I’ve been hearing it for so long that I forget if it’s true or where it came from: no one gets bored anymore. Everyone has access to everything. Eventually we’ll have absorbed and released so much information (energy) that the information (energy) will kill the planet.
I recently learned that the New Yorker’s Andy Borowitz was one of the creators of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This information will eventually kill the planet, hopefully long after I’m gone from it. In my dad’s basement there are more than ten underground Canadian rap CDRs. The production of those CDs will kill the planet, and my knowledge of those CDs will kill the planet too. The damage has already been done.
The worst shit I do right now is put my Trader Joe’s iced coffee concentrate in a mason jar, like that’s better than anything else somehow.
When my son was a baby he would only sleep if I walked him around in his stroller. I traversed New York in sweltering heat and in blustery winters. Afraid to stop moving, wishing I could read a book.
The last time I was bored was, I think, 1997. 14, with nothing to do in the Yakima desert with my best friend for his parents’ soccer tournament. We listened to Fu Manchu in a sweltering van—windows up—until we couldn’t do it anymore. Bored, we skulked to 7-11, bought Slurpees and Yoo-Hoo and candy. Dragged our Etnies back to the van, brainfreezed ourselves into oblivion.
Drugs for kids, in chronological order:
spinning around until you’re too dizzy
involuntary brainfreeze
voluntary brainfreeze
minor trespassing
weed
My friend didn’t drink the Yoo-Hoo right away, so it baked in the van. It didn’t curdle—a fun pastime is to point out that Yoo-Hoo is not technically chocolate milk, it’s chocolate drink, which contains no dairy and is therefore not milk.
So we sat there, not watching the game. Too hot to be outside. Too hot to be inside. Eventually he chugged the Yoo-Hoo in one go, stomach burbling. He felt like he was going to throw up so we got out of the van and laughed about feeling gross.
Zeke’s “West Seattle Acid Party,” a song we loved, plays in my memory, but not in real life. When I first heard it, I didn’t know acid was a drug. I thought it was about a house party where people dissolved their skin with hydrofluoric acid. You know this kind of thought—a misguided one stemming from boredom. Better to speculate than learn, sink into the not knowing because it’s easier and more fun anyway.
In the old internet, but not the old old internet I used to watch this video of two teenagers lip-syncing to Korn’s “All in the Family” on YouTube. It’s a terrible song from Korn’s extremely popular album Follow the Leader that happens to feature Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst on the cusp of superstardom. It is a facsimile of a battle rap, with Durst and Korn frontman Jonathan Davis trading limp, homophobic insults at each other for like five solid minutes. It’s plainly terrible, was plainly terrible to me even at the time. There’s no enthusiasm in it. No good jokes. Just directionless anger and an attempt to shock in a way that will resonate with you if you were of the right age at the height of early South Park mania and had some latent understanding of what shocking through edgy—"edgy,”—gross out jokes could mean.
How it could seem dangerous or cool. How it could make being alienated a badge of honor.
The video with the two teenagers has 2,318,109 views. Comments are disabled because “I'm tired of idiots with no lives acting tough on the internet.” If you google Korn All In The Family Youtube, it’s the sixth result.
There is no better illustration of teenage boredom in the twilight of the 20th century than this video. The baggy cargo pants fraying against sweltering parking lot blacktop, the cutoff JNCOs, the tone— “this is just us joking around, unless you think it’s cool, in which case this is us being serious”—this video is a depiction of complete apathy. It’s hypnotic. Without purpose, it’s all just landscape. Ambient noise that you recognize as shocking, but doesn’t actually shock. It’s the late ’90s in a nutshell.
Who has the luxury of being bored now? Alyssa Milano going on Twitter rants. Donald Trump. The kids at that TikTok house that got its power shut down because they couldn’t stop having parties during a global pandemic.
Being bored means that you have enough time to think about how things are going to get worse, and when that starts to feel overwhelming, you can just do nothing at all, which is actually the great trick of boredom. It’s all information pollution either way.