Am I Bored or Boring? / Book: White by Bret Easton Ellis / Joel Vandroogenbroeck

Untitled print, RTomens, 2019

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Am I bored or merely boring?

Is this the most boring time of the year or am I just bored?

The luxury of being bored! I moan but others are at Work, at war, at the point of starvation. I presume there are still starving people in the world although they don't make the lead story on the news anymore as they did when I was a kid in the 70s as in major famines (are famines a thing of the past? I should look it up but can't be bothered).

Talking of food there's pork belly in the oven; just the name of it makes me feel fat. You're bored - you eat. Isn't that right? Today I've eaten marshmallows, chocolate and biscuits, yes, all the fatty, sugary stuff that people eat to comfort themselves (countering what? their useless, empty lives? tragedy? arguments? etc - yes). And boredom. I also ate an apple, but I'm not kidding myself that it made up for all the other stuff. I looked for films on Amazon Prime...Thrillers...Drama...Crime...then BFI...Herzog? Nah. Boredom renders choice-making almost impossible, cloaked as you are in it's equally unwelcome twin, apathy...bah! A film to liven me up? But it will be so formulaic!  A film won't do it, I decide. 

I'd phone a friend but he probably wouldn't want to hear how bored I am. Perhaps I will call him later. I vow not to be boring. My other friend...well, that's a bit awkward...he hates most of my opinions about society and politics. I only found this out late last year. I don't know if he counts as a friend anymore.

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I'm reading White by Bret Easton Ellis...

...I'm only 39 pages in but he's already talked about the problems of Twitter, online life etc and how annoying they can be, how nasty...you know, that thing of expressing opinions which whip up a storm of outrage and, yes, lose you friends. Mostly he's talked about film so far, rightly praising American Gigolo. It's so easy to read and very enjoyable. Here's a great passage about us all being 'actors'...

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Joel Vandroogenbroeck passed away recently. Here's a great track from his Coloursound Library album Biomechanoid, which is well worth tracking down.