George Pelletier

It was said that the world’s second worst crime is boredom.

The first is being a bore.

Rather than divert my boredom, I try to see what boredom can teach me. After all, Nietzsche said “to ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar.”

If that’s true, I’m positively disgusting right now.

With so many people home, social distancing, stay-cationing, quarantining, working from home, home schooling their children and just existing, it’s raising the craze-o-meters in many a household as the stay-at-home has been trying for many.

That may be true, but I still have zero desire to watch NBA stars social distance themselves from one another and shoot a game of HORSE.

Car racing with no fans? That’s called driving around looking for a parking space. Riveting.

There’s not a lot of politics going on, if you exclude the politics of the COVID-19 response. People can’t wait to get back to work, as protesters have made that clear.

My favorite pic is the one circulating of a group of protestors smushed up, against a class door. Next to that image is one from the movie “Shaun of the Dead.” They look like the same picture.

MAZA: Make American Zombified Again.

The other image I love is of a woman angrily holding up a “No More Masks!” sign. She’s wearing a mask.

People will do what they want. But imagine you’ve jumped from a plane with a parachute, and as you get nearer and nearer to earth, you figure, “I’m so close. Why don’t I just toss away my parachute?”

Splat. That’s why.

Groceries are a commodity. So is finding concentration among the mundane. Boredom equals stagnation, right? That’s why there are those Americans, like summer weekenders on Fire Island, who say, “Open up, I’m coming out.” ?

Boredom is a state of mindlessness to some.

Elections are lost on boredom. Mike Dukakis, who ran for president in 1988 was duller than an Amish stripper. And how did he try to shake that image? By manning a M1 Abrams tank. He went from dull to ditchwater. And his running mate? Lloyd Bentsen. The guy looked like a human snooze bar.

Last year at a tank factory, Trump said he would have gotten into a tank himself. Great minds think alike but fools seldom differ.

“I want to get into them, but then I remember when a man named Dukakis got into a tank,” Trump said. “And I remember he tanked when he got into the tank. I’ve never saw anyone tank like that.”

Clearly, Trump has never listened to one of his own impromptu speeches.

Some people say Trump’s voice is soothing. It’s the multiple syllabic words he uses that create all the phonetic speed bumps.

I don’t find his voice or his message soothing. Any president who says things like, “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” clearly has wonderful economy with words. He could be naming any leader in history. Say, Rocketman. Or he could be talking like a five-year old who eats chalk.

Speech writer, James Hume, credited with co-authoring the text on the Apollo 11 lunar plaque, said “Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership. If that’s true, Mr. Trump would be appearing off, off-Broadway. In a one-man show.

Then there’s Mike Pence, COVID squad dance captain. Not only doesn’t the paint dry listening to him, it jumps back into the can.

But I digress. Another symptom of boredom.

While many of us struggle when we have zip-a-dee-doo-dah to do, research suggests it can make us more creative and productive.

“There is something more terrible than a hell of suffering,” the French novelist Victor Hugo wrote in his book Les Misérables in 1862. “A hell of boredom.”

It is an observation that apparently remains true even today. In our modern society, boredom is something to be escaped, whether it’s with a quick round of Tik Tok or by scrolling through your list of contacts to see who owes you money.

It is perhaps not that surprising that we find boredom so uncomfortable. Just look at the importance society places on being busy. The wealthiest among us work longer hours while being busy has become a status symbol and a mark of prestige.

Boredom and idleness, by contrast, are for the underachievers, the lazy, the loafers. It is something associated with mental dullness and lacking in aim or purpose. In a society where happiness and positivity are often linked to productivity, those who are bored must by extension be unhappy.

I’d rather die from exhaustion than boredom.

Ultimately, there’s a fine line between boring, tedious and painstaking.

Standing in line just to get into Walmart is boring (and nuts). Scrubbing a tile floor with a toothbrush is tedious. Watching ‘The Bachelor: Listen To Your Heart’ is just painstaking.

Let’s face it- no one on this show is winning any Nobel Prizes (or “Noble” as the president likes to call them) any time soon. Watching ‘Listen To Your Heart’ for authentic pathos is like watching that think tank Fox for hard hitting news revelations. Either way, it’s sheer boredom. You need a good piece of mental floss to free your mind after sampling their mind-numbing, fib-riddled news placebos. And they wouldn’t have their audiences any other way.