Boredom is a very useful force. I keep forgetting this. Briefly bored this afternoon, I stared at the heel of my palm, which had cuts in it, results of a bicycle fall last week. I began idly picking at the wounds, and dreaming about bicycles. Dreaming about the city, about the tenor of the city. I imagined orderly movement, swift and serene. I imagined parks where I had picnics once. There was one splendid day when I met a young couple, friends of friends, living in a house in Ravenna; we slowly made supper and took all day, we broke out the bocce balls and took several rounds in the backyard. Our man there was talking about astronomy. What is an Astronomical Unit, I asked him, and he told me. What do you study out there? The history of the universe. It's written in the way the Asteroid Belt moves and the other comets and things that come into our world. There are certain wobbles in the orbits of the planets which indicate cosmic events. Let's go check on the girls, there in the kitchen. How old-timey it was, women cooking, men playing on the lawn. And we wanted to break up that pattern. New gender roles for a new generation! And while I was idly picking at my hand, the light in the room moved, the coffee pot remembered me; I poured more coffee and went back to touching the heel of my palm. A number of books were laid on the table. Some of them were probably very good. I haven't been getting into novels recently—why is that, I wondered. Remember that man, that Alaskan, who made a celestial chorus, some kind of stochastic musical machine, which determined the notes it struck from geological sensors around the area? You could hear sonic derivations from the clouds massing, and tiny earthquakes. Was it really musical, I wondered? Or only sonic? How about making a sonic installation in a room? Could I project sparkly noises into the high corners, and create a larger space by so doing? It is very satisfying, scraping the dead skin off one's hand. What about those "rooms" that James Turrell makes with only light? And Robert Irwin, he spent a year on Ibiza, before it was a party town, living in a room. In the fall of 2005, I thought about boredom everyday. My room was bare. The bed, desk, bookshelf: a handful of books. A box of keepsakes. And it rained and blew the wind all the time in a gray city.

Life often gets too fun, too busy. O bring back boredom, please, Unknown.