serdab disturbances by Simon Aulman

The reason I've not kept girlfriends for very long ...... shit no, let's admit it, the power lies with them, always - and the reason they haven't wanted to be around me for very long is that I am just not interested in stuff - I'm really not interested in anything, I'm bored by facts, I have no curiosity, I don't care about stuff, can't be interested in TV or box sets or social media or people's lives or history or anything. With friends we'll go into an art gallery and I'll be finished in the time it takes to walk briskly through the middle of each room. And I love Art. Maaan. I've never been to a gig that hasn't left me longing for the ending. Any ending. Amen.

Still the most agonisingly boring experience of my entire lifetime was a half-hour spent in the Ashmolean Museum about 2 years ago. I can't conceive how people can have hobbies (music isn't a """"hobby"""") or pretend to want to go on holidays to visit places of "interest" and then bore the fuck out of me by telling me about it afterwards. Out for walks with people it's "oooh let's go over there and see what's round that corner", and I am just so not fucking interested. Sure, I know it's me. I know there's something wrong with me.

And don't talk to me about interesting people - you only need to tell me that I really must meet her/him cos s/he's really interesting and I and you and he and she and everybody all know(s) that s/he's the most boring twat on the planet. I'm sure everyone's right when they say I'll be lying on my deathbed wishing I'd shown more interest - but no, I'll just be lying there wishing there'd been something around me that had actually really been interesting.

And yet and yet - an album like this, as boring as fuck to the whole of the rest of the world, kinda thrills me. Always has, always will, deathbed and all. Finding the one tiny beautiful thing amid the boredom and doing it over and over and over again. I found one tiny beautiful thing, bent it four different ways, and had it until it almost stopped being beautiful and instead started to become (oh fuck) "interesting". It's when stuff and life and girlfriends and boyfriends and me etc become "interesting" that they become horrible and boring and over.


(recorded in Southampton, February 14th 2021, originally released 14/2/21 as "disturbances" by Sonja Berlin-Jones, photo by me, white card on dusty ikea surface)