No. 206 - Tits on a Boar

I guess I started doing the Wall Street Journal crossword puzzle a year or two ago. I grew up watching my mother work through them in those old books sold at the checkout line at the grocery store. There’d always be a yellow No. 2 pencil next to it with a worn-out pink eraser. I never paid much mind to them—they were just one of those things that make a house a home without you ever thinking about it.

But like I said, I started messing around with them, and now they’re part of my morning routine most days.

I can usually complete the Monday puzzle without help. Tuesday I’ll get three quarters of it. Wednesday, maybe half. By the end of the week, I’m a D student. If you don’t know, the Wall Street Journal makes them more difficult as the week wears on.

The other night I was wrapping one up—it took me about an hour—and it got me thinking about how much time I spend on these things. If I had to guess, three or four hours a week. For a brief moment, I felt a tinge of guilt, like there are better ways to spend my time. But it was fleeting.

I got to thinking about my role in the universe: one man—a grain of sand on another grain of sand in an infinite galaxy. I felt, well, as my grandfather used to say, as useless as tits on a boar. And it felt liberating.

What is one man ever going to do that will matter in a hundred years? Not much. And that’s fine. I’m just a middle-aged man trying his best with the tools he has. I may string a few more decades together, and then I’ll be an old man. Beyond that, I’m just another Evans in a graveyard with eleven prior generations.

I suppose what I’m getting at is this—why take life so seriously? I’m not a nihilist. I believe I have a purpose, but worrying about how I spend my off time is ridiculous.

I doubt my grave will say, “Here lies a man who spent too much time doing crosswords.” And even if it did, who cares? In fact, if I were walking through a cemetery and saw that, it’d make me laugh.

Life is tough enough without subscribing to the “efficiency movement.” Far be it from me to knock it—I used to be obsessed with making the most of my time. Life was broken down from years into quarters, quarters into months, months into weeks, weeks into days, days into hours, and hours into fifteen-minute increments. Talk about a recipe for exhaustion.

These days I take life about as seriously as a twig on the shoulders of a stream. I just roll with it. If I sleep in until ten o’clock on a weekday, oh well. If I spend a Sunday driving around a farm at five miles an hour in a truck, taking in the views of Texas Hill Country with a cigar and George Strait, so be it. I don’t care.

I’ve become as unapologetic as I am pragmatic. Maybe that’s how all drifters live. I don’t know. Truthfully, I don’t care enough to inquire.

I took my hands off the steering wheel a while ago, and I’ve been enjoying my life ever since. I have no illusion that I control anything, nor do I want to. One day at a time works for me.

*Composed, Edited, and Published at Whatley Wines in Fredericksburg, TX