A short while ago, I awoke from uneasy dreams to find myself transformed into a gigantic bore.

I didn't realize the full extent of my affliction, however, until later that day, as I drove up a hilly street with my friend Penny. "Sometimes I ride my bike up this hill," I informed her, "and I get tired." Even as the words came limping out of my mouth, I knew that this was possibly the dullest thing I'd ever said, but I had already gained a terrible -- albeit sluggish -- momentum. "When I get here," I continued, "I'm really tired." Penny mm-hmmed. "When I get here," I added, "I'm really tired." There was a moment of silence. "But when I'm going downhill . . . "

And it only got worse as the day wore on. By midafternoon I'd become so dull that Penny seemed to be struggling not only to stay awake, but to maintain control of her bowels. It didn't help that we were driving up to New Hampshire, a trip that provided hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities to regale her with spectacularly boring comments. "Ex-girlfriend's sister used to live there," I said as we drove past Portsmouth. And then: "This is a long road." (Yep.) "I'm always surprised at how, you know, how long it is."

And so it continued for the rest of the journey. "Look," I would say, "a warehouse."

The problem with being a bore is that it is a self-perpetuating condition. You'll be halfway through a monologue about vine-grown tomatoes and it'll hit you: this is the dullest conversation since Michael Dukakis explained to his wife Kitty why he forgot to buy bread. As soon as you realize this, you'll begin to panic. Your voice will take on a jittery, cringy edge. At this point, you could be talking about the time you found Madonna in your bedroom with a pair of your underpants on her head, and it wouldn't matter. You are already branded with a scarlet B.

Occasionally, you'll attempt to mitigate your Dukakisness by saying something dazzlingly controversial -- which in your case means something toe-curlingly inappropriate. (Never, by the way, confide in a bore; in a moment of listless desperation, he will let your secret slip: "I was on a bus this morning and it took 45 minutes to get to Kennedy Plaza. . . . Er, did you hear Joe has gonorrhea?") The only decent thing to do now is to clam up completely.

Many people mistakenly equate shyness with dullness. Though there are plenty of boring shy people, the two conditions are by no means interchangeable. Indeed, most of us would rather face a thousand wallflowers than a single blatherer. A shy person you can work around. The blatherer, though, is a conversational black hole -- you'll be talking to someone about, say, a mutual friend's ugly divorce when suddenly you'll find yourself being sucked into a tale about Pookie, the blatherer's dog: "And then he stood up on his back legs and I'd swear he was trying to speak to me . . . "

The majority of bores don't realize how boring they are. They mistake loudness for humor ("YAAH!"), verbosity for eloquence ("The protagonist's fate was resolved sans denouement"), incomprehensibility for depth ("There's a mean man in the moon, man"), cliché for wisdom ("Takes all kinds"), the iteration of facts for analysis ("There are three branches of government"). And then there's the worst of the lot: the bore who mistakes long-windedness for intrigue, whose stories are the verbal equivalent of an Escher painting: tales without beginning, middle, or end.

It takes a special kind of bore, though, to make others be boring back. That's the kind of bore I've become. I was in a bar recently, trying to chitchat with a barmaid. "Where do you live?" I asked. "Kingston," she replied. "Oh," I said, "how did you get here?" Unless she had sailed a pontoon across the harbor in a hurricane, it was a question that could only elicit an equally crappy answer -- which is what it did: "Car."

But maybe there's hope for me yet. When Penny and I got up to New Hampshire, we sat out on the porch and reviewed all the dull things I'd said that day: "This is a long road" -- ha -- "This is a nice town" -- ha ha -- "This is a good song" -- ha ha ha. By the time we got to the "I get tired" bit, there was beer shooting out of my nose. Our laughter must have been audible all the way across Squam Lake, which is a fairly large lake -- not enormous, but fairly large, as lakes go.

Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: October 5 - 11, 2001