To Mudgeon or not to Mudgeon?

    My wife has accused me of being a curmudgeon. She’s even gone so far as to buy me (and insist I wear) a t-shirt captioned “Captain Curmudgeon” with an amusing (snort) caricature splayed across the front. But am I really a curmudgeon? I decided the first step would be to consult the folks at the Oxford Dictionary as to the actual definition. 

cur·mudg·eon /kərˈməj(ə)n/ noun 1. a bad-tempered person, especially an old one. 

YOU KIDS GET THE %$#&^ OFF MY LAWN!!!

Okay, okay, I’ll own up to the “old” part of the definition. I have been around the sun 76 times. (And bought a souvenir key chain at the gift shop.) I’m admittedly no spring chicken. 

    

But “bad tempered”? I beg to frickin differ!!! I think I’m perfectly even tempered. After all, I made no attempt to burn Mar-a-Lago to the ground when “he who shall not be named” finagled his way into the White House a second time. And no matter what egregious muckery Elon Musk has perpetrated on any given day, I have yet to spray paint the words “Sieg Heil!!!” on anyone’s Tesla. 

    I do confess, as the years stack up, little things that shouldn’t raise my temperature annoy the hell out of me. Such as:

• The guy in front of us in line at the recycling center, as we waited to turn in one expired cell phone, felt it necessary to carefully exacto knife all 79 cardboard boxes he had transported there in the back of his pickup. A glance back would have alerted him that he was holding up the line. But did he? Not on your life. 

• The fact that I have to learn yet another song in Latin for my community chorale concert. “Laudate eum in timpano et choro.” Or words to that effect. After two choir concerts with Latin lyrics, I feel supremely confident I could go back to ancient Rome and confidently order a McCleopatraburger. 

• Since we’re on music, pet peeve 3 is songs where the title appears nowhere in the song. Examples? “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen. “Baba O’ Riley” the Who, “A Day in the life” by the Beatles. And worst of all the Jefferson Airplane’s “3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds” in which they sing the entire song and then, at the end, Marty Balin shouts (for no apparent reason) “3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds.” I don’t know what drugs they were using but I’ll take a hard pass. 

• Young women (with the occasionally male exception) who croon “purrrrrfect” after taking your order at a restaurant. As we all know, pobody’s nerfect. 

• Guys who equate their manhood with how badly they need a muffler job on their “tricked-out” little Mitsubishi. (Or insert your favorite noisy, smelly rackety car here.)  

• Pedestrians who hold a cell phone 3 inches from their face while they cross the street mid-block. The last thing in the world I want is for someone to plow into a screen-junky slacker. Which is why I shriek “pay attention future corpse” as I drive by them.  

• People who can’t remember their PIN number when paying for stuff at the supermarket with a debit card.  

Oh, wait, that’s me. Never mind.

 

The Norovirus Diet

 

Carolyn J. Rose

 

On the plus side, catching the norovirus is a sure way to lose weight. I’m down three pounds in two days—just in time to get into the summer wardrobe.

 

A bout of this virus can also make you lose your appetite for some of the favorite foods you ate in the hours before you found yourself doing the tight-cheek tango to the bathroom. In my case, those were foods I should steer clear of—cake and cookies and cream cheese, fried shrimp, creamy salad dressing, and all manner of chips in crackly packaging. Yes, cheesy snacks.

 

And if you’re looking for a clean-out similar to that achieved before your last colonoscopy, here it is.

 

On the minus side there’s the nausea, sometimes only a vague feeling and sometimes a full-body, full-on experience.

 

There’s also the uncertainty. Do I lean over that porcelain bowl? Or do I sit? From sad experience, I’ve concluded that either choice can be the wrong one. But I see an opportunity for an inventor to create a bit of bathroom “furniture” that would somehow allow a norovirus victim to do both simultaneously.

 

And then there’s that strange stomach symphony of sounds, a clash of rumbling and grumbling playing at a pitch never before heard in my lifetime. At times I’m concerned I’ll set off the sensors monitoring for volcanic activity from Mt St Helens. And if I were to submerge myself in the Columbia, there’s a good chance that migrating gray whales off the coast would pause and try to decipher the gurgling message from my stomach as it works to expell the virus.

 

Unfortunately, there’s no magic bullet to cure this crap. (Pun intended.) Fortunately, the worst of it lasts only 2 or 3 days. Days, I might add, which seem to stretch on endlessly as I swill electrolyte-balancing drinks and nibble an occasional cracker.