It’s a well-known fact, supported by data you can slap on snazzy charts and graphs, that as many people (especially males) age, they get ornery, dour, dark, dick-headed, and downright curmudgeonly. Feeling the brunt of mortality’s anticipatory revenge, they often develop a gravelly graveyard laugh just from reading the newspaper. They revel in the misfortunes of deserving others—those they know personally and most certainly those they don’t—and plot fantasy evils to be visited upon their real and imagined enemies whom misfortune has unjustly overlooked.
That is not all. In rough proportion to the burden of bodily aches and pains they experience, they use more toilet paper than they know they should, stubbornly refuse to floss (because what the hell anyway, you know?), and curse pointlessly at the dog when no one else is around. What’s more, and so very much worse, they kind of enjoy all this and could not give a shit if anyone objects.
My loving wife, years ago already, warned me of the dangers of curmudgeonliness. She can well do without it, particularly in me. In her own right (which is always), she is so generally upbeat—or old New England-stock stoic, as circumstances require—that it sometimes makes me want to howl. Yet I fully understand and take to heart her counsel.
After all, I personally knew James Schlesinger, the king of curmudgeons, a man so advanced in the arts of scowling, sibilating, and seething that he achieved full black whisky belt curmudgeon status before turning fifty. When he spoke in his characteristic low growl, with mouth all but closed and teeth touching, perspiration silently boiled off his forehead. So, knowing what advanced cases look like, I prepared a symbol of my wife’s good counsel as a constant reminder of my responsibilities to be as a gentle and charming as my arthritic and dyspeptic personality allows (see above).
I made several large copies of this graphic and tacked them up hither and yon around my work places. The sight of them restrains me temporarily, and at the margins. But they are nearly powerless to resist tidal surges of bilious revulsion against human stupidity, concupiscence, Piltdown Man pig-eyed stares, and puke-orange hair—namely, Donald J. Trump. Yes, it would be pointless to deny it: The great waves of curmudgeonly energy that well up within me have multiplied since November 8, and my gravelly newspaper reading laugh, I am informed, has noticeably deepened. It all begs therapy, but, then again, now that we are all pinned to the mat in the late Professor Rieff’s reigning age of the therapeutic, doesn’t everything?
When my anti-curmudgeon banners do not suffice to contain me these days, and cursing becomes just too much wasted energy (besides which it debases the verbal currency), what is left but literary complaint? So I seethe on paper for comfort, but I seethe exclusively over subpolitical irritations because, for some reason, getting upset about politics makes me feel even worse once the curmudgeonly spasm has spent itself. These small irritations vary greatly in kind, for reasons beyond explanation or control. Some verge on the stark raving silly, while others may contain at least a seed of the sublime—a condition prone to strand my seething “voice” somewhere between that of George Carlin and that of Joseph Epstein (not that Carlin has been saying much lately).
Look, it’s just what I do, and I am about to do it now, moving from pretty silly to even sillier and then back again. Listen in if you like. If you don’t like, I couldn’t give a shit.
Hands Off the Fruit
When I was a kid—this is the standard curmudgeonly prolegomenon, in case you’re wondering—fruit came from store to home naked. We didn’t have to peel off or eat around ubiquitous little pieces of sticky paper, usually oval or round in shape, slapped on every damned apple, pear, peach, banana, plum, mango, and orange we eat.
I don’t so much mind the damned things on bananas because no one eats the peel, and anyway I don’t care for bananas. But on soft, delicate plums? On perfect shiny, almost opalescent, apples and on delectable sweet pears? Even peaches, for God’s sake? What bureaucratically berserk asswipes have wrought such a sinister subversion of everyday life? Screw, to a stiletto-studded stony wall, the bastard who invented this pointless nonsense, and screw the servile automatons who participate in these wanton acts of graffruti. Have these people no aesthetic sense at all when it comes to fruit?
Yes, I well understand that our food chain is truly international these days and that these crappy little flecks of paper are there to protect us, somehow. That’s doubtless why they are pockmarked with tiny print no one can read. I can’t believe that this is the only—and it can’t possibly be the best—way to accomplish this nanny-nanny-boo-boo guardianship function on behalf of us poor dumb schmucks who need protection from pathological kiwis and other foreign terroristic dangers of the fruity sort.
I have come to expect that the next step will be the paper desecration of individual grapes in a bunch or of every bing cherry in a paper sack, or that some pinheaded government functionary will invade my yard to tag my cute little blueberries and raspberries aborning. But of that I’ve no fear, for the Second Amendment is still here. (Oh, yes I would, too.) I feel better already.
Dropkicked
Since we’re on the topic of food, let me note that something has gone horribly wrong with the standard horseradish condiments on offer in the grocery store. Used to be that this stuff—whether Gold’s or some other brand, plain “white” or flavored deep red with beet juice—was, if ingested, the rough equivalent of a small nuclear weapon. You’d fork it out of those six-ounce tall bottles onto a piece of forlorn, pallid gefilte fish—and all store-bought gefilte fish is forlorn and pallid, in case you are not aware—at the one and only time during the year when you were liable to be doing anything like that (namely, during Passover). So you’d stare at the stuff just lying there looking so innocent on your little piece of fish, and you’d confidently gird your loins, mental and otherwise insofar as you had any as a young boy, because you were sure you could man up to the challenge it presented.
And you’d soon be proven wrong.
The stuff would start out nice and tasty, but before you could complete one modest swallow you could sense both the detonation below, about six inches below your gullet, and the liftoff to come. What would lift off would be the top of your head, as toxic fumes gushed from your nose and ears, curling your eyelashes and sideburns; every hair follicle felt like a miniature Atlas missile just ignited for launch. Your eyes shuttered open and closed and open again, to stare into the onrushing abyss. For a second—it seemed like minutes—you could not breathe, your voice would become thin, high, and panicky if you foolishly tried to use it, and you would rapidly flap your arms up and down for no apparent reason whatsoever. You looked and felt like a battered dragon having just been rocketed down from the sky in a black-and-white 1950s Japanese horror adventure flick, or else like Jerry Lewis “acting out” in front of Dean Martin (and if you’re too young to conjure an image of that, count yourself fortunate). And then, of course, you would blink twice and take another bite.
You can’t do this anymore. No eight-year old kid can do this nowadays with the store-bought stuff. Except for some small-batch designer brands that are not easy to find, the kick has been dropped. For reasons unknown to me, the stuff the standard labels now peddle labeled horseradish—by the same companies in the same bottles with the same labels and in the same two “flavors”—is so schvach (weak) that it couldn’t get the sideways attention of a baby canary even if you dunked the bird right in the sauce head down. You can spoon the stuff directly down your throat half a bottle’s worth at a time, skipping the gefilte fish altogether, and…nothing. Nothing happens.
Who has been pussyfooting around with my bitter herbs is what I want to know. And to what possible purpose? Is someone, yet again, trying to protect me from myself? Is this the gastronomical analogue to those killjoy numbnuts who have managed to banish every piece of playground equipment that was any fun?
I have suffered many indignities and frustrations during my life at the hands of those who claimed only the best of intentions: the designated-hitter rule, emission-control devices in cars, the sudden murder of Lik-m-Aid, and—I shudder to recall it—the advent of bicycle helmets. But mess with my horseradish and you have gone too far. Too far—do you hear me?—you cowardly (because anonymous) corporate turds!
Manufactured Sincerity
Early stage disintermediation has radically reduced the frequency with which most people have to engage with bank tellers, gasoline pumpers, and those—like travel agents—associated with a whole host of other common service-related functions. ATMs, automated gas pumps, and related mechanisms have seen to that, for better and mostly for worse, because they contribute to the everyday class segregation of American society.
But every once in a while I do enter an actual brick-and mortar bank, in my case to make a small deposit in a feeble extended family-related business account that lacks a facility for remote deposits. When I do this downtown around 19th and M Streets, NW, in our nation’s capital, I am invariably greeted by a seemingly random employee whose job seems to be to stand within easy earshot of the door (but not too close), smile vacuously, and mutter meaningless, if mercifully succinct, unctuous greetings to entering customers. In other words, the bank, through the employees detailed to “greeting” duty, is in the side business of manufacturing fake sincerity.
It could be that some bank customers are so desperately lonely and isolated that they actually like this sort of thing. Or maybe they work someplace where they occasionally are obligated to do something similar, and so empathize with the vacuous misery of it all. Fine. But while I don’t hate these hapless employees, I do hate fake sincerity, which is a form of industrialized pseudo-emotion. I hate it more than ever since I have entered the maw of the curmudgeonly personality, but truth to tell I have always hated it.
I don’t scream at these people or throw things at them. I don’t grunt, spit, or even harrumph. These days I just stiffen in preparation to ignore them, and head for Paula, the bank teller I actually know for some years, and who knows me. We never fail to engage in small talk, which sometimes even spills over into harmless banter.
So I’m all for friendliness in business transactions as long as it is earned, just as I am all for manners when manners do what they were designed to do: confer dignity on all those who observe them regardless of personal connection or station in life. The small amenities that our forbears composed into the rhythms of human interaction are not small in cumulative effect—they help render us fully human social animals and civilize us from generation to generation. Fake these kinds of things enough over time and you debase them, just as intimacy too rapidly sought and accepted drives out the real and valuable kind.
Don’t be shocked by this modest outpouring of sentiment. We curmudgeons do still care about such things. Most of us, after all, are just long-since-disappointed idealists in mourning for our youthful hopes.
Now, there is no good purpose to be served by trying to explain any of this to an obedient bank employee who almost certainly would rather be doing something else. I know; I’ve tried. It’s like asking directions from a coconut. Not even a card-carrying curmudgeon would keep plugging away at such an effort for long, seeing as how there are so many other, more satisfying targets out there to fume over.
I could go on, and on—all of us of a certain age can. Pre-curmudgeons can readily guess many of the common apolitical fuses that set us oldsters off: robocalling telemarketing scumsters; litterers; jackasses who refuse to use their turn signals; ignorami who say “exact same” and use impact as a verb; less-than-a-dollar price sign-makers who don’t know the difference between a decimal and the dark side of the moon; technoboobs who keep putting mostly pointless new buttons and gadgets on simple tools and calling it progress; clueless conflators of a wondrously beautiful world who can’t tell a bee from a wasp from a hornet; almost anything the USPS does…..the list is long if not endless.
Then again, most of us curmudgeons nurse customized grievances of one kind or another, if only to illustrate our highly individual, if rapidly rusting, personalities. For example, every curmudgeon worth his pepper hates to be held hostage to loud cellphone half-conversations while riding on public conveyances. That alone probably accounts for considerable support for the death penalty, in hopes that, one day, terminal rudeness will become a capital offense.
But my blood-red beef is with women (and men, to the lesser extent it may apply) who daub makeup on themselves as though no one else was anywhere near them on the train, bus, or plane. It’s as though they are signaling that, while they clearly intend to get dolled up and attractive for someone, you are most definitely not that someone. These commuter selfie-artists think nothing of finishing getting dressed—because that’s pretty much what it comes down to—right in front of you since to them you don’t actually exist, notwithstanding your being roughly as physically near to them as they are to you.
Admittedly, others feel differently. About the makeup thing one friend suggested I was being needlessly persnickety—as if needless persnicketiness were really all that easy to distinguish from needful persnicketiness. To re-coin a phrase, that is a judgment firmly in the eye of the persnicketeer.
But I take the point. I know a guy who goes ballistic every time he encounters a double-glass door on some commercial establishment, and one of the doors—invariably the one he tries to push or pull open—is locked in place (which is all of the time). I can hear him now: “Why the fuck would you have two doors if you’re always going to lock one of them—and not indicate which door it is?!” I empathize, but the double-door thing just doesn’t rise to my particular bar of curmudgeonly outrage. Maybe next year.
So I make my “no curmudgeon” signs and place them around, doing the best I can to stop the advancing wave of a new irritation rising in my gorge. But it’s only a holding action; I know that. I am resigned to freeing my inner curmudgeon. After all, as everyone stupidly blurts out at one time or another, there’s no stopping progress.
