Horse 2699 - The Travel Blog: Day 23 (The Quiet Lake)

We have arrived at a place called Lake Ennui and the most interesting thing of note about Lake Ennui is that the lake has been bone dry for a very very long time. The road which heads north along here, used to be a two lane road which was very bumpy but it is now a dual carriageway which has both grade separated intersections as well as ordinary box junctions (some with lights).
Along the road are small monuments to summers past and the occasional bout of sadness but you'll note that the last monument to ennui and plaque commemorating boredom are quite old. They're just not being made anymore.

One of the problems with living inside my own mind is that the machinery of industry is more or less constantly spinning. The factories demand a constant supply of ideas and other industries are always in the process of solving (and maybe creating) problems.
The thing about ennui is that it is kind of a listlessness or boredom which is usually caused by either a general sense of unease or a lack of immediate interest in things. The twenty-first century has given us lovely distraction devices; which means that a genuine sense of ennui might not even exist anymore. Hence the reason why the lake is empty.

It is important to state that ennui is different to doing nothing. I am happy doing nothing sometimes. There is a lot of joy to be found in faffing about. Lake Faff is at the other end of Tea Gardens Road; which also comes off of this road. However since we are driving along this road, maybe it is worth stopping at a lookout and looking out over a lake which once was.
There appears to be something like dried up sludge on the lake bed. When someone was boating across Lake Ennui, the sludge made progress difficult as it gets clogged in propellors and on oars. Nowadays I suppose that you could just drive across the lake bed, provided you had a four wheel drive.
While Lake Ennui is empty if we head just a little bit north we come to a hydroelectric scheme, which is powered by holding back the wild rivers of happiness behind a dam; which has created Lake Weltschmerz. It is full.

Lake Weltschmerz is notable for being black most of the time and while Lake Ennui was a cool lake of boredom which might have been filled by weariness with the world, Lake Weltschmerz is vitally overflowing with the notion that there is an abundance of bad rather than good in the kosmos. As a natural pessimist who knows that the glass is half empty because that is how glasses work (only a dingbat would fill them half way), Lake Weltschmerz is full of tepid undrinkable water which is warmed by a rampant hot spring of annoyance that the kosmos isn't as it should be but the hope that it could be better.
I kind of wonder what would happen if Lake Weltschmerz was drained. I expect that whole schools of salmon of doubt and barracudas of inadequacy would be exposed but seeing as I can not swim, I am certainly definitely absolutely resolutely not going to get some scuba gear and go diving.

The really funny thing about Lake Ennui is that immediately to the north, there is a border bewteen states. In the olden days, before the road was made into a high speed dual carriageway, the border was just beyond an uphill right hand bend and then a sharp left. If you had been speeding along at the posted speed limit, then if you weren't careful you could have driven straight on and through the chevron signs. The border still exists between states but instead of a fancy stone monument which marks it, when the road was widened, it had to be demolished and has been replaced by a simple metal sign; which I guess itself serves as a monument to Thomas Wolfe's theory that 'you can't go home again'.

As we keep on heading north beyond Lake Ennui, the highway passes through a copse and then into a kind of rolling pasture country. We will be joined by a full on six lane motorway at some point but before we get there, I want to make a diversion to a wee town called Tollbooth.
There are loads of little towns which got bypassed by bypasses bypassing them but Tollbooth served no other purpose that I can tell, other than to collect tolls for use of the old highway.

The only important building to speak of in Tollbooth is the Tollbooth Post Office Hotel. There is a sign on the front of the hotel which reads:
"A Pint, A Pie, and Kindly Advice: ₱5"
Be warned: after you've had the pint and eaten the pie and asked for the kindly advice, the kindly advice will always be 'Don't eat the pie.'