19 | September | 2006 | A Year of Songs

Only boring people get bored.

I wish I’d known that as a kid. It seemed like I was always bored, then. It wasn’t until I more or less stopped watching television late in my teenage years that I stopped being boring. (OK, I did spend some delirious late, late night hours watching old horror movies over at my pal Shawnee’s house. Her parents were amazingly tolerant of her hippy friends, even after the rest of the household became seized by Born Again Fever.)

But, by the time I had crossed paths with that truism, I was already decidedly unboring. If I do say so myself.

I had a pal who was out on the road in those days with Chakka Khan’s band. It seemed so extraordinarily glamorous. But it was driving him nuts. He had a beautiful wife and a young baby and he really wanted to be home with them instead of holing up in a seemingly endless series of motel rooms.

I remember listening to him and offering up one suggestion after another… but he had them beat. And more or less legitimately. I offered up sight seeing and he said, Mostly, I’ve seen it. I suggested museums. You’d be surprised how lame the museums in Peoria and Hackensack are. How about learning a new instrument or something? I offered. He just looked at me funny. How about drinking, I finally said, and cracked the seal on the Tequila in front of us.

Some years later I would pick up a Rolling Stone magazine and glance at the lead article on a certain poor little rich boy rock star. Fabulously wealthy, he languished in his own shadow. His lack of passion became a burden and, for a time, he stopped writing. The Rolling Stone writer tried his damnedest to capture the star’s dilemna — and maybe if I’d had a little more compassion in those days, I’d have been able to dial in that wavelength.

But it just slipped past me.

All I could think about was all that money and all those possibilities and all he could come up with was… boredom.

I have considerable more empathy, now. Once I stopped drinking a dozen years ago, I started finding some compassion for those who could not, as I’d often advised, reach right down and pick themselves up by their bootstraps. Because, once I’d taken away my own medicine, I found my own bootstraps just a little hard to reach… they were so far and every effort, in those days, seemed crushing.

I eventually climbed out of it — but for way too long, I was depressed. Some days I couldn’t bring myself to go out or even do the simplest chores. Once an aggressive, restless bon vivant, out many more nights than not, I found myself unable to stay at parties more than a few minutes. After a while, it just seemed easier not to go.

So I holed up in my house, with my cats and my guitars…

But at least I wasn’t bored.

Only boring people get bored.