On Becoming a Curmudgeon

4/24/96

ON BECOMING A CURMUDGEON


Repeat after me: Me against the world. Me against the world. Me against the world.

Keep repeating that mantra at least 500 times a day. More mantras to come.

A bit of counselling: I know the world has dealt you a lousy hand and keeps dealing you rotten cards. Believe it. It's not an illusion. What is an illusion is any seemingly decent cards you've been dealt. The deck has been stacked against you since day one and everybody else in the game is out to ruin you. The fix is in.

My suggestion? Put as much space between yourself and the rest of the human race as possible. There's a cabin in Lincoln, Montana, that has a vacancy. Unfortunately, it is presently crawling with FBI men. But in time, they'll be gone, and its owner is not expected to return any time soon. Consider squatting there.

Isolation is ideal for the cultivation of curmudgeonly tendencies. Especially when combined with outdoor plumbing, 9 month winters,50 degrees below zero wind chill factors, and unheated toilet seats.

The farther you can distance yourself from your fellow human beings, the more misanthropic stereotypes you will be free to entertain about them. Once in a while, despite your best efforts to the contrary, you may have an encounter with an individual which may seem to shatter whatever negative stereotypes you have managed to construct concerning his or her subgroup. Don't be deceived. These are the exceptions that prove the rule. You'll know you're far along the right track when you have so distanced yourself from, and prejudiced yourself against, the human race that you can't abide your own company.

Always, always, it's that so-called human inside yourself that you must most vigilantly guard against. You can go farther away from civilization than Lincoln, Montana. You can go to the Yukon, or a lost landing on the banks of the Amazon, or the windblown wastes of Patagonia. You can pitch your tent in Anarctica's glacial deserts. And I wish you would, just so you would get away from me. Yet you still might not succeed in escaping that subversive and despicable creep within yourself who is the last vestige of your vulnerability. It is only when you have expunged his last traces that you will truly be free of your, and others', humanity.

Then you can return to the crowded city and walk the streets unafraid of being touched by something soft and openhearted that you imagine you see in another's eyes. You won't believe it for a moment. You'll be immune because you yourself will be incapable of mirroring anything openhearted back to anyone else. You, in the wastes of your own private Anarctica, have performed a heartectomy on yourself. And you know now, as you roam, invulnerable, through the crowded streets of those cesspools we call cities, that any open-ness you imagine you see in the eyes of others is a trick to disarm you, to loot and pillage you.

Let us start at the beginning. Who spilled you into this world? Your mother. Then resent her. She gave you life, this life that conspires against you. Blame her for it. Don't be deceived by any love and nurturing she has seemed to give you. Your life has turned out wrong, all wrong, hasn't it? Then it must have taken a wrong turn from the very beginning. In the womb. Everything she has done since then has only compounded the original sin.

And blame your father while you're at it. He conspired with her, didn't he, in the act of darkness which was your conception? How dare they? Did they ask you first if you wanted to be here? Hell no! They just went ahead and had their fun for their own private, selfish, reasons.

Your mother may have wanted a doll, a human doll, to give her love. Your father may have craved a variety of two-legged dog to order about and make himself feel important. They put in their order, and picked up you in the delivery room, and ever after they've been trying to make you feel as if you owed them something. Something like life.

But you know better. You are undeceived by what they claim to be their efforts on your behalf. If they had really done right by you, how could you be the miserable sonuvabitch you are today? They just want you to feel obligated to them so they can bleed you white in their penurious old age. But you won't be having any, thankyouverymuch. Where is the county poorhouse in this modern age? Whatever its equivalent is, that's where you'll be checking them in, if they live that long.

And, in their perversity, they probably will live long. If only to exhaust their resources so they don't have to leave anything to you. They CAN take it with them, and they will.

But let us get back to first causes. Who, besides your mother and your father, gave you life? God, the Prime Mover, if you are deluded enough to believe in such a One. As a curmudgeon-in-training, you know better than to believe in a gentle, loving, just God. If you believe in God at all, you know him to be, at best, a cruel trickster. He lifts you up only to cast you down. You are to Him as are flies to wanton boys---He plucks your wings for sport. One thing you know for sure. If there is a God, he's the greatest serialkiller of all time. He has killed, or will kill, everything that's ever lived.

Repeat after me: The fix is in. The jig is up. The cards are stacked. I might as well fold.

Say it 500 hundred times a day. Say it till your tongue turns black and your eyes bulge out of your head. Say it till what's left of that little human inside you begs for mercy, bleeds from his ears, eyes, nose, and mouth, and collapses. Then say it 50,000 million billion times more.

God, Mother, Father. Good places to begin your Hall of Infamy. But don't stop there. What about big brother? Didn't he, at one time or another, or maybe constantly, bully you? Forget whatever he may have done on your behalf. Forget the times he stood up for you in the schoolyard. Forget the way he taught you to play ball. Forget the jokes you shared and any tender feelings you might have for him. Illusion, illusion, illusion! He was just trying to get you to drop your guard! Don't be foolish enough to do it again. You know better now!

And big sister? Why didn't she introduce you to more of her pretty friends when she was in high school and you were a lonely horndog? Why did she make you don her prom dress so she could hem it? Was it just because you and she, for that brief Spring, were the same height? Hell no! She was trying to emasculate you, sexually confuse you. She was part of the female conspiracy against you that goes back to the beginning of time! And I mean that whether you consider yourself man or woman!

As for little sister, do you think she was just having innocent fun when she floated your entire collection of 1950's era Mickey Mantle baseball cards down the river? Or when she switched the heads on all your Barbie and Ken dolls? Again a conspiracy! She was trying to confuse you! And did she ever! Ever since, Kenlike heads on Barbielike bodies, and vice versa, have held an overpowering erotic, fetishistic, fascination for you. That's why you find yourself renting Victor/Victoria over and over and over, that's why you can't tear yourself away from Priscilla of the Desert! And it's all your little sister's fault!

It's all everyone's fault!

Repeat after me: I am blameless, you are blameful, I am blameless, you are blameful. Say it at least 500 times a day. Say it till you find yourself saying: I am blameful, you are blameful, everybody and everything's to blame, life's not fair, everybody hates me, nobody loves me, I'm going to eat some worms!

NOW you're getting somewhere!


Some of you curmudgeon-aspirants may not be able to get away by yourselves to fully develop your powers of misanthropy and misogyny. To you I offer my profoundest consolations. Sometimes, life just isn't fair. In fact, life is never fair. Repeat after me, 10,000 jillion million billion times: Life ain't fair, life ain't fair, life ain't fair! It's my ball, I'm quitting and taking it home, and the rest of you can go to hell!

Speaking of home and hell, many of us are stuck with so-called families----husbands, wives, little mouths to feed. And though we desperately want to get away, so we can feel free to simmer in our own emotional venom, economic or legal or even medical circumstances may prevent us, for the time being, or for all time, from making our escapes.

Still, there is hope. And by hope I mean barricades. If you can manage physical barricades, by all means build them. Begin by building a wall between you and your spouse. Build it in your bedroom, build it anyway you can, build it willynilly, helterskelter, build it of brick and mortar or wood and plaster, but build it.

Get separate beds, and get those beds into two separate rooms. If you can't engineer separate beds, then make your side of the bed inviolate. With the power of your misanthropic mind, erect an impenetrable Klingon force field around your body. If ever your mate should stealthily, by night, try to reach out and put a greasy paw on you, your forcefield will zap him/her like a buglight zaps a gnat.

If you cannot erect physical barriers between you and members of your immediate family, don't despair. Emotional walls can serve just as well, or better. For one thing, they're portable. With emotional walls of the proper thickness, you need never worry about being caught out in the open by a lowflying emotional stealth bomber or smart missile.

Not even the tenderest entreaties of your cutest toddler can hope to breach such a movable fortress, once you've built your walls thick enough. Let that be a warning to you. Until you've taken your curmudgeonly craft very far toward perfection, you'll still be vulnerable to the so-called innocence and openheartedness of small children, especially if they are your own. So of course they are to be avoided at all costs.

If communicating with your children is an unavoidable, for the time being, necessity, then build your emotional fortress in the shape of a tollbooth, or confessional booth, so that the child is only free to see you as a head in a window in a sentry box. Let the child pay a toll for the privilege of speaking to you, let communication be an opportunity to induce as much guilt in the child's heart as possible. Let the child confess to you, and judge him/her harshly, and make him/her serve unspeakable penance. Fix the child so that, in time, it can imagine this tollbooth, this confessional box, inside its own head. It will no longer need to come to you to communicate! Your talking head will be inside its head, making it feel guilty, forcing it to confess, issuing punishments and penance. Long after you're dead, your head will go on lashing your offspring, and you won't have to lift a pinkie!

Give a child a fish, and it will eat for one day. Plant a stinking rotten fishhead in the child's head, and it will be a stinker for a rotten lifetime.

Fish. That brings us to pets. And sex. If you must have sex, it's better to have it with a pet than with a spouse. Because a pet can't complain about it, can't knock your technique or your heartlessness, afterwards. And if you must have have a pet, it's better to have one from one of the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder. Four-footed furry friends are out. With the possible exception of lab rats. The trouble with mammals is that they can sneak up on you and break your heart. They can be worse than mates and kids that way.

Ants are good. They're not too cuddly. In fact, you may crush them, or get bitten, if you try to cuddle them. But antfarms are not recommended. There's something happy and soothing about watching an antfarm colony work themselves to death between those hot little plastic walls. The damn critters cooperate so well together! And they actually seem to love their work! Better to have a single ant for a pet. Keep him in an empty pillbox so he's forced to pine away in the dark. Don't even leave a grain of sand in there for him, or he'll be able to amuse himself by rolling it from one side of the pillbox to another. He might even forget how lonely he is for the company of his fellow ants, and that happy adjustment would be setting a very bad example for you. Think of his pillbox as an oubliette, a dark dungeon hideaway where you, the evil master of the castle, have tossed him and forgotten him.

Then there is the matter of sex. No matter how much you barricade yourself, physically or emotionally, your sex drive may occasionally, volcanically, erupt. If you are so unfortunate as to have a spouse, avoid having sex with him/her at all costs. The act can touch things in what's left of your so-called heart which you don't want to know about.

So, from time to time, you may find yourself forcing yourself upon one of the family pets. Very well. But don't have sex with a vertebrate. That's too close to home.

Sneak up on that poor lonely ant in that dark pillbox. Quick as you can, jerk the top off the box. He/she/it will be blinded and dazed, sort of like when the LAPD tosses stun-grenades into a crack house. Then, while he/she/it is still out of it, take your evil pleasure. How is a mystery you're going to have to penetrate for yourself. You'll be treading in a wilderness where few have dared to go before you. Or at least, if they have gone there, they aren't sharing their antlore with the rest of us. Think of yourself as a trailblazer. Think of yourself as a pervert. But don't get emotionally involved, and don't get bitten.

The emergency wards teem with patients who will not or cannot talk about how they got painful ant bites on their extremities. My advice: Avoid fire ants like the plague. They make you swell up like a beachball. Or at least, that's what I hear. Of course, I have no firsthand experience in erotica so entomologically exotic.

Considering the perils, and if you MUST have sex, it's probably better to have it with a plant or a mineral than with an animal. Though I have friends who swear by molluscs, molluscs have shells, and shells clamp shut and won't open up again, and that leads us back to the emergency ward.

As for plants. Stay away from venus flytraps and nettles. Dandelions are pliable to a fault if you can figure out how to get satisfaction from them. Minerals, with the exception of heartbreakingly beautiful mountain ranges and gemstones, are less emotionally involving than plants. They can prove abrasive and/or completely unyielding, but that's the suffering that a really dedicated curmudgeon should be looking for in a sex partner, if he must have sex. Above all, avoid liquid mercury. The wards are filled with twisted, gibbering curmudgeons who have gone the quicksilver route and never come back. Mercury will take your temperature and is lovely and malleable to a fault and won't talk back, but is more poisonous than a puff adder.

Ideally, as you hone your curmudgeonly craft, you will stop wanting to have sex at all, even with yourself. You will repulse yourself and get on your nerves and snap at yourself and it will be all to the good. Because the more fed up with your own company you are, the higher you will keep up your guard, and the harder you will make what's left of your heart.

It is said, of the truly transcendent, tenth dan curmudgeon, that he can compress and harden his vestigial heart until it is but a tiny diamond chip; then he coughs up it and gobs it into the gutter and walks on with a spring in his step and without a backward look, as if he has hawked up nothing more momentous than a juicy lunger.

Curmudgeon wannabes, don't despair: Everything is trying to break your concentration, but don't let it. The world will interfere with you enough to prevent you from doing what it is that you really need to get done, though you aren't exactly sure what that is. This puts you, permanently, in a dreadfully foul temper. It may feel to you as if the world has you right where it wants you. But don't be deceived. You have the world right where you want it. When the cosmos and all its laughing children and puppydogs and redwoods and Matterhorns and rainbows and Niagaras and shooting stars feel like nothing more or less to you than a seething boil on your butt, designed to rub your nerves to maximum rawness, then you, too, are very far along the way to gobbing up your own heart and spitting it into the nearest gutter like the master curmudgeon you are.

An exercise: Get really really drunk on your ass on cheap red wine in a rough part of town. Get rolled and left in an alley for dead. Come to with the worst headache of your life, puke on your shirt, and a stray mutt peeing on your face. Notice that your shoes and wallet are gone, your nose is broken, and your front teeth are missing. You now have the faintest intimation of how a true curmudgeon feels all the time.

But what I have described is more or less temporary physical and emotional discomfort. What the really serious curmudgeon craves is a long term, extremely painful, debilitating, and shameful medical ailment. Something like hemorrhoids the size of cricketballs, six or seven of them. Or shingles. Or a bad back, a back so bad the curmudgeon walks, or rather gimps, with a cant. A back so bad said curmudgeon can scarcely pick up after himself, or support himself. A back so bad the curmudgeon's face is locked in a permanent rictus of agony. A back so bad that the curmudgeon reeks of ill-health and is made an ugly animal to whom other creatures, especially attractive creatures of the opposite sex, but also small dogs, newts, and wart hogs, give a wide berth.

Leprosy is a perfect condition for a curmudgeon-in-training, but is hard to come by in this damnably antiseptic modern age. Still, leprosy serves as a beautiful metaphor for what the apprentice curmudgeon should be aspiring to. If the curmudgeon can induce in himself a form of emotional leprosy, he will make himself so repulsive to himself and others that he will remove many temptations toward tenderness and vulnerability and openheartened from his life. This will give his heart a better chance to close and compress to the desired, diamondlike hardness.

Speaking of diamonds, even the glittering stars in the sky can present an insidious temptation to the unwary, backsliding curmudgeon. Stars are, when looked at from a certain perspective, beautiful. Moreover, their seeming permanence reminds us of our own mortality. And this, under the wrong circumstances, can break our hearts. The recommended way to look at stars is to not look at them at all. Keep your eyes on the gutter. Put your eyes out if you have to. But if you must look up, if you cannot resist stargazing and putting at risk all your curmudgeonly striving, if you are so drawn to the night sky that you dare losing a lifetime’s supply of bitterness, spleen, and misanthropy, then lift your head, open your eyes, and force yourself to perceive those twinklings as as hard little diamond chips, mirroring what your heart is becoming.

When your heart has become the hardest substance known to man, you will at last be safe even from the entreaties of the heavens. You will know that there is a pinprick of light, deep inside you, which once was warm, but is now as distant and icy cold as Polaris. And by that North Star which is your heart you will always be guided, avoiding the painful, pounding shoals of compassion, love, and charity. You will soar through soundless, lifeless, lightless, regions of deep space where you will never again have your concentration broken, where you will never again be distracted from your contemplation of the failings and betrayals of the damned human race.

At last you will have nothing to fear, for you will have nothing to lose. You will have frozen forever your final vestiges of warmth and life. You will be impervious to pain and suffering, yours or others’. You will be dead, my friend. Though you may walk the Earth for another 50 years, you will be dead.

Others may look into your eyes, hoping to see there the light of human kindness, hoping that their gaze will be met by understanding and warmth, hoping that the flame of human intercourse will be kindled when their eyes strike sparks with yours. But all they will see, when they look into your eyes, is absolute zero. A heartstopping cold. A cold so dispassionate it goes beyond revulsion and loathing and is more powerful than hate.

When they look into your eyes, they will see the living face of death. What little warmth they have managed to generate with their own hearts will be sucked out and frosted over by the icicles in your eyes. The deeper they peer, the more blackness they will see. When they see into you, they will find themselves teetering on the edge of the abyss. Some of them will never recover from the sight. Some of them will lose their balance and fall in, ever after to be lost, never to be found.



That will be your gift to the world, to walk about with the eyes of a dead man set in a face like a clenched fist. Your expression will strike careless passersby like a blow between the eyes. You will remorselessly suck the courage and spirit from your fellow men, and some of them will be so demoralized, so despirited, they will instantly, and unconditionally, give up the holy ghost.

Your presence will be as bracing, and lethal, as an Anarctic wind. Your soul will be as distant and timeless and lifeless as a faraway star. And when that day comes, you can at long last expel an icy breath and relax, for you will have made of yourself a complete curmudgeon, beholding to no one, friend to neither man nor beast. You can stand back and steal an admiring glance at the ice sculpture you have made of yourself. And when you have finished taking in your own glittering magnificence, you will walk alone into the night, into eternity, finally spared the interruptions and distractions of humanity, of life itself, finally free to pickle forever in your own grouchy, irascible, bile and revel in your inviolable self-sufficiency, and wholeness, and perfection.

--FIN—