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Dr. Dirt
January 2011

The Curmudgeon in Winter

Do you ever wake up at 3am, tortured by thoughts of a boss or employee (we're avoiding relatives here) who makes your life miserable, so while trying to get back to sleep, you go through the initial stages of denial, anger, sadness, etc., failing most miserably, so you crawl out of bed, groan, limp to the coffeepot which you didn't clean yesterday, and in your too-early-in-the-morning haze on the way to the sink, you spill yesterday's coffee grounds on the floor, stepping in same on the way back, but in a minor victory over the fates, you finally get the water bubbling through the dark roast, then you realize you are talking out loud to yourself about the generally downhill progress of the world and the particularly miserable state of your own particular miserable life?

And you realize with a morbidly fascinating mixture of excitement and revulsion that, yes, you are turning into Andy Rooney. Your eyebrows have grown two inches, seemingly overnight. Jowls are beginning to flop below your chin. Your hair resembles Ms. Frankenstein's fright-wig after a bad night. Your mouth is locking into a permanent frown.  Your voice has gone up in pitch, with a mocking, whiny tremolo.

Grumpiness rules. Everyday incidental annoyances take on heavyweight influence. Yesterday's mosquito bite is today's scabies. Children's bright yells down the street are amplified to harpies' screams, even as your hearing has pathetically diminished. The fresh sugary smell of your neighbor's new-mown grass serves only to remind you it's time for you to mow your own lawn, and didn't you just do that? Teenaged boys are walking around with their pants around their knees and their butts hanging out. The shirt you just put on has little prickly hair trimmings all around the neck and back - a hair-shirt that you know you just washed. You are almost clipped in a crosswalk by a cellphone-blind SUV driver, who adds insult to near-injury by honking and flipping you off. Current popular music pulls across your eardrums like fingernails on blackboard. The Sunday Times costs six dollars, when you can even find a hard copy. "Hard copy" now refers in general to anything you like and can no longer find at any store. Twelve-year-old girls are dressed like streetwalkers, and where, you wonder in disbelief, are their parents? Cars have stopped using their turn signals, except in Florida, where turn signals never turn off.  Movies you've been awaiting for a year finally come to your local cinema but are gone in three days, while movies you won't be watching in ten years when they're on free TV stay on the local screen for what seems like months. Most of the people around you in most any setting are talking loudly to themselves with blue cockroaches stuck in their ears. When you sit still, half of you hurts; when you move, the other half hurts.

To a large degree the world has become an irritant. And perversely, in a flashback to age six, your response is to irritate the world back. You plant a thorny hedge where kids cut through your yard. You drill holes in the exhaust systems of your car and lawn mower to produce a few extra decibels. You spike your remaining hair and tint it green, just to provoke your spouse and children. You stream re-runs of Sesame Street to pick up pointers from Oscar the Grouch, the ur-curmudgeon. You paint your house with pink and black stripes to face Neighbor 1 and green and purple dots to face Neighbor 2. At the office you take up atonal whistling, and you spray canned cigar smoke around the desks of people who annoy you.  In the car you stop using your turn signals on even-numbered days, and leave them blinking constantly the rest of the time (left or right, at random). You move your waste recycling bins to the front yard, and you move your home compost operation near your neighbor's dining room windows.

And by now, yes, you are truly Andy Rooney's twin. You start watching Rooney re-runs to improve your technique. You are positively enjoying being Andy Rooney's twin. You gain pleasure from it. You realize if you continue to have too much fun at this, you may become actually cheery. You get depressed. You hope for an early spring.

Dr. Dirt makes a curmudgeonly nod in the direction of John Hart, Professor of Horticultural Technology at the Thompson School of Applied Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham.