i do a lot of crossword puzzles II

today i went after the saturday puzzle, the king of all NYT puzzles. I didn't go in with monster expectations, i've often failed at this one. i headed over to Penny Lane in San Marcos to set up my camp and go to battle. i'd had to do some moving from our office storage unit and was a little sweaty and uncomfortable, but relaxed with the gentle caress of Stella.
Here's the scene:

beer, smokes, puzzle. the pilot precise was champing at the bit to enter the fight, so i let loose after a swig of Stella Artois. At first I had nothing...the puzzle yielded only a could short clues, and the vast expanse of unfilled squares mocked me for about half an hour. at last, i returned fire and managed to fill in the bottom right corner.

one thing about puzzles, your first impression is often right. that makes it awful when you're wrong, and the first impression is way off, which happened to me on this puzzle. the clue "the opposite of relaxed" seemed simple. "tense", five letters, let's go. but it turned out to be wrong, the correct answer was "antsy". so blah.
The rest of the puzzle looked impossible. i probed constantly, running possibilities through my head. i kept running into small squares i'd filled in wrong, like when i put "SPRINKLES" in (it ended up being "splatters" "falls in drops". I began to lose hope for this one. at some point, you begin to think you can't make it. you're two hours into a puzzle, and you just start to think "that's it, i gave it my best". I even capped my pen and talked with the bar back for a while, a nice guy named Pat. a huge group of people showed up for some kind of birthday party in a chartered bus. i actually sat for about an hour just ignoring the puzzle, trying to psyche it out.
at some point, you give up and fill in things you're not sure about. i try to visualize the whole thing before filling in letters, but sometimes it's just obfuscated, it's behind a fog. so i just threw a couple guesses in there. i knew, inside, i'd given up.
but to my surprise the guesses were right. they started the wonderful fall of dominoes that can lead to you filling out a whole grid in minutes. there's a competitive crossword series called the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Ken Jennings won a lower division challenge recently (the guy who won millions for weeks on Jeopardy!). These guys literally fill in the hardest puzzles in minutes, or faster. I heard an NPR interview with a winner who filled in a huge saturday-sized puzzle in less than a minute. i wish.
so after my last-gasp guesses, i ended up finishing, to a small amount of amazement on my part. so for the week, i ended up finishing all but one puzzle, going from sunday to saturday. the loss on a wednesday puzzle was odd, but the NYT is a mean beast, and can strike with vengeance at random moments.
all in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

(i wrote "is my bitch" after "New York Times")