Verified by 
His daughter is worried. She’s not sure where he is on the curmudgeon spectrum.
Is he simply a complainer, a crab, a grouch?
Is he merely a grumbler, a sourpuss, a grump?
Has he gone beyond irritability, fault-finding carping, to being so querulous and so contentious that he gets himself into trouble?
How can she de-grump him?
Can her father be pulled back to the sweetness that once was so prevalent in his nature?
She’s tried to get him to calm down, to get him to resist and refrain from over-reacting. She’s tried to get him to calm down and remain calm.
Understanding her father’s displeasures
A friend who is a clinical psychologist (and who teaches Adult Development, Aging, and Eldercare courses at a university) wonders if the father is experiencing Intermittent Explosive Disorder. The speculation (not a diagnosis) was delivered kindly, sensitively; and with the hope that the father’s emotional and verbal vehemence does not become so frustrating that it results in actual violence.
The friend also wonders if the father is suffering from a transitory Adjustment Disorder. The friend suggests a careful noting of disturbances of emotions and conduct, in the hope that these disturbances do not become chronic, persistent.
Good to have such a friend. Now to the chronicling:
The banes of her father’s aging existence
· The incessant, unrelenting, unattended blare of car alarms.
· The gasoline-fumed growl and snarl of leaf-blowers (debris-scatterers).
· The accelerating, menacing, roar of motorcycles.
· The barking and yelping of unattended dogs.
· Those in a movie theater who talk, and talk, during a film as if they were in their very own, private, home-entertainment center.
· Distracted drivers and oblivious cell-phone yakkers.
· Demon cyclists, skateboarders, and scooterers.
· Urban-street-campers and their mounds of plastic bags parked at his bus stop or who encamp in the doorway of his favorite sandwich shop.
· Those who foul the men’s rooms of public libraries, which, to his mind, should be sanctuaries of silence and serenity, away from cacophony; which should be oases and refuges from mal-odors.
· Those who litter – flinging food wrappers and containers from their vehicles; those who fling cigarette butts anywhere and everywhere.
· Smokers at the entrance to the supermarket and the deli that he frequents; smokers at the entrance to the medical building where he sees doctors.
· And the list goes on, and on.
Is he a crank?
How can his daughter de-crank him?
Is he a malcontent?
How can she get him to some state of contentment?
He’s contemplating revenge against the malefactors who sour and infuriate him. That’s got her worried, really worried. He could get hurt, even as he’s probably hurting himself internally – and socially, of course.
Stress-reducing respiration? The suggestion has him bristling.
Delicately, gently, deferentially, cautiously, his daughter has suggested deep breathing: the count-to-ten-variety. The suggestion seemed to irritate him even more; had him sputtering mild invectives in shortened breaths.
Public-library reference shelves provided his daughter with reinforcement though:
High-level texts speak of the deleterious effects of the release into the bloodstream of adrenal hormones such as cortisol, DHEA, and other hormonal and neural chemicals. But even her cautious reciting of the risks of such releases into the bloodstream would likely make his blood boil. She has to get him to simmer down.
In texts that convey mechanics, she’s read that deep breathing from down in the belly can increase oxygen intake, and can increase the expulsion of carbon dioxide and other toxins from the lungs. The effect, if she understands it, is to massage the internals, which in turn can relax the nerve center – and calm some stressed ganglia. Her understanding is that the induced physiological relaxation can produce a physical and mental calming. Her father bristled at the suggestion. He would have none of it. He growled from his chest. So much for deep, relaxing, diaphragm breathing.
For him, stress reduction would come if all the offenders he encounters – seemingly on a daily basis – would immediately quit aggravating and offending him. He’s plotting ways to have them cease and desist.
That’s got his daughter worried, really worried.
Exercise and Laughter as Therapies
He’s contemplating teaching a lesson to those who assault his senses with their noise and their odors; those who defile and disregard what he holds dear as decent, civil, proper behavior.
He’s angry – not without some cause, reason, warrant, and provocation. His ire is not religiously self-righteous, puritanical. He’s just old-school.
Yes, he’s angry; and, yes, with some good reason – but, in the moment, not always with good reasoning. Nor in the aftermath, either.
His daughter is trying to get him to exercise. He responds that he wishes he was his former self – so that he could teach a lesson or two to those who offend his sense of considerate-of-others conduct.
Humor, laughter – that would surely combat some of the anger he harbors. His daughter brings him joke books, along with DVDs of comedy shows collected and preserved for those who can remember them. At his place, she’s setting out audio-cassette tapes of radio-show-skit comedies (yes, he still has a cassette-player that works, most of the time). And she’s setting out LPs of stand-up (and bar-stool) comics whose best variety-show routines were recorded and can still be heard at 33 1/3 RPM.
He grumps. Grudgingly, he picks up a few of the cassettes and LPs. They bring a smile. Small victories.
But those decades-old jokes and comedy routines don’t vanquish what gets to him. The world away from his cassette-tape-player and his old Magnavox console record-player intrudes and festers.
His viscera may yet be getting the best of him – bringing out the worst in him.
Music Therapy
Yes, his daughter is sure that she’s read that music can prevent and thwart – at least stall – inflammatory triggers. Her father surely has lots of triggers. Thudding thumping coming from a rumbling vehicle’s super sound system. As bad timing would have it, the offending mega-decibel noise-machine has been held over by the same red light that has thwarted his crossing. For what seems like a long-playing eternity, he can’t escape the ear-splitting. His swears can’t be heard; his irate scoldings only strain his vocal cords. The cogs in his agitated brain turn: there has to be a way of taking revenge.
His daughter resorts to research: All the way back to 1697, a playwright/poet sealed his immortality with the lines –
“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak….”
The adage has come down to us as “Music has charms to soothe the savage beast.”
Her father is hardly savage or beastly, but his chest heaves in ire at incivility and discourtesy. He’s not likely to be pulled back by a lullaby, and yet she’s going to give it a try. Got to.
Tai Chi, Qi-gong, and Progressive Muscle Relaxation
His muscles – such as they are – are tight. He’s wound tight. If he had the muscle-mass he used to have, he’d show them. He ordered a set of sand-filled rubber dumbbells. In his tumble-down garage, he manages to briefly balance himself on an amputated piano stool. He pops in a cassette of Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra, and, every so often, reminds himself to lift the dumbbells.
When his visions of possible vendettas take over his mind, he must wake to his mind-body preparations. He’ll reach down for the free weights, and, invariably, jerk the dumbbells with an ill-advised fervor. With each thrust and labored pump, he has to re-steady himself on the amputated stool.
Later, he will curse the dumbbells as he pops over-the-counter pain-relief capsules. And for a more tactile remedy, amid more self-reviling, he lathers on a now-watery stream from a twisted tube of analgesic cream. The fragrant ooze will provide some sense of relief from the muscle and joint pain that he has brought on, by his vendetta fervor. Lots of pain – negligible gain.
What he envisions is a crusade of vigilante revenge and justice. Craves it.
That has his daughter worried, really worried.
The Urge to Admonish
He yearns, longs, to call malefactors to account – and make them submit to his umbrage and ire. It is more than a passing desire. He harbors an enduring personal mission to upbraid, reprimand, rebuke, admonish, chastise, chide, reprove, reproach, scold, berate….
Bearing grudges that are hard to bear
He bears a grudge – grudges. And he can’t let go of them.
In the moment of provocation, he sputters an expletive. In the seconds that follow, his invective lacks syntax; it’s too prolonged and unclear. The malefactor is out of earshot – or, has a far more searing putdown at the ready, thus adding an insult to injury. Those affronts sting; the dismissals inflame. The blood boils and the viscera churn, with hurt, frustration, and humiliation.
Comebacks occur to him, as he still fumes. His mental rewind recreates the outrage and he delivers the rehearsed remonstrance – muttered.
Remedy, Recourse – Revenge?
He wants malefactors to acknowledge their wrong-doings.
Is that too much to ask?
Apparently.
At the hospital, waiting to be called for surgery
From 5:30 that morning, until 6:15 when he was finally summoned by a prep nurse, the intake area was the venue for a group of partiers. Fourteen of them had accompanied a family member or chum to the waiting area – and were themselves accompanied by mounds of takeout Styrofoam which gave forth the most pungent and all-pervading smells. And the noise – boisterous.
He paced. He would have been pacing anyway, but his back-and-forths were so agitated that his blood-pressure (hyper-hypertension) might well delay his surgery. He muttered to himself and allowed his mumblings to become increasingly audible.
He couldn’t take it any longer. The intake staff wouldn’t do anything to quell the celebration that had so infuriated him. He composed himself sufficiently to walk over to the bacchanalia, eyed the restaurant bags from which the Styrofoam had spewed forth, and – somehow, someway – managed to feign a horrified expression.
“Oh my, no, haven’t you heard on the news,” he sputtered in a quivering tone that was meant to convey genuine alarm – “That place has just been raided by Public Health. E-coli, Listeria, and Botulism – a pack of free-range rats as big as wolves; so big and so fearless that they recently attacked and infected pit bulls.”
Shaking his head as if in deep mortal sympathy, he walked away. He could barely contain his glee.
Well, that’s what he imagined pulling off. Instead, he suffered until he was called to surgery. Whatever the beeps and moans of the prep corridor, whatever the indignities and apprehensions up until general anesthesia – all were a respite from the partiers. As he was being rolled to the surgery, a grin could have been detected. He would get those people, next time. He has a devilish, delicious, plan.
On the way home, post-surgery, in his daughter’s Prius, his delight (despite his pain) was uncontainable. Anesthesia had not erased his vision of sweet revenge. It was abiding and determined. The hospital partying continued to rankle. He was able to recall, in detail, his plan for retaliation and retribution.
Hearing what he hoped to hatch, his daughter almost rear-ended a dump-truck that had been spewing the very debris it was transporting to a dump. Her father began reviling the truck and the driver, and all those who might have been a party to the debris hurtled aloft.
Momentarily, thoughts of his reprisal against the pre-surgery partiers are tamped down and supplanted by the new outrage. If he managed to escape a beating at the hands of the hospital partiers, his daughter imagines him being banned from the hospital, as incorrigibly disruptive. The thought of his banishment makes her ill.
She also fears he would be sued for slander by the restaurant whose take-out fare he intends to describe as poisonous.
Yes, she’s worried about him – really worried.
In an Uber, choking on third-hand smoke
He doesn’t drive anymore. Just as well – for his sake: he could ramp up road-rage to self-damaging levels.
He leaves the driving to the Uber folks, and that’s worked out pretty well – especially when he saves money by “pooling.” Ahhh, but on a recent “pool” trip, he was joined by a scruffy fellow whose every inch of epidermis had been festooned with tattoos. The fellow reeked of cigarette smoke – was a walking chimney.
A lifelong non-smoker (who can’t understand how or why cancer cells had turned several of his inners into Airbnbs), her father debated with himself: tell the Uber driver to ditch the guy as a walking cancer-stick? Tell the walking cancer-stick to get out? Get out himself? Why should he leave, he was there before the offending fume-infested passenger got in.
He endured the outrage, the fumes, the resentment. Next time, as his seething needle moves into the red zone, he will find the composure to ask the driver to open all the windows fully and to allow him to move into a seat that may be upwind of the internal gusts.
He told his daughter, “If that doesn’t work, next time I’m going to say that I have some terribly contagious disease and am about to throw-up.” She tries to get him to realize that the Uber driver will probably pull over to have her father relieve himself at a distance. And she also asks her father to imagine that the kind of person he’s so offended by might actually be sympathetic and might insist on helping him and then offer to accompany him home.
Her scenarios give her father pause. Even so, her father is conjuring up exit strategies, escapes, even if his passenger-rating has to be sacrificed as a result of his creating a scene.
Skateboard and electric-scooter menaces
He hates them. He tenses up, head to toe, as he hears them coming from behind. Unheeding, unyielding – reckless. Recently, one knocked him over – knocked him from the sidewalk onto a patch of scrub and had him stumbling onto dog droppings. His hatred spiked.
He’s gonna return the favor. Next time he’ll brace and knock over the skateboarder or scooterer, hoping that the board will become stuck in…
His daughter is worried – very worried.
His wish list
· Cars with blaring, un-silenced, alarms get towed and impounded.
· Leaf-blowers implode, forcing landscapers to resort to rakes and brooms, to clean up the very mess their own noise-making-machines have wrought.
· Speeding, weaving-in-and-out lane-splitting motorcycles all get watered gasoline and stall out ignominiously, in ultra-embarrassing and precarious circumstances.
· Engine-gunning reckless zero-to-hundred speeders, with their thudding head-splitting sound systems, hurtle off bridges into swamps populated by starving pythons and anacondas.
· And if he only had the composure, he would turn to movie-theater motor-mouths and say, “This film has dialogue. You might want to hear some of it.”
· Skateboards and electric-scooters that whiz by him heedlessly, they ultimately soar over a construction-zone ramp and plummet right-smack-dab into freshly-poured road tar or concrete.
Phone yakkers, chatterboxes, motor-mouths
For his almost-daily forced march to and from the supermarket, he only buys what he can carry away in a black fibrous tote. The tote is emblazoned, in yellow-gold lettering, with the motto “U. S. Army – Be All That You Can Be.”
These days, his duty, as he sees it, is to call malefactors to account. Most chatterboxes, motor-mouths, just ignore him – or tell him to…
But he has a plan. He’s been working on it, rehearsing it. Here’s what he imagines pulling off:
At the supermarket, he does a quick reconnaissance and then buys precisely the very items he had intended to purchase on that day’s expedition. Then to the express-checkout line – the one that signals “Ten Items or Less.” He assembles his items in an orderly fashion to facilitate expeditious scanning and his precision bagging.
The guy in front of him – in the express line – has plopped a jumble of forty-some items onto the conveyor belt. Oblivious, wholly absorbed in his mobile-phone monologue, he is nattering on – holding up the line; the express line.
Cell-phone guy’s hair is long, cascading and untamed - displaying a windblown nonchalance, which gives clearance to all the metal trinkets that dangle from his ears. These, in turn, may actually provide a magnetic force-field that enhances reception and keeps the phone adhered into the side of his head. The long metal chain-link loops that cascade from his belt-sash may serve as antennae, which (along with a Dennis Rodman array of facial ironwork) may further boost cell-phone might.
Cell-man is so busy talking on his mobile phone that he does not hear the scoffs from the “Be All That You Can Be” dad.
Cell-man is so absorbed in his phone monologue, and with accompanying gestures to punctuate his endless narration of the day’s minutiae, that he isn’t paying any attention to what he has placed haphazardly on the conveyor belt.
Her dad has seen this kind of behavior before – and he is ready. He had worked it out and rehearsed it – trained for it – in the tactical unit of his imagination.
While cell-man is talking away and gesturing, her “Be All That You Can Be” dad launches his tactical operation.
Paying not the slightest attention to the conveyor belt, nor to the listing of the scanned items on the checker’s display screen, nor to the bagging that the checker is obliged to take on, cell-man has made his purchases vulnerable to infiltration. “Be All That You Can Be” has his target, at close range.
Stealthily, furtively, quietly, unobtrusively, her dad slips a few individually-wrapped specialty sweets, mini-tins of pricey breath mints, and packets of chili- and jalapeno-infused chewing gum onto the conveyor belt. All these he infiltrates and embeds on the conveyor; all snuggled and sequestered amid and behind cell-man’s intended purchases. All are then rung up by the checker-bagger and whisked into store bags. If the checker-bagger spotted the add-ons, she decided to play along.
Cell-man has been too absorbed in his phone monologue to lift a finger to bag the items the checker has scanned; too absorbed to spot the infiltrations.
Politely, the checker is waving and motioning at cell-man to produce a credit or debit card, or cash, to consummate the transaction. Cell-man finally notices her all-too-patient gestures, pauses his narration just long enough to wave his phone at the payout monitor. It doesn’t work. Nor on the second and third tries. Nor on the fourth.
Exasperated, he fumbles under his high-fashion serape to emerge a cloth bag from which he produces a debit card – which does not do the job, either. Eventually, a credit card does the trick and allows him to return to his phone conversation.
Re-absorbed, he takes no notice of what has been bagged. He’s too absorbed to glance at the display-screen itemization. He waves off the checker’s offer of a receipt for the purchases. Unsuspecting, cell-man goes on his way, unawares.
The checker winks at “Be All That You Can Be.” He nods to affirm their conspiratorial silence. At last, a victory. What a glorious feeling.
He is so pleased with the scenario that he regales his daughter with it. She can’t help but smile. Oh yes, she worries about him, but she admits to herself that if he were to pull it off there would be glory.
No, no, she’s not encouraging, she wouldn’t do that.
But still, sometimes, make-believes can serve as antidotes to stress. Can’t they? Maybe, a kind of therapy?
Fervently, she hopes her dad can become more tolerant, more accepting, less judgmental. More patient and forgiving. She hopes he can rise above his fumings.
She hopes her dad’s recoils subside quickly, quietly, and that his reprisal plots remain make-believes. Most of them, anyway.
