When are you going to
wise up, Johnny? Remember when you were a first grader, and you used to come
home from school and eat your lunch hiding under the coffee table for fear of The
Boogieman kidnapping you from right under Mommy’s nose? Remember realizing well
into adolescence that The Boogieman was something in which Mommy tacitly encouraged you
to believe because it made you more dependent on her? And now you find out, all
these years later, that I was real all along, albeit not in the form you imagined at the
time. My interest isn’t in snatching you, but in ruining your life from the
inside.
You really imagined I was
going to leave you in peace? Have I ever done so for more than a few weeks at a
time? You keep imagining you’ve changed, and outgrown me, and every time I come
charging back, as I have this week, one of those during which you’ve been pretty
sure you're losing your mind. How can anyone be as bored as you’ve been and go
on living?
You’ve tried hard to
keep the deadly boredom at bay, but fat chance. You spent actual cash money
advertising your creative (writing, design, and video) services on Facebook,
and attracted a grand total of no paying clients. Realizing that expressing
kindness or generosity is by far the best way for a person to make himself feel
good, you’ve continued to offer your services pro bono to deserving charities. No
takers. Trying to get authorised to help kids learn to read, you’ve jumped through a wide variety of hoops, including a day of orientation
that redefined boredom But
the bank doesn’t send you hard copies of your statements anymore, and the council
tax bills are in the missus’s name, so the process remain ongoing while you, in
the meantime, go mad from frustration and boredom. The thwarted altruist!
It’s really easy to be
bored when no one values your work. You’ve been writing short stories the past
few weeks. Have you forgotten that pretty much no one has read your two self-published
short story collections, including your own wife? The world keeps telling you, “Not
interested,” and you keep foolishly imagining that’s going to change. Well, has
it changed for more than a month or two at a time since you first moved to the
UK 15 years ago? Madness: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a
different result. When are you going to get it into your head that nobody likes
your writing very much anymore? When?
All of which is to
leave unmentioned the elephant in the room — the fact of your band being on the ropes as a
result of the defection of the guy who, not counting you, has been in it the
longest. For months, he’s been saying
that going direct into a little mixing board and listening to each other through
headphones (as The Romanovs did in LA) gives A Misleading Picture of what we
sounded like. What we needed do was rent a proper rehearsal room and use real
drums (you ordinarily play an electronic kit) and amps. For months, you've been saying:
Waste of time and money. So last week you finally did it. You played a full analog
drum kit for the first time since around 1973. He had his bass amp pointed toward
himself, away from you. You cannot try to play along with the bass if you can’t hear it. You asked him to turn up. He was
mightily offended, for reasons you have yet to determine, and not long thereafter
sent you a terse it’s-not-fun-anymore-so-I’m-leaving message on Facebook. Thus, the band that has been the principal beneficiary of your relentlessness and energy
for the past 18 months is on the ropes because you asked the bass player to
turn up. In the words of John Lennon, “This could only happen to me,” which was
of course ungrammatical. (Grammatical: This could happen only to me.)
And nobody wants to
hear your views on grammar either.
If you’re somehow am
able to drag yourself into early evening, you will have the consolation of
watching television with the missus. While doing so, just try not to pay attention
to the voice in your head shouting, “How much time do you suppose you have left,
big boy? And the highlight of your day is watching on television some tedious, exhaustingly overcomplicated UK police procedural in which you aren’t really interested?”
You’ve got it bad, big
boy. History suggests you’ll claw yourway through this, wondering all the while if
doing so is worth the effort. But don't imagine I won't be waiting right around the corner.
