Cargo ships grind overhead. Industry churns the water into a permanent murk. It is nearly blind, so it listens instead. It sends out sound and reads the returning echo, building a picture of the world from vibration rather than spectacle…
and speaking of spectacle…
What bores you?
Rows of people facing the same direction, wearing the same colours, chanting the same lines. Week after week, season after season. It feels like cultural echolessness. So much noise, very little listening.
As a kid I tried to care. It seemed compulsory. Real Australians follow the game. They know the scores. They pick a side and defend it. I thought maybe I was missing a gene. It turns out I’m just an Uncommon Animal.
What I felt instead was boredom so deep it was almost physical.
Boredom is not always laziness. Sometimes it is a compass. It tells you this is not your river.
The Yangtze finless porpoise does not measure its worth by goals kicked or trophies lifted. It measures it by survival in hostile conditions. By staying attuned in a system that is stacked against it. While stadiums roar, I am more interested in a rare species persisting against industrial odds. While people memorise player statistics, I am memorising the curve of a dorsal ridge, the pattern of a shell, the way light hits water at dusk. One world thrives on spectacle. The other on attention.
Sport, to me, often feels like conformity rehearsed as passion. Wear this. Chant that. Hate them. Repeat. It binds people together, and I respect that. But it binds through sameness.
For years I assumed my boredom meant something was wrong with me. Now I see it as information. I was never built for the stadium. I was built for the margins. For the overlooked. For the slow accumulation of drawings that say look closer.
Kids Book Illustrator Andy C Marshall 