Boredopolis: a city tour in fourteen indistinguishable bits.

1.

The city bores. There they go, preoccupying themselves with the Evening Standard, and sometimes the Metro. More often a phone: the hope that the beep of an incoming message was unheard and lays there waiting; some profound news to jumpstart life somehow. The noise is shielded out with headphones. I look around at the couple who appear not to know each other, yet sit next to each other. This is inexplicable behaviour on public transport where the rule is to not encroach on other's personal travelling space until the last possible moment. They must know each other.

2.

Encounters are brief and unprepared. The lurch of the train pushes me into someone and I sputter an apology. Nothing comes back. Together we sway. The rail at London Bridge grinds and grates like an ship scraping the ocean floor, below which streets of painful significance sit there mocking, harbouring memories. People cross the streets but fail to overwrite the past. A woman's face etched to the back of my eyelids burns and I panic. I'M NOT LISTENING I'M NOT LISTENING. And I cloud my head with images that have no place in my world: war, lunar colonies, pirates... These things can find no way back to my life, no connection at all. They are things for soldiers, scientists, pirates...

4.

When the train stops we all, without knowing why, get off. We all file through the ticket barriers and disseminate into the city like a fart in the wind. My eyes dart around in the hope that something is there at this arbitrary destination; the hope that maybe the smile I practice in the shower can be tested on another human. Looking around for victims, I see everyone is busy, all so full of purpose. They cut through the lanes where the cars can't fit. They cautiously ease out into the road between busses. They spill mayonnaise from the bagel they bought down their tops. All the while, the ghoulish angelic statuettes which are carved into the buildings, with their doleful eyes and creamy smooth cheeks, look down on us, as bored as can be in their unending architectural prison. Bored with what they see: the ant-like people going across town, then returning with supplies; the same bus doing the same route; the same people taking the same photos of the same things; the occasional political demonstration; the occasional beating in of someone's head. 

5.

Everything that means something is meaningless to someone else. I fill the boredom with pathetic fantasies which should never be realised, but inevitably do. Their profundity is in the sheer magnitude of their bathos. Only the movement towards something has any purchase on reality; experience itself, being in a moment, is the event horizon into which you can only fall. From there, where backwards no longer exists, the singularity of who you are and what you do can no longer be ambiguous, and all that's beyond you, beyond reach, impresses upon you like an unending catalogue of things that you are not, of the things that have been and have now gone, or the things that you don't even have the audacity to hope for. All that remains is the pitiful thing that you are doing.

6.

I leave before she wakes up, promising myself to never go back. Some days, the boredom dresses itself in a nihilistic hedonism to be overcome with indulgence. Other days, it appears more spectral, floating and long-term, the imminence of existence stretched out indefinitely, where one need only wait... If life was an infinite Tetris game, sooner or later the blocks would just fall into place. On the remaining days, boredom comes shrouded in heavy lead coats - warm but pinned to the ground. Which version will appear the next day is anyone's guess, and the arbitrary promises I make myself only have relevance on some of these days, on the ones where promises and newly redefined worldviews coincide.

7.

Something only means something with this coincidence - the advance of meaning met with its acknowledgement, its insertion into a system which grounds it. I leave the cinema, teach myself how to blink again, finding myself let down by language's inability to convey anything following the spectacle. But the real world beckons, with the need to have dinner at a respectable hour and ensure the last train is not missed. She had never left this world, as I had, in those two hours. Her smile was one of sympathy rather than affection. It was a badly translated communication of gazes.

8.

The medication ruins my appetite. It makes me jumpy and awkward, unable to hold anything down. I walk past a diner with workmen on a break, an all day breakfast with all the colours of a coral reef - soaking in the yellow of the egg, the red and brown of the sauces, the orange of beans. Speckled in salt and pepper. I swallow the lump in my throat, withhold a burp, and keep walking. Should I wind up having a meal in a restaurant with some girl, my affection for her can be accurately determined by how much I enjoy the meal. An enjoyable meal would mean indifference towards this person. Alternatively, if I simply cannot stomach it, and have to leave most of it, then I am in love. 

The appetite is gone, and I am paralysed. I cling to the chair as it threatens to shake me off. And in this moment, in this limbo, eternity in an elevator that never stops but just shuttles up and down seems preferable to the conversation I am offering.

'Sometimes I walk to the end of the road and sit in the park.'

'Right.' 

9.

My brain lacks content. Like air rushes into a vacuum I drown in another oppressive scenario in which I converse with the woman who is probably best described as 'you'. You of marked silence; you of few words. I go back and forth between different personae: the coolly aloof, the pathetic whinge, the perplexed, the angry. You don't even consider your persona, so secure it is, unflappable. Not easy to deal with, in my little made-up conversations we have: not easy to imagine your half. 

'What's happened to you then?' she asks.

My eyebrows have never worked so well, they convey just enough mystery.

'What has happened to me,' I rhetorically ask myself. I ponder on this for a moment.

'How is work?'

At this point, without answering the question about work, I lay out the finest, most poetic, not gratuitous, not indulgent, but biting, yet charming, concise and complete evaluation of the pain that I feel. Some magical combination of words falls effortlessly, like liquid, from my cool, steady lips. And she knows, despite me not saying it, that it is her, and that she has transformed somebody, as someone's life is vicariously but undeniably changed by the actions of another. Say, for example, one day, a man throws a cigarette from a car in a suburban neighbourhood. It lands in a plastic dumper truck toy, which, one hour later, is picked up by its owner, a small boy. With curiosity, and encouraged by a half-forgotten image of Humphrey Bogart deep in his unconscious from some nameless Sunday movie, he feigns a quick drag, sucks it in, and chokes.

10. 

I wind up on another train platform. Everyone stands in their chosen spot, reading something, listening to something. When the train arrives, just as it's approaching, they start restlessly shimmying around. Some move up the platform, some down. Why hadn't they moved there already, I wonder, why wait until the final moment? They are like a herd of disoriented cattle, who  linger until food approaches, and then can't contain themselves as it arrives, even though the trough is on the other side of the fence.

11.

On the Overground we sit in pews. The modern train makes fluid, wispy sounds and the air vents breathe on us in a continuous belch. More people read newspapers and listen to music. No one talks. The women in front of me have huge Jamaican flags. They sit there pouring words out at each other in giant waves, and rearranging their swollen breasts in their skin tight lycra tops. Behind them, the sun is setting. I look through them into the sky which occasionally gets obscured by buildings or an overzealous arm. The clouds take rays of sun from the right and scatter them out to the left in deep orange; orange blotches that stretch the sky, then seamlessly become the pixelated windows on blocks of flats. 

12.

Two songs about boredom include Deftones' Bored and Daniel Johnston's Held the Hand. 'Oh Lord, I am so bored,' he cries. I scroll through iTunes seeking something to listen to, an attempt to add some ingredients to the mulch of brain that is stewing up there. But the mulch devours all that goes in, the concoction is too strong, the flavours too overpowering in their incessant neutrality. I hear white noise, and sometimes a distant tinnitus.

13. 

Between the numerous transportation machines, ingeniously devised to connect the city in a network of vacancy - tubes and containers of nothingness - lie the pockets of life. They swarm through shops or argue in offices. They drink from 10:30am in Wetherspoons. In here I go for a cheap coffee. The room is an archipelago of aged solitary menfolk, drinking pints extremely slowly, eyes fastened to the sport on the TV or a newspaper. The age of telecommunications came to late to save these types, to late to continually remind them of the people that are only a phonecall away. Instead, sports pundits keep their company, and the occasional passing waitress.

14. 

The city spins, a metropolitan passenger on a global vehicle, going at 652 miles per hour. I keep the travel sickness at bay by leaping from handrail to handrail, and avoiding the eye contact that jettisons my sense of self. I pause near the crossroads, and my field of vision becomes fixed. Through this field march pedestrians. They swim through the air with their enthusiastic swinging arms, covering every inch of ground in the residue of their passage, like the slime of a snail. A man drops a cigarette. Two women pass each other, each talking to some faceless being somewhere else. The wandering bored chop time up into manageable chunks and distil these moments into the sustenance that pushes them forward. The future, carefully planned in electronic diaries and mental notes, promises that the fog will disperse, just as soon as the next thing arrives.