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It's Monday and I'm writing this column at Sonny's kitchen table. His two dogs Maggie and Shiloh read over my lap and point out spelling errors.

It's quiet right now, but I keep my ear tuned to any noise or sign that Sonny might be trying to crawl out of a window. He's my responsibility. I'm baby-sitting him for his wife.

Sonny had his knee replaced. He's been housebound for over a week. Sue had to go back to work and needed someone to watch him.

Sue: "I'm mostly worried because he's depressed and bored."

Me: "I'll do what I can."

My job — in addition to writing this — is to keep him in bed, get him to take his meds, make sure he doesn't fall in the bathroom, fix him lunch and find stuff on TV that he hasn't already seen 50 times.

That's easy. The hard part is listening to him bitch about how God hates him for giving him a bad knee in the first place, how being so immobile is crushing his free spirit, and why I'm not a true friend because I won't give him a rope so he can hang himself.

Sonny's real problem isn't his knee any more than mine was my shoulder last year. We simply share a malady common to lunatics — we're both deathly allergic to boredom. Monotony could actually be lethal.

Whatever makes tedium so potentially dangerous to people like us (and consequently everyone else nearby), is only part of the problem. The bigger issue is having one of us take care of the other. After a while, even that can get boring.

In trying to raise Sonny's spirits, I only managed to undermine my own. He's right. Being stuck in bed with nothing to do is just awful — especially for the one who has to listen to it.

Within minutes of Sue leaving, I started to feel the malicious creep of disinterest. I tried to alleviate the problem by coming up with ways to keep the two of us from lapsing into terminal ennui. After all, I was the caregiver.

At first I stood in the kitchen doorway and fired lead fish sinkers at a couch-bound Sonny from a Wrist Rocket. Neither of us was bored by that, although he did get tired of it way before I did.

When he asked me for something to drink, I concocted an on-the-spot libation from stuff I found in the spice and medicine cabinets, plus a little something from under the sink.

It was a medical breakthrough. Violent retching is a potent distraction from the dangers of boredom. Write that down.

After that, Sonny pretended to be happier. He couldn't fool me though. So I took the TV remote and his walker away. Then I changed the channel to "The View" and turned up the volume for an hour.

That really did the trick. In fact it was hilarious. I wasn't bored at all, and neither was Sonny. Did you know that it's impossible for a person recovering from knee surgery to pull themselves into a complete fetal position?

There was some other stuff that may have gone too far, but it was for his own good. Mine too. Neither of us sank into the abyss of self-pity just because we were stuck inside on such a fine day. But it's still probably good I forgot where I hid the rope.

I'm done writing this column. Sonny has been napping fitfully. Time to wake him up and make sure he's hysterically happy when Sue comes home and takes over.

Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley. Find his past columns at http://www.sltrib.com/lifestyle/kirby