^{ILLUSTRATION: Zareen Tansim Bushra, Pylon // 2023}

“In all of the memories I have left of them, we are either eating, smoking, or drinking something. We’re silent in a lot of them. In one of them, they look at me and drunkenly blurt out that silence is the most proper sound a human can make.”

---

philosophical fiction, aug 23

    It was my first time skinny dipping, and that too with basically total strangers. The boys had somehow convinced me that this would be fun, and given I was more than a little intoxicated, I kind of went with it. The lake stood awfully still, and the moonlight was as bright on the surface of the water as it was on the sky. We were gonna see who could dive the deepest, and the winner wouldn’t have to buy dinner for the whole week. They didn’t know I was a semi-professional diver and was well known among my family for holding my breath for frightening lengths.


I had been introduced to the boys just that afternoon, as we were on a journalistic assignment in the outskirts of town, reporting some strange local phenomena I don’t have the authority to mention here, although I can legally state that it involved a person’s death. Anyway, we dove in and the boys hardly lasted two minutes. The lake was supposedly not super deep, so I thought I’d go touch the base just for fun. The water was cold and still, and that’s basically when I saw it. A strange diary at the bottom of the lake. Hard cover, wrapped with a leather belt. I picked it and came back up. The boys had leapt with joy as I came up, they were beginning to think I had drowned. Needless to say, I didn’t pay for dinner that week.


We dried the diary in the sun the next morning and carefully opened it page by page. It somehow remained intact. The diary is kind of meandering and ideas proposed or introduced in it are far from resolved. It’s also lacking any kind of poeticism. And yet, I felt the need to share this piece with you all. Just a reminder that these are not my words nor my thoughts. I just happened to stumble across it at the bottom of the lake, and I believed that it should see the light of day:


07/02/30

- I’m only writing this because I am extremely, cosmically bored.
- The problem is that now boredom has found its way here.
- Boredom physically hurts. As in ‘real-ly’ hurts. There’s no meaning to it, which is a major component of the reason it hurts ad infinitum.

Speaking of hurt, one of my closest friends very recently passed away. This is bleak and morbid and hugely un-fun. Their passing was pretty gruesome and self-afflicted. It has been occupying space in my mind for a bit, and is probably why I’m even writing this, despite the fact that ‘this’ is destined to generate boredom on both parties. This specifically, because when their body was found, a little note in the pocket of the jacket said, ‘lately I fear that what we call boredom is an almost dread.’


08/03/30

My friend and I would play chess a lot. We’d also talk a lot during. It was nice to wax philosophical, although sometimes it’s hard to tell what you’re really saying to each other while you’re saying those things to each other. Like you know, the big picture stuff about/between two consciousnesses. Don’t get me wrong here—I’m hardly moved by the abstract, big picture stuff. 50% of the time, I’ll roll my eyes whenever anyone spews philosophical speculation out loud. I like my experiences concrete, grounded, tangible, here. This despite the fact that I do end up smoking a fair amount of grass just about daily and just sit there thinking and like hurting, just like fitting that total stoner cliche. But really, I find myself physically unable to produce that ‘look of curious wonder’ people expect me to have when they ask me non-rhetorically, ‘why are we even here man?’ or ‘what if your green was my red?’ or ‘but isn’t reality all in your head?’ and all that. I just basically don’t care. I mean, what words could you possibly utter that would ‘move’ me? They’re just... words.

There are no philosophical problems. I know this, I do. Because we don’t have the answers, and yet life goes on.

-We used to play a lot of chess around our other friends (none of whom really enjoyed the fastidiousness required to play the game at higher levels) and sometimes imagined, while we were playing, what it was like to be them (uninvolved observers). Like, some of our friends didn’t even know the rules. Could they ever enjoy playing this game, without knowing the rules? Chess was fun because of its limitations. Imagine not knowing the rules, or how each piece moved. Imagine 22 people playing football not knowing the rules or what a ‘goal’ is. Almost two dozen people running around, no clue what to do. Could such a game really be fun? My friend asked me “What if we went through life not knowing the rules this way? such a life would be boring.”


09/03/30

I used to think the opposite of boredom was fun. But now I don’t think that. You see, I’ve been having a lotta fun (sex, drugs, some rock n’ roll but more jazz, food, good films, etc.) and yet daily feel just a terrible, hollow pain in my stomach.

The day my friend was buried, there was a lot of commotion, especially during their burial rites. It’s common among the people to refrain from burying—ritualistically—those who took their own lives. There was nothing fun about the incident. People crying, fighting. I stood there in my sandals. Showered, clean. Damp, cold grass. It’s like I’m back there again. There’s a light drizzle and the sky is low and gray and frequently groaning. And I basically prayed. Just prayed (this is highly unusual for me). And it wasn’t boring. I suppose it wasn’t boring because for a moment, I just about believed in something. For a second then, I believed in something—in my friend. The real existing person who did not exist anymore. It also made me realize that Boredom, or dread, wasn’t the opposite of Fun. I mean, I already regularly have and have had Too Much Fun in my day-to-day life and yet I was bored. Why was it not boring when my friend was being placed several feet below the ground, forever? No, the opposite of boredom was a moment-to-moment gratefulness. And there in the field I just stood there, while people fought, and I was thankful for having had the chance to know this fun and radical person—who always even-handedly flirted with, broke, and followed the rules.

That day I prayed. Maybe legitimately for the first time ever. I guess another way of thinking about it is that I was just conversing with them in my head.


21/4/30

-“They created the heavens because They were bored. They created the angels, the jinns, the world, the animals, the humans, because They were bored. To get rid of their animalistic boredom and silence, the humans fucked and created words. They created art and culture and yet were still bored. They imagined their way to physically recreate the images in their minds through electromagnetic sorcery, and remained bored. They became something of gods themselves, and found ethereal boredom.” This was spray painted on my friend’s wall.

-‘Boredom’, which we usually feel very personally about, derives from the word ‘bore’ as in ‘to be a bore’ (an external observation).

-SK says ‘far from being the root of all evil, boredom may be the only real good.’


13/5/30

-In the middle of the last century, Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell got together to write the ‘only’ story there is. The universal story: The Hero's Journey. It’s supposedly a story of a cycle of personal growth; what they call an ‘Individuation Process’. This trope, overused as ever (as the writers themselves claim it to be universal), is boring to me. I wish to walk the opposite way. A ‘Deindividuation Process.’

-DW says “everyone is exactly the same in how they all want to be different.”

-“OH THAT FRIEND! I think of them everyday.”

-AN and AH pretend to play chess (they don’t really know the rules, or at least pretend not to) and move pieces haphazardly before knocking over the entire board and all the pieces. They break the rules, but are having Fun. This doesn’t feel like normal fun, but the kind that’s the opposite of boredom. Was my theory totally wrong?

-The point of philosophy is to stop language from making us appear dumber than we truly are.

-LW says “I don’t know why we’re here but I know it’s not to have Fun.”


15/6/30

-The more Fun I have, the more Bored I get later on. Then I need more and more Fun to get rid of more and more Boredom.

-In all of the memories I have left of them, we are either eating, smoking, or drinking something. We’re silent in a lot of them. In one of them, they look at me and drunkenly blurt out that silence is the most proper sound a human can make.


16/6/30

-Sometimes you just have to sit there and get bored. I rarely make a real choice without doing this.

-No philosophy can look into the future (Hegel said this, but what would he know?)

-I suspect he may’ve been on to something. We never know what is really being said or being done, at least at the time of saying or doing it).

-I suspect my friend died of boredom. This is because the last time we spoke, they said “I’m literally going to die of boredom.” I took it for a joke; a meaningless, repeating gag. Should I start to consider that they really meant it? Contrary to popular belief, the past is always open to being changed.

-Paying close attention can make boring things easier. Attention can create new meaning.


1/7/30

-LW: A good philosophy leaves everything unchanged.

-Despite being the opposite of superstitious (I’m a radical skeptic usually), I kind of vaguely like the idea of dead people watching over the living, like some Truman Show type film.

-Having meaning die is like having a friend die. Oh wait or is it the other way around?


5/7/30

-The average cat has about a 7th of the average human lifespan. My cat meows and whines to go to the roof everyday, but some days I’m tired and some days it’s just too boring. Is one day of my life equal to seven of his? How does he deal with all this boredom?


6/7/30

-I’m watching a hyper-zoomed video of a single neuron looking for a connection with other synapses in the brain. Is this what meaning looks like from up close? It’s a fun video because it's brief.

-My friend and I had a substance-fueled joint-epiphany one day that it was easy to have epiphanies on substances and then masturbatorily enjoy not being able to verbalize your experience to others. As if those moments had anything to do with anyone else. Some things are truly, unendingly private.


7/7/30

-I never told my friend how bored I used to get, fearing it might upset them or try to draw away from their pain. Now that the final tragedy, The Bad Thing has occurred, I wondered if maybe telling them could have been... like... comforting. Like hey you feel this way I feel it too, let’s feel it together. But no. I didn’t do that. Boredom is paralyzing.


27/11/30

-That day, when it happened, I woke up to the phone call that said The Bad Thing was back and with a vengeance. My friend was no more. I brushed my teeth. Not slowly in objective but subjective time. It felt like an eternity. No, it was an eternity. Three months on Earth it’s been today, maybe? I’m still brushing my teeth. Repetition is soothing. It somehow helps the mind escape, but you can guide it.


1/12/30

-Culture is our solution to boredom. It doesn’t work all the time, but it’s kind of a weird miracle that it works at all. What was that quote about boredom and something about the devil’s playground?

-The problem is not that we are infinite, immortal beings. The problem is also not that we are finite creatures who also always die. The problem is that we are somehow both. Is it a problem or a blessing? I know you want to press a gun to my head and ask which one is the lie? Finite, or Infinite? The lie is that it ‘has’ to be one or the other.


5/12/30

-Is that... you?


6/12/30

-My friend was a true melancholic. My friend’s stance on life was strange—as if they had already lost what they possessed in real-time. They stared at me once when I was beside them and told me, “I miss you.” I suppose, they were already well-versed in loss.

Consider the act of dying, you know like the moment it happens, it shouldn’t ‘feel’ like you’re leaving the world. It’s not easy to imagine an experience you’re not in the center of (have we had any practice of this while on Earth?) No, I think when you die, it just feels as if you’re about to lose the rest of the world. That you’ll never see everyone in the world ever again. I think my friend held strong here, at those dying moments—they had already lost everything the first time. How hard would it possibly be to do it again?


8/12/30

-Sometimes I feel less free when I’m having fun than when I’m dreadfully bored. Why is this?

-It had then been three days since they passed when I felt a sinking kick in my gut, remembering. it was a heated fight, and they screamed at the top of their lungs, that I (as in me, they are telling me this quote) don’t believe in fucking anything. and based on the relationship we’ve had and the uncountable exchanges of gifts and petty sacrifices and love, that if I couldn’t understand what they’re asking for despite them having laid it all out on the table, then they didn’t even know who the fuck I was.

There was a lot of build up to this. I’m telling you the punchline without setting up the joke. Basically, they voiced their strong and well thought-out opinion that I did not care for anything. it was hard to argue. What I do care for, though, is to not forget this memory. and the all-consuming shame of having even repressed that memory.

The only real Sin is: to Forget.


14/12/30

-The most basic form of the Hero’s Journey:

1. Hero
2. Call
3. Journey
4. Trials
5. Crisis
6. Treasure
7. Return
8. Changed (Master of Both Worlds)


-My formal training is in Theater and Drama, with a special focus on Set Design. My professor was particularly fond of my skill set and once even jokingly said that I could “take any room and make it the other. Like turning an empty garage into a lush jungle, or a neat person’s room into a messy person’s room, or a homicide room into a suicide room.”


17/12/30

-Random line in a Hollywood romcom causes an ocean of anxiety in me now, enough to drown: “Guilt before action is morality.” My friend had a sadistic penchant for the most cheesy, cliche, and cringe shit known to man. I am wishing I could be more like them.

-My friend and I used sarcasm and irony in most of our conversations. It was a gimmick turned into tradition. Sincerity or sentimentality was seen as ‘uncool’ and ‘too real’ or ‘melodramatic’. But we still always meant what we said to each other. There were no take-backs either. When something was out, it was out.

A few times, we did get vulnerable and teary. Those moments were actually not so boring. Economics answers: the more Fun you have, the less Fun it becomes.


21/12/30

-Found a list from a few years ago. A list of things I could get them for their birthday. I had never used the list.


26/12/30

-We used to finish each other’s sentences flawlessly and never make a big fuss out of it. No one finishes my sentences any more.

-That feeling when you know you’ve done a bad thing.


27/12/30

-I search ‘bored’ in my text messaging history. Out of 731 found, 666 messages are from the friend who has passed. Most just say “i’m bored”. They would send me a few of those every day. It was something of a love language. The world is now an even more boring place than it was then. Lately, I haven’t been actively seeking out Too Much Fun.

-I notice that despite being pretty calm and cool in appearance, I can actually become quite violent when angered or upset.


28/12/30

-Fitting my life into the Hero’s Journey model:

1. YOU —  There’s a person. It just happens to be me. This makes life very dull and boring.
2. MEET — I meet a person. We are asked to be friends but they seem like an asshole.
3. WOAH — Turns out they have super magic powers and my new friend can just annihilate my boredom.
4. WOAH x2 — I have Too Much Fun for the first time ever.
5. BEST TIMES EVER BUT SHIT ULTIMATELY HITS THE FAN — Our new bond is such razzledazzle and ontologically significant that we get in trouble with just about everybody we know (friends, parents, colleagues, exes, etc.). Years pass this way. We become inseparable. We tone down the substances. We go out. We read like crazy. Days of chess nonstop. It’s just back and forth, with the emotional security akin to playing pong with a wall. We also start having fights and stop meeting others. Fights get intense.
6. CHAOS — People hold interventions and ask us to stop being together. There is a list of reasons why.
7. YOU BETRAYED US — We try to remain friends but now the real world is knocking at the door. We spend some time apart. No interactions. No interfacing. They want to meet again because they need me. I hold on to my petty rage as to why they agreed to stop talking in the first place. We meet after ages. There’s a huge fight. We both get extremely mad and things get bitter.
8. THE BAD THING — My friend mysteriously dies.
9. LOSS — I start feeling really down. Other people don’t like the new me. I lose more friends.
10. TEMPTATION — I want to abuse substances again. I do, and there is nothing to stop me..
11. ROAD BACK — The way ho-

Okay so I’ll stop right here. I will actually just wait here for a few seconds, catch my breath. See, I don't really want to cross this line. This Individuation Process, the same story we all keep hearing, isn’t that what got us here? Isn’t that like a historical necessity?

I’ll be real with you for a second. I don’t want to finish this Journey, and I don’t even think it’s gonna help. I’ll get too bored. The road ahead isn’t just the answer. The road behind isn’t just the answer. I’ll walk all the way back (I’m aware I can’t just bring you back to life, but this is actually about me). The Journey, for me, doesn’t stop. I keep taking it. I’ll tell you, as soon as I’m back there, back home, at the end of the Deindividuation Process. I’m gonna want nothing more than to come back right here to the Road Back and do this all again. Imagine Sisyphus not bored.


29/12/30

-Life goes on, with or without philosophy. Ah my poor friend! I think of them less often nowadays. When I do, it stings like a needle.

-Boredom allows you to think and choose. It hurts, but this is the price for Freedom.

-If I’m right, boredom is just whatever the opposite of gratefulness is.


30/12/30

-It’s fun to criticize how bland and lame TV shows are. It’s as if the shows are almost asking for it. But it’s all for show—maybe the producers are counting on my enjoying criticizing the show. I don’t really want to watch. I want to be entertained, but more than that I want to escape. I want to forget. Is this... Sin?


-Can one be a murderer through inaction?


31/12/30

-My favorite part of films are usually the intro where things are mundane, when The Bad Thing hasn’t yet happened. But for me, The Bad Thing has happened. This is where I am now. Today, right now. Bored. At home.”



And that’s where the diary just abruptly ends.


What’s interesting is that the diary ran out of pages right after the last entry, leaving me to wonder. Did the author only stop because there were no more pages left? Beyond the last page of the diary, we found two photographs tucked into the back cover, both of which with significant water damage.


In the first photo, one person is giving a piggy-back ride to the other person. Their faces are completely washed out, and you can’t really tell who is carrying who, or if they were the two people referred to in the diary. You can still somehow tell they were smiling when the photograph was taken.


The second photo is the same two figures wearing the same clothes, possibly taken on the same day as the first. Between the two figures is what looks like a glass showpiece which has shattered entirely.


The experts tell me that the diary was likely thrown into the lake by the person who wrote it. The diary was, of course, authorless, but that doesn’t mean no one wrote it. There were also some sketches—lines and scribbles really. Nothing concrete. I attempted to carry out a preliminary investigation by myself to find the diary’s author, but couldn’t find anything conclusive. But I knew they had to have come here physically to throw the diary into the lake. And I did happen to run into someone who told me that on New Year’s Eve, he saw someone handing himself over to the authorities for having committed a murder, without any proof to show for it. They mentioned that the person had been maintaining complete and utter silence since their confession. Apparently they just sit in jail all day and do absolutely nothing, but there isn’t a hint of boredom on their face.

AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO
AUTHOR BIO