I Am So Bored

When I was a kid, I remember being bored on a pretty regular basis. "A good problem to have" is what my dad always called it. I suppose for him, it must have seemed that way. After all, a bored kid is the main ingredient in a manual labor pie. My dad had a passion for curing me of that boredom. The man never seemed to run out of ways to fill my idle time. Vacuuming, dusting, dishes, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, tidying... and that was just the indoors stuff.

The man owned a two acre plot of land. There was alot of outdoors stuff.

Now I don't say that to complain. My childhood was a happy one, and even if those chores never inculcated in me a desire to keep my own home so fastidious as his, they certainly taught me perspective. Not so much the perspective he meant to teach me, I suppose; elbow grease is still not something I produce in any impressive quantity. Same goes for cleanliness, for discipline, or even the simple capacity to shut my yapper when I get to whining about petty troubles. No, what I learned from those days, more than anything else, was this: how to turn drudgery into something halfway entertaining.

Because what else is a kid to do? I was a kid before the era of smartphones or ipods. So when I was set to the task of pulling every last weed on those acres, bent over with my ass in the air in the scorching sun getting eaten alive by mosquitoes ripping up every unauthorized plant I could find... I learned to make a game of it.

What else was there to do, right? Challenge myself to pick the thistles sans gloves -- an incentive structure that promoted excellence. Practice the moonwalk while vacuuming. Beating the dust out of the rugs put me in the batter's box at the world series. Cleaning my room became an exhaustive search for the buried treasure that, legend held, was enshrined somewhere in this temple -- perhaps beneath the Pit of Laundry. Elaborate gesticulation inserted into the process of washing the dishes was Mr. Miyagi's way of turning me into the ultimate karate fighter.

(It did, once or twice, result in a broken dish, but I reiterated to my parents that all life was about balance.)

Fast forward to today. Boredom is an omnipresent threat lurking on the borders of my consciousness. I don't have much, if any, chores to attend to, but even the most fulfilling routine, with sufficient repetition, becomes precisely that -- routine. Now I'm in my forties, more than comfortable financially, gainfully employed when I feel like being gainfully employed, and by any standard, living the dream.

Literally, in fact. And not figuratively literally, but literally literally. See, twenty-some years back, I had this dream where I could probe the thoughts and feelings of others. Only when I woke up... it was still there. I could sense my then girlfriend's grumpiness; my boss's smug satisfaction as he chewed out one of my coworkers for a petty infraction; the impotant rage of a nearby driver as his lane slowed to a stand-still. I'm not proud to say I went ahead and pilfered a gold star idea from a colleague competing for a promotion and proposed it up the chain right before he could. Promotion achieved, pay raise secured, girlfriend pampered and indulgence reciprocated.

Sure enough, with a little concentration, I learned to alter those thought patterns. Like anything, it got easier with practice, and as months became years, it became rathertoo easy. I quit my job, but left the firm with a golden parachute of massive proportions. Rent payments for my deluxe skyrise pad in the city were no longer required upon the realization of my new landlord that I had saved his life. (Or saved his family's lives? I don't even remember any more.) My girlfriend was a nice girl, and pretty-ish, but I didn't kid myself about my capacity to stay faithful with these new tricks up my sleeve. I cut her loose shortly before I failed to stave off the temptation, cosseting my ego by gifting her a handsome, well-to-do young stud to replace me. Then to reward myself for my generosity, I brought home a nice tasty professional cheerleader.

For a long while, I forgot all about that "good problem" of my upbringing. I mean, how big of an asshole would someone have to be to get a gift like mine and have the audacity to complain about it? About anything, really. It could solve nearly any problem, and even when my own biology was on the fritz, it meant the best treatment from the best doctors as their highest priority. I got to go anywhere, meet anyone, have anything, screw anybody.

That's not to say there were no drawbacks. Not quite. After all, the more a person has, the more paranoid they're apt to be about protecting it. It's lonely, sometimes, not being able to tell anyone about this power of mine, to have even my closest friends and family in the dark about what all I can do -- at least not without blanking their memory after or inventing an excuse for them to cling to secrecy. An unfortunate necessity, though. Nobody wants to go through their day worried about what insane methods a concerned citizen might use to eliminate someone like me for the supposed greater good, or to extort favors, or whatever else.

Even so, living this particular secret has been a net amazing experience.

Only...

OK, just try to hear me out. We all have those dreams of winning the lottery, right? Likewise, we've all probably had some sanctimonious douche canoe remind us as we rattled off our lottery dreams that most lottery winners actually wind up miserable, that money only buys happiness up to a certain extent. Well, today, I am my own sanctimonious douche canoe it looks like, because... I hate to say it, but there's some truth to it. Having everything and earning nothing actually does get tiresome after a while. Like, imagine your favorite food at your favorite restaurant. Great, huh? Mouth-watering and perfectly prepared. Now imagine that you got to eat that whenever you wanted. So you start to eat it every other meal. For weeks. Months.Years. At what point does a treat cease to become a treat? It's Halloween, except your parents owned a costume shop and a candy store and you had a spare key to both.

So yeah, here I am, two decades and change into this perfect life, and... so help me, I'm beginning to have that good problem again. But lucky for me, my dear old dad unwittingly taught me how to cope.

With a little luck, the cure for my bout of boredom was a woman named Nikki.

Nikki was, for the most part, not substantively distinct from the countless other women I'd set my eyes on over the years. She was a fitness buff and a dance team instructor at a high school in the suburbs, so while she was maybe a little more lean and cut than I usually went for, variety is the spice of life as they say. I'm serious. You ever wake up with mind control powers, don't restrict yourself to an endless buffet of bikini model types. Play the field. Snag a girl who's a head taller than you. One with more piercings than you'd have thought a person had places to pierce. A black chick with an ass so big it frightens you. And so on -- you get the idea.

Nikki, I guess, wasn't so far outside the conventional. Gorgeous face, body so trim her big tits look almost too perky to be real, thick blonde hair -- but platinum blonde, like she was left on a beach for a decade or two. She even wore smart girl glasses once in a while. When she wanted to look smart, I guess. We had a bit of an age gap between us, wth her only in her late 20's or so, but sue me if my appetites haven't aged as quickly as my bones. (Besides, in her social media profile, she'd described herself as an "old soul," so there.) She was hot, for sure, but still quirky enough to be intriguing.

Now yes, the point of all this was to make a game of it, but I had to cheat at least a little bit at the onset to do some of the groundwork. After all, I didn't want to go to all this trouble only to find out I'd picked a dud. A few years back I'd had a date with this eastern European chick I picked up at the airport, and... I tell ya. Everything seemed normal right up to the moment I got my pants off, and then the poor thing couldn't stop crying. I didn't even want to know what had happened to bring her to that point. Even though I could (and did) reach in and squelch all that ugliness inside her, it definitely killed my mood. Hopefully her next date went better, both for her and for the lucky guy who landed her.

Uninterested in risking a repeat of that unpleasantness, I poked around inside Nikki's head to make sure she was a candidate, and was pleased to find everything healthy and hetero. Nikki liked dudes, was sex-positive, and wasn't in a committed relationship. Yes, yes, I could simply make her straight and single, but that always seemed sorta mean-spirited for one, and for two, the whole point was to give myself a challenge. I'd be breaking the rules of my own game if I started out by making her into someone she wasn't.

With the target in my scopes, I got to work. This wasn't going to be easy, and might not work regardless. Still, for the first time in a long time, maybe I wouldn't look out at all the acres of mindscape out there and feel that same old problem.

***********************************

Nikki blew her whistle and waved the squad over. It was heady, sometimes, how much respect these girls showed her, even now watching her with breathless anticipation for her feedback on their new routine. She'd studied dance since first grade, after all, and had even participated in some professional shows. These girls were right to value her input, as she had helped shape them into one of the top high school dance squads in the state.

"Great work on that, ladies," she opened, but she didn't let their relief stand long. "Tricia, your timing was about a half beat behind on the kicks. Make sure you're leading the music, not letting it lead you. Morgan, great form, but don't forget to smile. Lindsay, dynamite work out there! How many hours of practice did it take you to nail it like that?"

"I dunno. A lot," said Lindsay guardedly.

"Well it paid off, girl. I want you to take the new girls and work with them in a group, show them how it's done. Can you do that for me?"

"You got it, Miss Campbell," she answered, a flattered grin threatening to overwhelm her often dour face.

Nikki couldn't have said what had happened to Lindsay these past few months. She'd only transferred here at the start of the semester, and while her natural athleticism and raw beauty seemed to make her a shoe-in for the squad, her attitude had been simply terrible. Petty bickering, ignoring directions, skipping workouts... she had been kind of a chore. Not Lady Viking material at all.

Then one day, Nikki had caught her crying alone in the locker room after a particularly disruptive practice. The coach had actually been waiting around to catch the girl on her way out of school to let her know she was being cut, but the sobbing girl had moved her to pity, so instead she sat down to ask her what was wrong. Lindsay had opened up to her about all sorts of things -- how hard it had been moving schools her senior year, about how awful it had felt when her mom had walked out on her and her dad, about how dance had been the only thing that used to make her happy but now she felt like she was losing even that. Nikki had held her, talked her through it, and promised not to give up on her so long as Lindsay didn't give up on herself. Since then, she'd become a better and better team player by the day until now, she was the strongest asset on the squad, bar none. Her coach could only guess how she'd come so far so fast.

Hey there, me again. So yeah, I could definitely tell you how Lindsay came so far so fast. It's because she was a recent Juilliard graduate, and frankly, one hell of a hard worker. The girl had all too much experience with the school of hard knocks growing up. Me, I'd been fucking her on and off during her years at Juilliard after I saw her perform. After she finished up there, Lindsay was struggling to find work so I figured I could help her out, put a roof over her head while she spent the semester as my In with Nikki. My gift made short work of the enrollment process, and from there, it was a simple matter of planting that bratty, petulant seed in little Lindsay and letting her coach do some weeding, as it were.

Tangentially, fucking ballet dancers is exactly as amazing as you would think it is.

The practice resumed, with Nikki moving around giving pointers, modeling techniques, adjusting routines, making sure nobody was slacking in the gym. They didn't need much such supervision; these girls wanted to win state as badly as she wanted to see them win. Finally it was time to call it a day. She wished them well, then bided her time until she could close and lock their locker room for the evening. In the fall they shared it with the soccer team, and winter with basketball, but this time of year they had it all to themselves as the softball girls had another out by their field.

While she waited for the girls to shower up and change back into normal clothes, she made the rounds with the parents. Nikki wasn't a teacher, not officially, but she still considered what she did a part of the girls' education, and parent outreach was an important step in reaching them. Besides, there was never a shortage of needs that the parents could help with, from chaperonage to transportation to simple financial support for the squad. Plus, more than once she'd gotten a heads up about what was going on in a girl's life, and that helped her be a better coach and a better support in their life.

It was mostly moms, as usual. Nikki passed on good feedback on Allison's progress, told Danae's mom about her strained hammy, listened to yet another high-pressure sales pitch from Mrs. Nakashima about why Kristin needed to spend more time in the spotlight. There was one potential dad, there, though she didn't recognize him. In fact, she'd briefly worried it was another random perv off the street swinging by the ogle teenage girls in their workout clothes. (Not that that had happened routinely, but still, once was enough.)

That's me, to be clear, and honestly? I totally would've been ogling the teenage girls in their workout clothes if I didn't have to worry about Nikki catching me in the act. I'm not even sure my Lindsay was the hottest on hand.

Maybe some other day.

"Good evening," she said, trying to sound warm, but not too warm (just in case). "I'm not sure we've met before. I'm Coach Nikki, and you're..."

"Grant Fleming," he said, accepting my offer of a handshake. "Lindsay's dad."

The coach's eyes widened in surprise and elation. "Lindsay's... Oh! Mr. Fleming, it's so good to meet you! I've been looking forward to meeting you all semester! Lindsay's told me all about you."

"Notallabout me, I hope," he joked. "And please, it's Grant."

"Grant then, great," she said, and finally realized she was still holding his hand, releasing it with a small flush. As she and Lindsay had gotten closer, she really had learned a great deal about this man, and she knew her newest Lady Viking thought the world of him. At least as much as any teenage daughter could. "So you're here to pick her up?"

"Guilty as charged. Yeah, usually Linds rides home with Erika, but..." He didn't finish, but she nodded anyway, aware Erika was out sick for the day.

Yes, I've fucked Erika, too. High school girls usually fall outside my range, but you should see this girl. Lips like that, you can't help but want to wrap them around your cock while your pretend daughter fingers her clit to orgasm. I was a little bummed she wasn't here to not-ogle, but I'd needed a reason to come to practice, so I'd driven by Erika's house that morning to push her into playing hooky.

"Well it's nice to meet you."

"The same, totally," the man answered, pausing to let her say a farewell to another dancer as she departed. "Seriously, I can't begin to thank you for all you've done for Lindsay this year. She was having so much trouble adjusting here, but she's told me all about how you stepped in and took her under your wing. I'm so grateful, seriously. If there's anything I can ever do for you -- for the team, I mean! -- I'm happy to do it."

He winced for his flirtation with flirtation, though in truth Nikki probably wouldn't have considered it if he hadn't reacted as he did. "Well thank you, Grant. You know, someday I may just take you up on that."

Then Lindsay was exiting the locker room, and that was that. Nikki walked away smiling to herself as she listened to Lindsay chatter on about how she'd gotten to teach the girls some of her moves today. Moments like these, she told herself, that was why she was in this business. Frankly, the girls' technique was incredible, advanced way beyond anyone else on the team. She had every right to feel proud of herself.

Half an hour later, though, Nikki was no longer smiling. Quite the opposite, in fact, as she glared at the engine of her car. "Why won't you start, damnit!" she yelled, pacing back and forth, kicking the front tire and then grunting in pain. It was a used car, going on a hundred and fifty thousand miles, but it had always been so reliable! It ought to be. Her uncle was a mechanic, and she made sure to follow his every directive on maintenance and care. Only now, as she turned the key in the ignition once more, it didn't bother even making a sound. It had been just fine when she'd driven it here! Ugh!

"Car troubles, Coach?" came a voice from behind her. She turned and there was Lindsay of all people.

"Lindsay? What are you still doing here? I thought you left a long time ago."

"Yeah, but I forgot my laptop, and my dad said I needed it so I could access the notes for a test tomorrow in Mrs. Burley's class," she grumbled. Nikki understood the frustration with meddlesome fathers, but still, she counted it as another point in Mr. Fleming's column. "So what's going on?"

Nikki glowered again at her car. "Oh, just some engine trouble. It may finally be the big one this time. Guess I'll have to get used to taking the bus for a while." Ugh!

"Hang on," said Lindsay, then suddenly turned and yelled at her father, who was parked nearby. "Dad! C'mere!"

"Does your dad actually know anything about cars?" she asked hesitantly. She'd been pretty enough long enough that there was nothing charming in watching some would-be white knight fumble away at her problems in an attempt to impress her. She didn't want to think such dim thoughts of what seemed to be a nice man, but then again, she didn't want to stand here in the parking lot watching him learn to be an auto mechanic, either.

Little did she realize, I'd already learned how to fix cars -- her car, anyway. I'd had a reputable mechanic from Queens teach me what I needed to know. Turns out it wasn't all that hard to force the hood open and disconnect the right wire in the right way as to keep things subtle to the untrained eye. Doing it in the middle of a school parking lot would be have been tricky if not for the handy ability to make people ignore what they were seeing. I'd even been prepared to fudge my rule and use it on Nikki if she caught me in the act, but luckily for me, I was still playing a spotless game. All I had to do was put her in the driver's seat, call out "try it now" a few times, then reconnect it.

Could I have simply chatted her up, used my Dad of the Year cred with Lindsay to work my way up to an ask? Maybe, but personalities don't always mesh at first, so that was a risk. Making her a damsel in distress was way better as an opening salvo. I'd even contemplated a more heavy-handed solution. After all, not like I couldn't just give her a new car or something, but I'd learned long since that making someone feel grateful was not at all the same as making them feel indebted.