Occupy My Mind

Using a quote from a Buzzcocks song for my last post reminded me just how I view my life at times as a fight against the lurking menace of boredom. The title of this blog was supposed to be a jokey reference to how I view the world, but also to write about the things that help in the war.

Of course, it's an inescapable presence in my life at times: I have to go to work most days and like most of us, that's an experience that goes beyond tedium. Therefore, in my free time I find it important to avoid going anywhere close to boredom so as to make the most of it. It's an interesting arena though - after all, standing at a bus stop doing nothing is very dull, but lying on the sofa doing nothing can be the exact opposite. If I was smarter, I'd possibly be able to work out some correlation of waiting into this, because having to wait is never fun. Staring into space in your own time, on the other hand, can bring you all manner of brain entertainment.

Thinking on it, waiting may well be the most dreary thing I could do. It's time wasted before something you want to occur happens. It's like when you're at the bus stop in the morning, and it's late, and you can't help but think "I could have had another five minutes in bed, damn it". It's the one huge downside of air travel - you have to piss about waiting for two hours before you finally get on the sodding plane. In an airport, time ceases to have meaning except for the feeling you can sense your body wasting away at three times the normal speed. I think Will Self was correct in his assertion that it's all to numb the senses before you engage on what will be the most weird experience of your life: I mean, do you know how a huge tube of metal somehow wretches itself free of gravity and hurtles itself through the air? I can tilt my head at this moment and see some of them descending at hundreds of miles an hour to Manchester Airport, and the thought of it still makes my head hurt.

Anyways. Boredom. On one of my random Google related searches, I came across a scan of the Glasgow Herald from around 1974. A quick look of the TV listings page made me glad I was born when I was: to say there were sod all on is putting it lightly. Bar an episode of Mission: Impossible it made for grim reading and I came to the conclusion that a big reason people have always had children is just to break the sheer tedium of existing.

And yet, it wasn't always so that I looked to the computer or TV for distraction. When I was a wee laddie, I could spend an hour sat by the roadside watching cars pass by, creating lists of which models were the most popular - Ford Escort, probably. I never did see the Porsche 911 that I was always looking for, but it turns out my dad did a similar thing growing up. I also followed in his tradition of getting cheap kicks by rolling on my side down the dry moat at Penrith Castle. There'd be loads of us doing it, and pop told me that his dad had the same thing. It makes me wonder if I just need more stimulation nowadays or if those truly were more innocent times.