No Pain, No Gain

Boredom is to the human spirit what disgust is to the human body. The human being, like the Earth herself, is vulnerable to pollution - go figure.

But, you ask, what pollutes the bored person? Mostly stinking thinking because one of the truest realizations is "I have met the enemy and the enemy is me!" Essentially, however, we battle what has been called our "original poverty."

From the moment we enter this world, we have nothing but our birthday suit to recommend us. So we try to add to ourselves, in our existential poverty, as much as we can in the short lifetime, relatively speaking, that we are given. 'Given' is the key reality since, other than opportunities grasped, we face only potential greatness. Life offers us no real guarantees - except the one that no matter how much we accumulate, we can't take it with us when we die. The TV program, Antiques Roadshow , is proof positive of that discovery.

David Foster Wallace died before seeing his work The Pale King published, but not before probing this mystery. He wrote, "Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there."

Always there; like the toilet and shower/bathtub is there to relieve our disgust and maybe even our boredom with the mundane. If a debt-management counselor calls offering to pull me out of poverty, I'm in the shower.