I’m one of the few people left on this planet who haven’t dumped Facebook — well, me and roughly 3 billion other sad dinosaurs. Many of my close friends smartly jumped ship during the absolute dumpster fire that social media became in 2020. But I hung around, isolated in my mountain home and clinging more tightly than ever to quirky groups such as the Wild Winter Women (a robust and active group of 400 women who are improbably as obsessed with obscure cold-weather endurance sports as I am) and the Nedheads (residents in and around the town of Nederland who commiserate about life in the Front Range foothills.)
Like all social media platforms, Facebook continues to deteriorate into maddening noise. Still, in my circle of algorithms, the platform is quaint and fun and surprisingly nonpolitical (thanks to a heavy round of blocking in 2020.) Facebook is outmoded and uncool and thus perfect for the “Olds”, especially for those of us who have never been on the cutting edge of anything (I picked up Facebook reluctantly in 2008, about two years after most of my friends started admonishing me because I was out of touch and no one read blogs anymore. I also dragged my feet about signing up for Twitter in 2010 but felt I had to because “all the journalists were already there.” I wasn’t on Instagram until 2020. I still don’t understand Instagram. I will never be on TikTok et al, which is one perk of being an “Old.” No more new social media for me.)
But Facebook … Facebook is fun. Don’t @ me. (Oh yeah, nobody is on Twitter anymore, and I only look at it during snowstorms. I hear the @ works on Instagram as well, but don’t try to contact me there because I promise I will never find the message.) Anyway, lately my favorite thing on Facebook is a group called the “Dull Men’s Club.” I have no idea how the algorithm decided to start showing me — clearly, an exciting woman — a group for the Dull Men of this world. But each post is more delightful than the next.
There was the man who “wrote” a book of every possible permutation of the phrase, “For the first time is no time at all.” The number of sentences in the book was a factorial of 9, or 362,880 sentences. The text required 2,600 pages. He split this into 650-page volumes and had the paperbacks printed. These books exist! Four volumes of gibberish for which the author is so proud he went on Facebook to promote his self-published tome. “An incredibly dull read,” he quipped.
There was the 58-year-old man who found an old combination bike lock last used by his son 14 years earlier. No one remembered the four-digit, 1-6 code. He did the math and concluded he only needed to try 1,296 combinations to crack the lock, which given 30 seconds for each try (an overgenerous amount of time, he wrote), would not take longer than 11 hours. So he sat on his couch methodically trying each possible combination until the lock sprung open. He didn’t report how much time had passed, only that it happened at the precise moment his wife was taking a photo to tease him about “wasting his time.”
There was the man who wanted to prove that bananas are not a good unit of measurement (apparently using bananas for scale is something this group does. Inside joke?) He bought three bananas of radically different sizes and placed them next to a pair of glasses for scale. “To put this in perspective — if you put the banana on the left next to a Chihuahua it would appear roughly around the size of an Alsatian if you put the other banana next to the Alsatian,” he wrote. Later, he took a second photo of another, much smaller pair of glasses, to show that glasses are also not a good unit of measurement. In a PS note, he admitted he wasn’t a fan of bananas and didn’t know what to do with the bananas he had purchased. Finally, in a PPS, he wrote, “Something occurred to me late in the post — perhaps we could use a ruler?”
As I said — these dull men are just delightful. Imagining their lives harkens back to my preschool years when I was a rabid fan of Bert and Ernie, the muppet roommates of Sesame Street. Ernie is messy but loveable and Bert is rigid and boring but loves Ernie anyway (even as a small child and before I understood anything about relationships, I understood that Bert and Ernie loved each other.) Bert collects paper clips and reads books called “The History of Oatmeal” and “The Secret Life of Pigeons.” In my favorite childhood picture book, Bert is reading a hardcover outright titled “Boring Stories” and at one point calls out to Ernie, “The prince just drank a glass of water!” This line reverberates through my memory 40 years later. It was exciting that the prince drank a glass of water because it was exciting to Bert. For most of my youth, I pined to be an “Ernie,” but always suspected I was more of “Bert.”
As I charge into middle age, I feel a growing desire — and obligation — to embrace my dullness. After all, I am long past my youthful dabbling in loud rock concerts and thrilling gravity sports. I enjoy gravel road cycling — specifically long and arduous climbs; descents are just a necessary chore once you’ve finished your climb (except in virtual worlds on Zwift, which is one of the many reasons I love Zwift.) I read nonfiction almost exclusively. I play Wordle every morning. My average is still 100%. I would eat the same breakfast every day for the rest of my life if it continued to be an option (plain yogurt, berries, and multigrain Cheerios.) My favorite season is winter, for crying out loud. I love the gray and white monotone, the silence and stillness.
I am always so sad (genuinely) when winter is over. Lately, I’ve been far more anxious than I have been in months and trying to discern the reasons for this anxiety spike. I am nervous about a 100-mile foot race coming up on May 18 in Utah. This race is hard — rocks and sand and the rolling whoop-de-doos of the Thunder Mountain Trail that inspired that iconic ride at Disneyland. My body hasn’t been fully cooperative since the White Mountains 100; I’ve felt off-balance and out of step.
Still, I don’t think performance anxiety is the only thing haunting my sleep. Summer is coming, and with it a whole lot of excitement. My sisters and I are going to visit the places where we spread our father’s ashes in Canyonlands in a couple of weeks. At the end of May, we’re traveling with our mother and two of their daughters to Paris for our first international family vacation. Then I’m joining friends for a two-week bike tour, then comes Beat’s barrage of summer races, our annual trip to Switzerland, and everything else in between. It’s all good but it’s all a lot. My mind has been swimming with the logistics.
On Thursday, winter returned with one of Colorado’s classic spring snowstorms. After a couple of weeks of struggle — slathering on sunscreen and bug dope, reminding myself how it feels to run for 3 hours in 80-degree heat, and trying to figure out the ratio of water and electrolytes my body needs to not pass out in those conditions — I was free. I could strap on my fanny pack with its 16-ounce water bottle and lope through the frosty, silent landscape for several hours without a care. I wasn’t fast, but I didn’t feel dizzy or off-kilter once. I know it’s April 19 and this snowy weather won’t last — not long at all. But for a moment, I can breathe again.
As I ran along the ridge above South Boulder Creek, I thought about how wonderful it is to be “dull.” After all, this is why the dull men in the Dull Men’s Club are so delightful. They come across as happy. They can spend 11 hours turning numbers on a combination lock and be content. They can be content to simply run from their front doorstep every day and cover different combinations of roads on their suburban grid to draw Strava art for the delight of their son. Their lives are just as meaningful and satisfying to them as the person trekking across Antarctica or trying to break a world record for consecutive marathons. The dull people’s lives are probably more meaningful and satisfying to them because the drive that pushes people toward achievement is the same that will never allow them to feel content.
Yes, the drive toward achievement is a necessary part of the human condition and advancement. But since so few of us are out here trying to cure cancer, one can argue that cracking the code to an old combination lock can be just as meaningful to one individual as crossing Antarctica is to another. From the first person’s perspective, crossing Antarctica probably looks like an incredibly dull endeavor — just one foot in front of the other in a sea of white for weeks on end. The combination lock at least presents an intellectual puzzle. Either way, we’re all heading to the same destination in the end.
I thought about starting a Facebook group called the “Dull Adventurers’ Club” and pondered what it might look like. There would of course be the polar explorers with their methodical calculations of calories and daily mileage. There would be the marathoners who have sharpened their training to perfect science. There would be the bucket-list travelers who jump from place to place with much in the way of Instagram content but perhaps fewer unique stories. There would be people like my husband Beat, who embarks on the same thousand-mile journey across Alaska every winter. And while crossing Alaska on foot through anything a northern Alaska can throw at him is anything but dull, there’s a kind of methodical routine to this endeavor, an expansive ritual that mirrors the nonsensical factorials of the phrase, “For the first time is no time at all.”
I love the idea of embracing my inner Bert. In accepting dullness I remove expectation. I can find contentedness in who I am rather than strive to be something I’m not. After that, there’s nothing left to achieve and everything left to discover.
I once bought a used car which had a bike lock wrapped around the steering wheel in such a way that you couldn't remove it without the combination. I would methodically go through the numbers whenever I had some time, such as at red lights, or when I gave one of my carless housemates a ride to do some errands, and eventually I hit upon the combination. Then I had a useable bike lock.
Another great one!