In which the author complains of—

 boredom


Sincerity bores me.
To be sincere is to have one’s heart in the right place, than which few things are more annoying.
Show me a sincere person and I’ll show you a pain in the poopoo.
Honesty is the sincerest form of hostility. Whenever somebody wants to level with you, duck.
To quote Uncle Oscar, “The worst vice of the fanatic is his sincerity.”

The angry are sincere.
The drunk are sincere.
The young are sincere.
Please.
It soon leads to the sin of seriousness, for which one cannot do adequate penance.
The forces of seriousness are all around us. 
Romantics are serious. Try listening to Debussy. It’s like sitting in a piano bar without a drink.
As I prefer pleasure to pain, so I prefer Mozart to Beethoven.
Give me Bach and the Italians. Satie is sad, but not serious.

Society is a system of secrets. You see me as I really am, but you wouldn’t say so. It would hurt me. I see you as you really are, but I keep it to myself. You’d just tell me to go stick it up my star. 
Whenever someone offers to tell me "the truth" I cross my legs and look out the window.
Nobody knows what they’re talking about, anyway.

Have you the least idea how much I care about your dietary preferences? Were I to pick a little piece of poop out of my pucker and roll it up, it wouldn’t even come to that. 



Character bores me.
It’s like a job application.
Life refuses to be characterized, and so do I. Deep down I'm everybody else. I can identify with anyone but myself.
Reality is something I aspire to.
Of course I’ll never amount to anything. Money spoils the line in my pants.
I have charm, but no depth, and live on the quality of my errors.

To make money, you need brains. To spend money, you need culture. I have no brains whatsoever, but I'm crawling with culture.
Work is a spectator sport. I always step back and sit down while someone stands over me with a parasol.
The trouble with not having a job is that it denies me the pleasure of retiring.
I do have a PhD. The wizard couldn't give the scarecrow a brain, so he gave him a degree.

Café-sitter, slacker extraordinaire, flâneur without portfolio, boulevardierje-m'en-foutiste, intellectual dandy—sort of a happy Hamlet, evading responsibility with style.
Narcissist with undeniable charm, prick with a good haircut, a mere lad, and already effete—but more than just a pretty face.

Reluctant rake, underfinanced fop, voracious voluptuary, with splendid insouciance, spiced by panic and depravity.
Like all that's best in life I am quite useless, lounging on the daybed, eating grapes, putting in a call in to Dial-A-Girl.

Of course like you I am governed by the tyranny of moods.
I wish that I wished that I were otherwise. If I could wish to be otherwise I might accomplish it.
Frankly, I forgive myself.


Women bore me.
Dumb and delicious, brilliant and elegant, you’re more trouble than you’re worth.
When I see you walking down the street I get interested, which itself is boring.
When I see a man walking down the street I search for statements of style, am invariably disappointed, and turn my thoughts elsewhere.
My libido is canine. Flexible. Not all that fussy. But a woman’s bare feet are always glance-worthy; a man’s bare feet, always inconvenient.
My prevailing perversion is a beautiful-woman fetish, for which my family disowns me.

Women are like food. When you’re young you eat anything. When you get older you choose.
It’s no use my trying to explain what excites me about you—your stretch marks, your sculpted adipose, your blue marble veins. Pointless. You won’t understand.
Women are guilt. Men are the unforgiven. Some of us like it that way.

Women are engaged in a bold new experiment to see how annoying they can be.
You rage around in pants, seeking for ways to take yourselves seriously, in maenadic ecstasy over your shared enthusiasms, which is the one virtue of a mob.
Soon, good-looking women will be illegalized because they offend the fat and the ugly. 

Women who still love one after all these years—I sigh, I admit that.
But you have no idea what you are in the eyes of men. Were you to ask, and we find the courage to tell you, you’d never believe it.

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon PrimeTubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. No brains but an intellectual snob.