The older I get the more I realize that life consists of doing the same thing over and over again. Why can’t you do a job once and forever be done with it?

Personal hygiene is the worst. As I mature, the more I dread having to even take a shower every four days or so. I’ve only had a beard, mustache, long sideburns or a goatee once in my life and that was after I was in a coma for eight days and the first thing I wanted after I woke up was to shave. And I hate shaving. Yet there I was, every morning of my adult life, looking at the mirror all lathered up just so I could cut and slash myself and bleed like a stuck pig. I read somewhere that many Indians never have to shave, well, I want to become a member of that tribe.

It’s the same story with clipping my toenails which I can’t even see I’m so blind, let alone reach them. As a senior citizen I now have the added chores of clipping the hair that grows out of my ears and nose. I never had to do that before. And why is it that I can grow hair out of my nose but not on top of my head?

The older I get the less energy I have to do all these things. Even getting dressed so exhausts me that I’m seriously considering going to bed in my Wranglers and a work shirt.

That is why it’s probably best that my wife and I couldn’t have kids. I can’t even begin to comprehend how hard it would be to change a baby’s diaper once a day.

Owning your own home isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be either. Just like clockwork, every five years I have to paint the house, every 15 we have to get new carpet and every 25 years it’s time to reroof our home. Why can’t a person do it once and be done with it? Is that too much to ask?

We tore out our lawn a few years ago because besides saving water it had become a weekly chore I dreaded. I once calculated that I’d spent at least 50 years mowing our lawn for one hour each week which meant I’d spent 2,600 hours of my life mowing the grass. And that doesn’t even count the two months of my life I spent trying to start the lawnmower.

This is also why I don’t work out or belong to a gym. I refuse to spend a good chunk of my life and my money lifting weights at a gym after I’ve just spent two hours lifting heavy bales to feed the cows. I’ve got better things to do with my life than do ab crunches.

Ranchers know about repetitive chores better than most folks. Every day it’s the same old thing. Cleaning stalls, spraying thistle, feeding bummer lambs and dogied calves and spending an hour and a half catching the horse. You ought to have to only do that once and be done with it. But at least we don’t have to spend hours walking a dog every day so it can poop on a stranger’s property instead of their own like city slickers do.

I haven’t even mentioned the No. 1 thing that I get the most tired of doing repetitively every time I turn around and that’s paying a wide assortment of taxes.