Dopecentury XXVII --- The Curmudgeon
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
“The problem is you’re a curmudgeon. You’ve always been a curmudgeon.”
“Everyone gets grumpy sometimes.”
“Yes, but you are grumpy all the time.” She looked directly at him across the table, the fingers of her hand curved around the chipped old mug.
“So sue me. I’ve got a right to be grumpy, world as shitty as it is.” He pulled a cigar from the short row of them in his shirt pocket and lit it.
She pushed the ceramic ashtray with its little invisible-cigarette divots rising above a mound of cold ash towards him. “Maybe the world is shitty, but your life isn’t. What have you got to personally be grumpy about? Your hilarious grandkids? Your loving family that comes to see you every day and brings you cigars? Your stable income and housing? What makes you so grumpy?”
“Those are the small things. And I appreciate them. I appreciate you, and the grandkids. It’s the larger world that’s so shitty, and you know you can’t deny that. Everyone should be a grumpy old curmudgeon.”
“If you want to be happy, you can’t go looking for it in the larger world. You gotta find it in your day-to-day life.”
“I mean, you don’t hear me complaining about my day-to-day life…”
She raised an eyebrow.
“…Most of the time. Day-to-day is fine. But the daily shit is framed by the larger aspects of the world — the shit that sucks. That’s the root of my grumpiness. I’m not sure it’s even appropriate to go around being happy about everything, even if your daily grind isn’t that fuckin’ bad.”
“The Man in Black theory of the world?”
“Johnny Cash was no fuckin’ idiot. Bet all sorts of folks thought he was curmudgeonly too.”
She stirred her tea, and gripped her fingers more tightly around the mug. “Alright. I’m not going to try to convince you the world is great. I don’t think it is either — though maybe I get that from you. But you know you come off as petulant to many people. You’d have more friends if you weren’t so…”
“Curmudgeonly? What makes you think I want more friends? The people I like — the people who like me — share the same worldview. Or at least respect it.”
“OK. Maybe it’s not a making-friends thing. Maybe it’s just about being polite.”
He coughed out a puff of cigar smoke.
“I know you don’t care and manners,” she continued, “but it genuinely hurts people’s feelings sometimes.”
He mouthed the words so fucking what? at her.
“So it comes off as just not being a nice person sometimes.” He stared into the cold black coffee in his stained mug. “Whenever someone has something positive to say about something, you immediately point out the negative aspects, the flaws.”
“Like when?”
“Like… the other day, Marianne was talking about how much she loved her new car. And you started giving her a hard time about the gas mileage and reliability and performance…”
“All of those things I said were true, I had just read an article about it in Car & Driver last week.”
“Yes, but she loves that car — she thinks it’s cute. It’s like part of her identity.”
“Listen to yourself! Can’t you hear how fucked up it is for people to identify with their car? To think of themselves as their car — it’s a goddamn machine. A tool. People who don’t understand that are… well, fucking tools themselves.”
“But you like Marianne!”
“I do. That’s why she shouldn’t get all bent out of shape because I’m just telling her the gods-honest truth about some machine she happens to own. She should be thanking me, really.”
“In fact, she was pretty hurt. She told me so later. She loves you, but she hates it when you do stuff like that. Makes her want to avoid you sometimes.”
He sucked at his cigar, and ashed it in the ashtray, slowing growing the pile there. He leaned his elbow on the table, and held the cigar in front of his eyes, inspecting it. “Can’t help the way I am.”
“Of course you can.”
“Not at my age. Marianne wants to defend her car to me, she should come back to me with evidence of its qualities. Make the argument on rationality, not that it’s ‘cute.’”
“You know she isn’t going to do that. She’ll just avoid you instead. See the problem there?”
“The fuckin’ problem there seems to be Marianne’s, if you’re asking me.”
“I am asking you… I’m asking you to dial it back. No one is asking you to change, we love you the way you are. I don’t think we’d want you to not be a curmudgeon. It’s endearing, in it’s way. But just… you know, hold back your worst instincts when it comes to this kind of thing — basically just keep quiet in any situation where what you are thinking might upset someone. It’s just not worth it to hurt the people you love over something like gas mileage.”
“I don’t know. I don’t think the problem is me. I think the problem is the rest of the world. They are too attached to the things they own. They invest the things with too much of themselves. They tell themselves a story about themselves and their junk and who they are, and they don’t want to hear that maybe maybe the story they tell themselves just isn’t fucking truth.”
“You might be right, but the world just doesn’t work like that. Not all people are like you and want to weigh everything just on its practical merits.”
“Well maybe they should be! If they were, not only might the world be a better place, but I bet I wouldn’t be so ‘curmudgeonly.’”
“But these people love you. I love you, or I wouldn’t be here having this conversation with you.”
“Listen, here’s the thing you and everyone else I know needs to understand: my grumpiness, my ‘curmudgeonliness,’ isn’t directed at you. It’s directed at things at systems and at the larger problems of the whole world. If I were grumpy at the people around me, that would make me a total fuckin’ asshole. I’m not. I love you all too. You just need to understand that my grumpiness is aimed outward at the world — and justifiably so, I’ll argue to my fuckin’ grave. It’s not aimed inward at you. If you can understand that, if Marianne and the grandkids can, then there’s no fuckin’ problem at all.”
She sipped her tea and look up at the cracked ceiling. Then she brought her eyes down and met his, sunken deep into his face over that scraggly tobacco-stained beard. “Honestly, I can’t argue with that. I know that at it’s root, it is true. Just… for the sake of feelings — and as true as what you said is, feelings have a truth about them too, right? — for the sake of feelings, just try to hold back your worst instincts when it seems like others might be sensitive, OK?”
He stubbed his cigar out in the ash.