God, says the Chris­tian Right. I say who cares? Marx was right about the bour­go­isie, they’re dan­ger­ous — oppres­sion through iner­tia, through bore­dom. I’m white, I’m middle class and I don’t exist.

I should prob­ably intro­duce myself. My name’s Dave, and I’m a nobody, a noth­ing. I’m the oasis that’s a mirage, the horse with no name, another face in the ebb and flow of the sea of sub­urban Eng­land. I’m so insig­ni­fic­ant that I’m not even flotsam.

I wander through each leafy street
With bor­ing hedges trimmed in rows
And there in every face I meet
Bore­dom, resig­na­tion shows.

So I’m not a poet; I can’t even bas­tard­ise Blake well, but you get the pic­ture. I’m bored. My sister’s bored. My mates are bored, my grandma’s bored, my shrink’s bored, my bus driver’s bored. I live in the bored sub­urbs of a bored city in a coun­try which can’t believe that its empire no longer exists and that it’s gradu­ally fad­ing into insig­ni­fic­ance. And I lied about the psy­chi­at­rist — I’m too bor­ing to need one of those.

That’s the irony of the mod­ern pre­dic­a­ment. It used to be that people got bored because they were inter­etsing. It used to be that they sor­ted it out: Caesar conquered, Brunel built, Picasso painted. Byron went to the Dolo­mites, got abso­lutely off his face on opium and had orgies with his fel­low romantics. Aris­totle did bloody everything. But now even the bor­ing people are bored; now there’s no hope.

Polit­ics is bor­ing, the right has become the centre right and the left the centre left. People are always look­ing for the centre, the com­prom­ise; middle ground, middle of the road, middle class. Films are bor­ing because everything is allowed; books are bor­ing because everything has been said; sport is bor­ing because every record has been broken. Music is bor­ing because nobody cares any more, apathy reigns supreme. Nobody would heckle Beeth­oven, or riot at The Rite of Spring, Moz­art would no longer be out­rageously young. There is no such thing as out­rageously young any more, it’s always another nine year old prodigy, another fif­teen year old olympian gym­nast, another thir­teen year old mother.

In our world everything is an extreme, and the extremes aren’t fright­en­ing any more. A pickled sheep is art, clos­ing the piano lid and sit­ting in silence is music, jump­ing out of a plane is sport, and put­ting clothes on is a job. In fact the only inter­est­ing thing I’ve seen for a dec­ade is…

I’m sorry, am I bor­ing you?

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