Irony: An essay on how boring it can be to listen to a real bore quickly turns into … you guessed it, boringness.

Holy crap, I can’t believe I read the whole thing. (Full disclosure, I did kinda skim by the end.) And right now I am too dispirited to go back and scroll to the end to get the author’s name. Suffice it to say that he is a professor of some sort and he is working on a book.

He also has a thing against boring people. He wishes he could tell them to shut up. He also, apparently, wishes that he could discourse on his endless theories about why people are boring, how they got to be that way, whether or not they realize it, and how smart he is to have sorted this all out for you.

The worst part is that every now and then, there’s a real sparkle in the prose, so you just want to keep reading. It’s almost worth it. It’s partly worth it. Parts of it are great. Parts of it I read out loud and laughed at. Like this, for example:

What is it with bores? I mean the sort of people who always have to hold the floor. They talk constantly at you, hurling their words like spears, each one tiny enough but nearly deadly in their collective effect. Almost all bores seem to have been born with, or to have developed, an amazing capacity: they can talk and take in air at the same time, so there’s never a moment to drop in your own two cents. On they go. They take no interest in you or anything about you; at best, you’re a stage prop in the one-person drama that they compose, produce, and star in. These are the people who like to proclaim that they are about to make a long story short, when what they usually do is make no story at all interminable. They’re the people who clear their throats, look you in the eye, and, with great finality, say, “My point is . . . ,” then proceed to ramble on with no point whatever in sight. They’re the people whose idea of human interaction seems to be turning up the volume on the monologue that’s always going on in their heads. William James dignified this flow of words by calling it the “stream of consciousness”; in bores, the stream comes at you like a flooding river. Nothing stands in its way. Plutarch, the historian and moralist, dedicated an essay to this sort of person, and his assessment of the type was anything but sweet. Having a bore as a doctor, he says, is worse than having the disease; “as a fellow passenger he is worse than seasickness, his praise is more annoying than any blame.”

But I also fell a little bit more in love with the scroll wheel on my mouse.