Occasionally—once or maybe twice in a decade or two—people will ask me when I'm going to write a book. My reaction is generally something like, “Whenever a pig dive-bombs you.”
I can't deny that I've thought of the idea, but whatever I could write would be about as interesting as watching wood rot or listening for the sound of the nonexistent tumbleyuk.
As a kid, my favorite pastime was digging holes. I once even thought I'd go into hole digging as a career.
My crown jewel of holes was the one I dug as a club house complete with pictures on the wall and cutouts in the dirt sides for chairs. A four-by-eight piece of scrap plywood served as the roof.
End of story.
Oh, and my sisters and I used to use the family's old outhouse as a playhouse.
Somehow, I don't think copy from those kinds of experiences would bode well with publishers.
The problem is that I was a tired kid. Now that I'm an adult, I'm a tired adult.
Tired kids and tired adults don't write books because we've never had the energy to do anything interesting. Maybe folks like us make it outta' the house every now and then, but for the most part, we're mostly content sitting or lying around the house being tired.
People who write books have to know interesting stuff they can share with their readers. My people—that is to say “tired people”—are happy sitting around the house not knowing anything.
That's because we're too tired to know anything.
Take the other day when one of the knowers-of-all-things-interesting-and-otherwise unloaded to me about a disagreement he had had with his lawn care company. As he went through the whole nine yards of proper lawn care, about which he is apparently more knowledgeable than the lawn care company or anybody's company, for that matter, I was thinking how nice it is to know absolutely nothing about proper lawn care.
Don't you see? If the aforementioned knower-of-all-things-interesting-and-otherwise didn't know anything about proper lawn care, he wouldn't have been bothered by a disagreement in the first place.
A tired person's philosophy is if there's a lawn care problem, don't get upset about they way the lawn care professional is doing the job since you don't know beans about proper lawn care; neither would you know he was doing it incorrectly.
More importantly, a tired person is just too tired to know anything about the subject, any subject. And with that, he's exceedingly happy.
Sometimes, it's just a lot easier and a lot less tiresome to not know anything about anything.
If the car breaks down, “Call the man, Aunt Bea!”
If the roof's leaking, “Call the man!”
If the refrigerator stops working, “Call the man!”
If the door lock won't lock, “Call the man!”
If the lawnmower breaks down, “Call the man!”
If you don't understand tax law, “Take a long nap!”
During holidays—Thanksgiving and Christmas mainly—my extended family would all gather at my granny's and papa's house in the country. While I relished the excitement of the seasons and the family get-togethers, I always dreaded my cousins' arrival because they were the high energy type. They were forever wanting to go outside and participate in mostly disorganized activities with all being of the tussling nature.
Their games just took so much energy, and I was the tired kid in the bunch.
While I was content with the more placid things like sitting on the porch and taking a nap, I felt obligated to do as any good cousin would do which was to join them in what was later to be known as “hyperactivity.” Back then everybody just called it “boys will be boys,” and the only medication for it was just growing up.
“I need a nap!” I remember thinking to myself as we played their stupid, high energy games.
One of their favorite games was called “romping in the hay barn, the chicken coup, the stables, the feed troughs, the watering basin, the tack shed, the orange grove, the sink hole, the cemetery, the cow pens, the cow patties,” and wherever else they could wreak havoc. More times than not, one of them would end up breaking a bone or, at the very least, experiencing a very serious “skint” on a part of his body due to his “boys being boys.”
If you get right down to it, not only was I a tired kid; I was also a very boring kid. Same's thing true today. Tired and boring...that's me.
That's because I'm content with not knowing anything about anything.
But I've been thinking about a title for my pretend-it book.
How's about “Nothings from the Porch” or “The Art of Knowing Nothing and Enjoying It.”
Maybe that'll keep that dive-bombing pig away.
