To Grunt and Sweat under a Weary Life

by Jeffrey Burghauser (December 2025)

Although I spent years trying to like sports (rather as gay men, in a more decorous age, tried to like women), it’s never even come close to working. My humoral equipoise must be off. Too much pituita. Galen would have recommended a decoction of hellebore.

This failure is frustrating. After reading Football for Dummies (2^nd ed., 2003) and peppering patient, kindhearted sports fanatics with questions, when it comes to professional athletics, I’m still a blind man before a Rembrandt, an anosmiac in a perfumer’s atelier, a goy blinking at a gefilte fish, a Jew blinking at a communion wafer, a stoic at a discotheque, a Bachophile hearing the Serbian gusle, a sane man encountering Foucauldian discourse analysis, or a feminist in a comedy club. I simply don’t get it.

For that reason, I was surprised years ago to find myself being interviewed for a position in the academic support department of a major collegiate football team. The job’s chief attraction was that I’d be encouraged to wear a tracksuit to work. (As far as I’m concerned, athletic mesh is right up there with the transistor and antibiotics.)

Having been shown into a conference room, I was questioned by two women: a moderately attractive 20-something, and a massive lesbian of indeterminate age whose head resembled an industrial-sized mortadella. Behind them was a computer-generated mural of a football player resembling the Hindu god of wrath, or a sub-Saharan Achilles. An optical filter had given him and his cowering surroundings the hue of arterial blood—one of the college’s trademark colors.

The interview took the usual course, beginning with circumambulatory chitchat, biographical trivia, and employment history before veering into those prompts which, in a job interview, one can only evade gracefully, as, in a driving test, one is expected to weave between the cones, without hitting them.

“Tell me about a time you failed,” said the more identifiably human of my two interrogators.

But I was distracted by the mural. Once upon a time, there was a Numidian race called the Circumcellions. “Their principal weapon,” reports Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “as they were indifferently provided with swords and spears, was a huge and weighty club, which they termed an ‘Israelite’; and the well-known sound of ‘Praise be to God,’ which they used as their cry of war, diffused consternation over the unarmed provinces of Africa.” Thanks to the mural, I now understood what those poor Africans were up against.

We were nearing the interview’s terminus when an unintentionally fascinating question was asked, also by the eugonadal member of this double-act. (The broad-chested, brachycephalic lesbian just sat there, inscrutable—perhaps daydreaming about chasing squirrels.)

“What’s your understanding of the pressures that affect elite college athletes?” said the vocal one.

In preparation for this interview, I’d watched a few sports documentaries, so my arsenal was well supplied with mission-appropriate clichés. I therefore stammered out some bilge about the burden of total, self-transcending discipline, Mahāthera-level focus, near-martyrial sacrifice, and willful imperviousness to pain.

But then I recalled an old friend. A successful cardiologist in Manhattan, his training seemed like a sustained, high-stakes hazing ritual. Med students are pushed to the very brink of mental and physical implosion. And how about another comrade of mine, the hedge-fund sorcerer? He pushes the boundaries of mathematics, and also of human endurance. And then, of course, I reflected on myself: a poet who serves his art with a fanaticism that surely must match whatever the elite athlete brings to the table.

And it isn’t just high performers. “I’m gonna get through this world the best I can,” vowed Woody Guthrie. He, too, evidently found life difficult—even though he was neither a cardiologist, nor a hedge-fund sorcerer, nor (I venture to add) a serious poet. There’s enough existential friction to go around.

Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce; most divorces are instigated by women. Therefore, roughly every other man you see striding purposefully through Midtown Manhattan (from the stockjobber to the porter rolling his racks of winter coats down the congested, urine-scented pavements) has endured something grotesque. Surviving such an ordeal isn’t just difficult; it’s terminal-velocity-difficult.

I once asked an elite collegiate football player for some examples of just how torturous the training program could be. He described weekly sessions which were actually designed to be so walloping that they’d routinely leave many players in tears. A grown man is so overtaken by a blend of pain, incapacity, and frustration that he reverts to a pre-verbal infancy.

But is this unique to elite athletes? Any man who’s experienced the implosion of a marriage will envy the athlete. Although the athlete undergoes hell, he enjoys the satisfaction of being regarded as having accomplished something exceptional.

“I’m gonna get through this world the best I can.” Indeed. Our failure to understand existential friction’s ubiquity is responsible for much social strife. Every demographic believes it’s uniquely required “to grunt and sweat under a weary life” (to quote Shakespeare), and that everyone else enjoys perpetual prelapsarian ease. Those who bloviate about “white privilege” really seem to think that some races enjoy a terrestrial Elysium. Grievance mongers can make a world unlivable.

This is unfortunate. If the conviction that you, alone, are miserable causes universal misery, the belief that we’re all miserable together creates (paradoxically) a wholesome, universal esprit de corps. We’re all in the same boat. Water is leaking in from … well, somewhere, and the last barrel of hardtack is infested with granary weevils. Our attitudes soften, for we realize that our neighbors’ most annoying habits belong to those who, just like us, are trying to get through this world as best we can. They don’t have much control over what will “do the trick”; all they know is that they risk going berserk, and that the only way to prevent this, for instance, is to talk on the phone while queuing; to use too much evil-smelling perfume; to honk at lady joggers; to go in for therapeutic crystals or essential oils; to act upon the unsound belief that all feet are equally worthy of public display; to play the autoharp; to use sans serif fonts; to haggle with overworked checkout girls over obviously expired coupons; to banish Twain from the curriculum because his characters use a certain Latinate, trochaic indecency; to honk, scream, and flail their hands as in response to the insoluble riddle of human stupidity, when, on account of your terminally tapering lane, you’re forced to shift one lane leftward, thereby depositing yourself directly in front of them; to love cats; to major in women’s studies; to stand on busy street corners, Bible in hand, sweating, gesticulating, and inveighing against faggotry; to ask their doctors about prescription medicines they’ve seen advertised on television; to masturbate in public restrooms; to use “individual” instead of “person”; to join religions that pray in a major key; to agitate for Satanic icons on Statehouse property simply to infuriate Christians; to mow their lawns more than once a week; to evangelize for veganism; to wear excessive makeup; to ride loud motorcycles; to use the word “sinful” to describe a baked good; to mistake complaint for a form of conversation; to address prim little missives to media outlets, claiming to have been “offended” by something; to laugh for no reason; to use the expression “the marital act” as a substitute for “sex”; to compare industrialized poultry farming with the Holocaust; to hate people on the basis of their race or ethnicity; to love people on the basis of their race or ethnicity; to use wedding photos as desktop images; to put vulgar bumper-stickers on their cars; to carry yoga equipment when not within 100 feet of a yoga studio; to vote for scoundrels whose very existence is inimical to the public good; to play Dungeons & Dragons; to use a vaguely black accent when describing good sex; to cough like a third-rate vaudevillian whenever a cigarette is lit within the postcode; or to ask frivolous, highly specialized questions at the very end of grueling meetings so that nobody can go home. The average person spends a substantial portion of his day trying to keep his brain from exploding.

Woody Guthrie’s protégé, Pete Seeger, recorded Dick Blakeslee’s “Passing Through.” If Stoics had a country, and if that country had a national anthem, this might be it, for the song (rather ambivalently) proposes easygoing detachment as the correct response to life’s occasional awfulness. The chorus goes: “Through, passing through, / Sometimes happy, sometimes blue. / Glad that I ran into you; / Tell the people that you saw me passing through.”

No part of a well-lived life can be characterized by “passing through.” Most definitions of “pass” suggest profound flaccidity: “to go by”; “to let go without notice”; “to cause or allow to go through or beyond a gate, barrier, etc.”; “to live through; occupy yourself during”; “to sanction or approve”; “to serve as a manageably acceptable substitute”. We overindulge in the old single-malt, and “pass out.” To “pass away” is our cozy euphemism for death.

When considering the experience of personhood, there’s only one sense of “pass” that nears the mark. It’s the transitive sense used to describe what the human body does to a kidney stone.

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Jeffrey Burghauser is a teacher in Columbus, Ohio. He was educated at SUNY-Buffalo and the University of Leeds. He currently studies the five-string banjo with a focus on pre-WWII picking styles. A former artist-in-residence at the Arad Arts Project (Israel), his poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Appalachian Journal, Fearsome Critters, Iceview, Lehrhaus, and New English Review. Jeffrey’s book-length collections are available on Amazon, and his website is www.jeffreyburghauser.com.

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