Confessions of a Tap Dancer

This is a world where people stare blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for you to tap dance.

Here's the thing. I'll tap dance on a dime. I'll tap dance if you ask unrudely. In fact, I'll tap dance even when there's no one's there at all, on the chance someone might pass by. Not to show off, or to accrue credit, but merely to add my piece to the puzzle—which, in my reckoning, is the entire point of this corroborative art project.

I tap dance just to tap dance. In fact, the only thing that can stop me from tap dancing is people staring blankly, waiting, in their boredom, for me to tap dance.

In that circumstance, I used to tap dance desperately, trying to rouse...something. The dancing would suck, and I'd chalk it up to my own inconsistency. Then I developed some restraint with age. Dead eyes and entitled attitudes not only creeped me out—they'd always creeped me out—but they made me more reluctant to tap dance. I'd occasionally give it a game go, but it never felt right.

Now, at 63, I'm tight as a drum. I'll still tap dance on a dime, or for an empty room, but the dead eyes—what Italians used to call the malocchio (though the term is less common now that this has become the rule, rather than the exception)—shut me down like a toggle switch. It's not emotional. Not some moral resolution. It's that I've stopped flailing against the inevitable. Interestingness cannot persist in the face of boredom. 

I've written a lot about boredom over the years (e.g. "Boredom", "Boredom, Certainty, and Frozen Perspective", and "Why Does Time Pass Quickly or Slowly?"), framing boredom as a dynamic property, rather than the vacant gap we imagine it to be:

Your boredom is God's kryptonite.

Bored outlooks ensure boring experiences

Nothing's more boring than boredom

Bored people spray boredom. It's the ultimate rebuke of Gandhi's exhortation to be the change you wish to see in the world

How do I know boredom works in this counterintuitive way? I'm interesting, and innately zestful, and have found, again and again, that the only thing in the universe that can thwart my irrepressibility is boredom. So I speak from direct experience.

This isn't about me, though. I write this as a minor envoy from Planet Interestingness, where motion, stimulation, and creativity abound. And this isn't my lament. It's my response to yours. As a light snippet of tap dancing, I offer this amiable explanation of your boredom.