The Death Of Boredom.
But first - before I mourn The Death Of Boredom - a minute’s silence, please, for the death of my phone.
...
Okay, so it’s not quite dead (and I am in fact still using it), but I can’t read at least half of the screen and a majority of its functions are only working because I know where they are as a result of seven years of honed instinct and symbiosis. (Yes, that’s stickytape bandaging it together. Like a grandparent I won’t euthanise, I don’t want to lose my phone and I don’t believe it can be easily replaced. There are birthdays and anniversaries on it that I don’t want to forget. So it just keeps me hanging on like a Supremes fan who won’t listen to a Kim Wilde cover version.)
As you may have inferred, I’m not a fan of new technology. I don’t camp outside Apple stores to buy iPads. (Hold on... is that really what they’re called, or did I make that up? Surely that can’t have made it through any sort of brand name testing market research - it sounds like a high-tech feminine hygiene product...) So usually, by the time I own something, it’s already... (obsolete? Superseded? I know computer people have a special word for what I’m trying to say, but it will probably be seven years before I learn it.) If I own a technological device, that’s a fair sign that the zeitgeist has long since abandoned the campsite. And yes, I don’t replace any technological devices until they die. Which segues me to The Death Of Boredom.
Imagine you had a “do over” of your life. For me, that involves going back a third of a century to a time where there were no mobile phones, and the handsets we had were all attached by spiral cords to heavy telephones with rotary dials which were in turn attached to your house. This meant that until the nineties, meeting people and making plans had to be done in advance and not at the last minute. No one could responsibly be late to meet someone ‘out’ because when they did, there was no method of last-minute communication. And as a result, people spent many an hour waiting around at the carousel or outside the town hall without an iPhone to keep them entertained. And this is important. Because we couldn’t check our Facebooks or SMS a friend or play Texas Hold’em. Sure, we could read a novel, but we’d keep interrupting ourselves every half a page to surreptitiously peek a watched-pot-never-boils glance at the friend we expected to peripherally appear at any moment. And so we waited. And so we got bored.
I used to hang around in bank queues with a woman who was (at the time) going by the pseudonym of ‘Mummy’, waiting for the staff to update our passbooks and give us our money for the week. This money was made of paper, silver and ‘copper’ (the latter coins were actually bronze, decirculated in 1992 and later smelted into bronze medals for the 2000 Olympics.) The only ‘credit’ card I recall was Bankcard, and there were no ATMs or EFTPOS, just the ‘click clack’ of a manual carbon copy imprint machine. Plus if you were working nine to five weekdays, there wasn’t much time to spend money anyway, since shops were only open for three hours on Saturday morning and closed on Sundays. And there was no eBay. And so we got bored.
In Canberra, there were only two television stations, and though one might think that would make it easier to switch channels, there was no remote control so we had to crawl up to the TV in order to click the dial. Broadcasting stopped at night until the next morning and was replaced by a ‘test pattern’. And one of the two stations often replaced entire days of programming with 'the cricket'. There were no VCRs, no DVDs and no Foxtel. (Heck, Neighbours wasn’t even on until 1985.) If a show was on TV, that might be the only time you’d ever see it and there was no guarantee that something would ever be shown again. (Robostory, I miss you.) You couldn’t download a show or watch it on YouTube or buy the DVD if you missed it. We couldn't watch an entire season of a show in one weekend, we had to wait a day or a week for the next episode. And if there was ‘nothing on’ there was nothing on. And so we got bored.
I had a computer - it ran on cassettes, had sixty-four kilobytes of RAM and took ten minutes to load anything. I had no word processor, which meant that when I wrote anything it went down in the order it came out of my head with no cutting, pasting, deleting or rewriting to make sense of it. (Which would mean that instead of the previous sentence, you’d have just read the following: “Which meant we couldn’t not linear and writes entire novels in the wrong order, let alone sentences and paragraphs from my brain.”) There was no Internet to surf and no eMail to check every five minutes (just snail mail, which at the time went by the name of ‘mail’. And it only came once a day, if at all.) Written international communication could take a couple of weeks and there was no MSN or Skype. And so we got bored.
Did I mention that we got bored? And not just the sort of boredom you’re getting from reading this blog, this was full-on ennui. And I'm pretty sure that it led to creating music and art and having an imagination. And I don’t get bored anymore, because I can always find some mindless form of entertainment. And this scares the crap out of me. I don’t want a world in which I’m even more of a vegetable than I am now. But it seems to be the direction I’m headed. I used to say I was “bored to death”. But I’d rather be bored to death than entertained to death.
**********
Two posts down, I mentioned my propensity to destroy digital data. And yes, somehow I irreparably deleted every Suede song off my iTunes player and my computer. Which is fine, I still have all the original CDs, and I managed to rescue the off-the-radio recording of Dog Man Star live at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts from my first-generation, 1 gigabyte, 2005 iPod Shuffle. But if anyone has the live acoustic version of ‘Trash’ from an Amsterdam session in 1999, call me!
**********
...
Okay, so it’s not quite dead (and I am in fact still using it), but I can’t read at least half of the screen and a majority of its functions are only working because I know where they are as a result of seven years of honed instinct and symbiosis. (Yes, that’s stickytape bandaging it together. Like a grandparent I won’t euthanise, I don’t want to lose my phone and I don’t believe it can be easily replaced. There are birthdays and anniversaries on it that I don’t want to forget. So it just keeps me hanging on like a Supremes fan who won’t listen to a Kim Wilde cover version.)
As you may have inferred, I’m not a fan of new technology. I don’t camp outside Apple stores to buy iPads. (Hold on... is that really what they’re called, or did I make that up? Surely that can’t have made it through any sort of brand name testing market research - it sounds like a high-tech feminine hygiene product...) So usually, by the time I own something, it’s already... (obsolete? Superseded? I know computer people have a special word for what I’m trying to say, but it will probably be seven years before I learn it.) If I own a technological device, that’s a fair sign that the zeitgeist has long since abandoned the campsite. And yes, I don’t replace any technological devices until they die. Which segues me to The Death Of Boredom.
Imagine you had a “do over” of your life. For me, that involves going back a third of a century to a time where there were no mobile phones, and the handsets we had were all attached by spiral cords to heavy telephones with rotary dials which were in turn attached to your house. This meant that until the nineties, meeting people and making plans had to be done in advance and not at the last minute. No one could responsibly be late to meet someone ‘out’ because when they did, there was no method of last-minute communication. And as a result, people spent many an hour waiting around at the carousel or outside the town hall without an iPhone to keep them entertained. And this is important. Because we couldn’t check our Facebooks or SMS a friend or play Texas Hold’em. Sure, we could read a novel, but we’d keep interrupting ourselves every half a page to surreptitiously peek a watched-pot-never-boils glance at the friend we expected to peripherally appear at any moment. And so we waited. And so we got bored.
I used to hang around in bank queues with a woman who was (at the time) going by the pseudonym of ‘Mummy’, waiting for the staff to update our passbooks and give us our money for the week. This money was made of paper, silver and ‘copper’ (the latter coins were actually bronze, decirculated in 1992 and later smelted into bronze medals for the 2000 Olympics.) The only ‘credit’ card I recall was Bankcard, and there were no ATMs or EFTPOS, just the ‘click clack’ of a manual carbon copy imprint machine. Plus if you were working nine to five weekdays, there wasn’t much time to spend money anyway, since shops were only open for three hours on Saturday morning and closed on Sundays. And there was no eBay. And so we got bored.
In Canberra, there were only two television stations, and though one might think that would make it easier to switch channels, there was no remote control so we had to crawl up to the TV in order to click the dial. Broadcasting stopped at night until the next morning and was replaced by a ‘test pattern’. And one of the two stations often replaced entire days of programming with 'the cricket'. There were no VCRs, no DVDs and no Foxtel. (Heck, Neighbours wasn’t even on until 1985.) If a show was on TV, that might be the only time you’d ever see it and there was no guarantee that something would ever be shown again. (Robostory, I miss you.) You couldn’t download a show or watch it on YouTube or buy the DVD if you missed it. We couldn't watch an entire season of a show in one weekend, we had to wait a day or a week for the next episode. And if there was ‘nothing on’ there was nothing on. And so we got bored.
I had a computer - it ran on cassettes, had sixty-four kilobytes of RAM and took ten minutes to load anything. I had no word processor, which meant that when I wrote anything it went down in the order it came out of my head with no cutting, pasting, deleting or rewriting to make sense of it. (Which would mean that instead of the previous sentence, you’d have just read the following: “Which meant we couldn’t not linear and writes entire novels in the wrong order, let alone sentences and paragraphs from my brain.”) There was no Internet to surf and no eMail to check every five minutes (just snail mail, which at the time went by the name of ‘mail’. And it only came once a day, if at all.) Written international communication could take a couple of weeks and there was no MSN or Skype. And so we got bored.
Did I mention that we got bored? And not just the sort of boredom you’re getting from reading this blog, this was full-on ennui. And I'm pretty sure that it led to creating music and art and having an imagination. And I don’t get bored anymore, because I can always find some mindless form of entertainment. And this scares the crap out of me. I don’t want a world in which I’m even more of a vegetable than I am now. But it seems to be the direction I’m headed. I used to say I was “bored to death”. But I’d rather be bored to death than entertained to death.
**********
Two posts down, I mentioned my propensity to destroy digital data. And yes, somehow I irreparably deleted every Suede song off my iTunes player and my computer. Which is fine, I still have all the original CDs, and I managed to rescue the off-the-radio recording of Dog Man Star live at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts from my first-generation, 1 gigabyte, 2005 iPod Shuffle. But if anyone has the live acoustic version of ‘Trash’ from an Amsterdam session in 1999, call me!
**********