The Most Boring Man in the World – “Dragons and Turkey Legs”

The Most Boring Man in the World lived with the fear that in the middle of saying something, he would vomit. He knew he wouldn’t vomit in a comical, cartoony spray, which, if done in public, would cause enough collateral damage to allow him to escape the situation by running very fast, much like Batman throwing a smoke bomb and shooting up into the ceiling. Instead, it would be a convulsive burp-like vomit that came without warning and would leave him covered in something that looked like creamed corn and/or beets. This had never actually happened, but this fear alone was the reason that The Most Boring Man in the World rarely said anything at all.

Seated in his regular seat on the bus, he looked out the window. They pulled up to a stop, where he could see a man with no legs sitting against a parking meter. The bottoms of his jeans, which were cut off below the fly, were covered shut with duct tape. The Most Boring Man in the World was suddenly possessed with the urge to run off and grab the man, throwing him over his shoulder like a backpack, like Chewbacca and the broken C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back. Then he realized that the man with no legs might not have seen that movie, and might not understand the gesture.

The bus doors opened and people trudged on. A woman with a high-cut lacy shirt and a long flowing skirt sat down next to him. “May I sit here?” It seemed a strange thing to ask after she had already sat down, but he just nodded, and turned back to the window. The bus lurched forward.

“Would you like a banana?”

He turned back to the woman, who was holding out a slightly underripe banana that she’d pulled from a pocket on her skirt. Panic rose in his gut.

“I have tons of these, like I’m a monkey or a chimp who’s escaped from a zoo that’s right next to a supermarket and has been looking through his cage at all the people who are leaving with bananas and thinking, ‘oh, man, when I get out of his zoo, I’m gonna get a nice apartment and fill it with bananas.’ Of course, my reason for having them is pretty simple. I’ve got braces, and when I get them tightened, they’re all I can eat. See?”

Smiling, she showed him her braces. “The thing that really bugs me is that they’re not authentic. I work at a Renaissance Fair on the weekends, and instead of walking around singing like I used to, I get worried that I’m going to affect people’s experience by taking them out of the moment, when they see me in my bodice and chain mail gloves, but then they see my braceface, they’ll be all like, ‘hey, what kind of Renaissance Fair is this? Queen Elizabeth never had braces!'” She made a mock-indignant face like the angry tourists might make. “It also makes eating turkey legs super hard.”

The Most Boring Man in the World: “Religion”

The Most Boring Man in the World decided to go to lunch. This decision was not motivated by hunger, or the idea of going anywhere in particular, but simply that it was lunch time and that’s the time that everybody else in the office went to Outback or Chili’s and had margaritas and appetizers, which the waiters called “apps.”

He had accidentally gone to one of these restaurants for a fat co-worker’s birthday once, and when Skyler asked them if they wanted any “apps”, which were all things that sounded like fun fireworks (“Pucker Pickle Poppers? Exploding Eagle Eggplant? “), but were actually just various inexplicably fried foodstuffs, the Most Boring Man in the World imagined the following exchange:

Skyler: Would anyone like to start off with some of our killer apps?

The Most Boring Man in the World: Don’t you mean “CRAPS?”

Everyone at the table laughed and laughed, and there was a lot of high-fiving from the guys, and the girls all whispered to each other, “He’s so funny. I want to put my hand in his underwear.”

The Most Boring Man in the World: “Night Vision”

The Most Boring Man in the World decided two important things that morning. The first was that he needed to acquire, post-haste, a pair of night vision goggles. Specifically, the Battle Owl X5000 With Special Head-Mount Assembly, for the sum of $3,579.00, plus shipping, handling and all applicable taxes. The second was that he would need a raise to pay for these night vision goggles.

The Most Boring Man in the World imagined that at some point in the near future, he would have need of such a pair of goggles, possibly if he needed to move through the darkness to steal a diamond from a heavily fortified museum to pay off an international criminal syndicate who had kidnapped his girlfriend/fellow assassin. Once he had given them the diamond and freed his hot-ass girlfriend, they could together sneak onto the yacht of the head of the syndicate and garrote him with piano wire, and then take the yacht to Belize or Thailand or something.

What he had to do now was convince Bruce, his boss that he was due a nine percent raise, retroactive for three months. He ate a Go-Gurt in the break room to keep his energy up, then walked to the end of the hall and knocked on Bruce’s office door. There was no reply. He started to knock again, when the door flew open and he was yanked inside. It was completely dark, except for a candelabra in which three fat red candles burned. The air in the office felt damp and hot, and smelled like copper. The carpet squished under his feet.