In Praise of a Dull Life

(Spoiler alert: it's not that dull)

I just discovered the Dull Men’s Club, and I’m all in.

Longtime readers might remember my post about men’s sheds, and their counterpart, women’s sheds. A shed, in Australia and New Zealand, is a clubhouse where people get together to tinker around with projects, maybe play a game of cards, swap books, or even organize an outing or a project. It’s a place you can go to hang out without having to make a big plan ahead of time—just drop by and see who’s there. It’s a combination library, community center, rec center, and neighborhood pub. I love the idea and would join a shed immediately if one opened up in my neighborhood.

So how had I never heard of the Dull Men’s Club, and its counterpart, the Dull Women’s Club?

As far as I can tell, the Dull Men’s Club started as a gathering of boring old guys and grew into an international movement, with a very active Facebook group and in-person meetings. The idea is to celebrate the mundane and share in the ordinary ordinariness of life. In its FAQs, the DMC explains that dull men are not idle: “Dull men do things — ordinary, everyday things that need to be done. They particularly like to do routine things. They like tickable lists, especially to-do lists — the thrill of ticking things off their lists.” At meetings, the website explains, there might be some washing up to do if you decide to go so far as to serve snacks, but that’s not a problem. “Dull men enjoy washing up.”

Other questions answered in their FAQ: Is the dull men’s club a movement? No, we like to stay put. Is the dull men’s club a twelve-step program? No, those programs are about change. This is a two-step program. We admit that we’re dull, and we aim to keep it that way.

Another organizer of a local in-person group said of taking on a leadership role, “I realize that I’ve bored a lot of people over the years and I’m highly qualified to keep doing that.”

Of course, dull men have hobbies. They like to claim that these hobbies are further proof of their dullness, but I’m afraid this works against them. As someone who just wrote a book about tree collectors, I am of course absolutely fascinated with these videos about the milk bottle collectors and postal box appreciators in this group, and I’m totally into long conversations about whether baggage carousels go clockwise or counter-clockwise.

The Dull Men’s Club’s Facebook group has a number of chats (which are like sub-groups, I guess?) on interests ranging from trains to history to metal-detecting, which made me realize that surely the patron saint of Dull Men is Mackenzie Crook, of the British version of The Office, for creating the absolutely wonderful show The Detectorists, which you should all go watch right now:

Anyway, the Dull Women’s Club celebrates re-reading good books, eating bananas at just the right moment of ripeness, enjoying cheese, and puttering around in the garden. I know, I’m the last person to claim that plants are dull, having written books that claim the very opposite, but the point is, you can do a bit of dull gardening. Pull the weeds around the stepping stones and show your neighbor how nice it looks once it’s tidied up.

So. I would very much like to join a Dull Women’s Club, where I would not be expected to have interesting opinions, engaging stories to tell, exciting plans for the weekend, or spectacular ambitions soon to be realized. The world feels a little frantic right now; I think we could all use a nice mundane get-together with our dull friends and our dull pursuits.

Which reminds me: the movie Perfect Days is beautiful and poetic and very much worth seeing in theaters right now. (Here’s the backstory about how a fairly dull idea to publicize Tokyo’s new public toilets sparked the idea for the film.)

My husband pointed out that this is the perfect Stewart film, because the main character reads paperback books, listens to 50 year-old music on cassette tape, takes the same pictures over and over again with a film camera, and gathers up tree seedlings for his little indoor garden. If you knew my family, you’d know that this pretty much combines all of us into one character.

Go see it, and embrace the beauty in dullness.

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Paid subscribers are going to Portugal this week

Paid subscribers have the option of signing up at the Patron of the Arts level, and in exchange I’ll make a painting of your favorite vacation spot (or something along those lines) and send it to you, and also turn that painting into a little art lesson for all of the subscribers.

I tend to underpromise and overdeliver on these. In this case, for Katie, who asked for a painting of Porto, I decided to do a quick one first, along the lines of what I’d do if I was traveling and only had half an hour or so to sketch. But I want to send her another one that’s not quite so sketchy. So there’s more to come from Portugal.

Meanwhile, a video of me drawing and explaining this little sketch is going out to subscribers today. If you’d like to join and have access to the entire archive of art lessons and demos, here you go:

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The Bit at the End

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