Boredom is not necessary, neither is it illegal. Resorting to subjects, verbs and objects that are illegal often serves as boredom’s potent antidote. For a while, anyway. Until one becomes bored with whatever illegal activity, hormones will surge, chemicals will churn life into the dull grey soft matter that is the hardware of consciousness. We are children squishing ants on the front porch. Nothing wrong with that, even kind of addictive. And it never gets old until we do.
Let’s turn things up a notch. That bird over there needs a rock thrown at it, we think, and throw one in its direction not intending to hit the target, which it does. The sparrow falls quickly, unaware of how or why or even that it has become acutely inert.
A few years later another juvenile ensemble has assembled, waiting to pounce. That kid with the new bicycle (sweet tufted banana seat, suicide handlebars, nothing but chrome for fenders) sees them staring at him. He innocently leaves it unlocked in front of the drug store. The glass door doesn’t even shut before one of the boys mounts the stingray and flies it to the next neighborhood. Hey, it’s something to do. The dork comes out holding a candy bar he will never eat. Sick with loss, new emptiness where his new bike was a few minutes earlier, safe, solid and real, all his, suited to no one else. How dare anyone ride it but him. He must walk the city block to his home. It’s a joyless hike, the distance compounded as barefooted forced march. The void that is his loss weighs on him brutally. That fine machine, the envy of the other boys, the most significant physical extension of his personal identity, the thing that got him from place to place in style, gone.
The dork rides shotgun as his father steers the Impala through the neighborhood streets. Decades will pass until father and son both relive these moments in dreams they never share with the other. It never occurs to either of them as they reflect on this memory, a horrible experience transformed into a sweet recollection, time together, so long ago. And there it is: the stolen bike, still recognizable under the all the disguise from a hasty black paint job. The thief later becomes a friend.
He remembers the time he returned to check on the carcass of the fallen sparrow a few minutes after he’d killed it, but it was gone.