Flagpole Sitta - Harvey Danger

"If you're bored, then you're boring"

My connection to Harvey Danger's 'Flagpole Sitta' does not come from one clever line near the end. It starts much earlier than that, in the opening rush of a person trying to make sense of himself while everything inside him is overlit, overheated, and slightly unstable.

The song has always felt less like a performance and more like a live wire report from a mind that cannot stop noticing too much. It is funny, but not casual. It is irritated, but not empty. It has that rare energy of someone staring directly into the mirror and seeing not a clean answer, but a mess of nerves, ego, memory, suspicion, loneliness, culture rot, and weird little flashes of joy.

That is probably why it hit me so hard. It sounds like the inside of a person who is awake past the comfortable point. The whole song is a catalog of being too tuned in: to yourself, to other people, to absurdity, to hypocrisy, to the strange performance of being normal. By the time it gets around to boredom, the line does not land like a joke. It lands like a diagnosis.

The line 'If you're bored, then you're boring,' worked well in my parenting style as a reply to the dreaded 'I'm bored!' It says, gently or not so gently, that imagination has been handed back to its owner. The world is full of chairs, socks, spoons, couch cushions, cardboard boxes, weird shadows, crumbs, clouds, songs, arguments, questions, and that one drawer nobody fully understands. If a kid cannot find anything to do inside that much available material, the problem may not be the room.

Of course, my use of the phrase could have gone either way. Maybe it taught resourcefulness. Maybe it taught them to stop bringing their boredom to management. Parenting is often a long experiment where the results are unclear but the slogan remains strong.

Then years later, the magic phrase returned from the next generation before I could even look up and smile. One of the grands said they were bored, and my daughter delivered the line herself: 'If you're bored, then you're boring.'

That is when a family phrase becomes a family artifact. It survives not because everyone sat down and voted on its wisdom, but because it worked well enough to become useful. It carried a whole philosophy in six words: do not wait for the world to entertain you. Notice something. Start something. Make something. Follow the weird thought. Pull the loose thread. Ask what the couch cushion is hiding.

Boredom is not always empty space. Sometimes boredom is a doorway waiting for someone to stop complaining about the wall.

And sometimes the real proof that a phrase worked is not that the children stopped saying they were bored. It is that one day, they said it to someone else.