My Grumpy Bona Fides

Feeling rather uninspired and a bit achy on this gray cold misty morning, I trolled the internet looking for something to spark my writing mechanisms. Nada. Then I found ">this, a rather ho-hum list of the Ten Grumpiest Living Writers. Imagine my near-chuckle when the second scribe on the list was Maurice Sendak; seems the list was published April 25, less than two weeks before Mr. Sendak grumpily departed this mortal coil. So much for the relevancy of that list. But wait a minute, I thought. There's an opening. And while my name is not nearly as famous as the other still-living (as I write this, I assume) nine typists on the list, I do write, damnit, and today I'm feeling rather grumpy, so what the hell, here's my application.

I have never seen the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, so my grumpiness comes uninfluenced, naturally, if you will. I'm sure the other nine writers on the list haven't seen a rejection letter in dozens of years, so I've got them beat on that point--how artificial is your grumpiness if you know with assurance that whatever grump you pen will be published? I'm so grumpy that apparently I don't seek empathy for my grumpiness--to date, and I imagine in perpetuity, I have read a total of 1 5/4 books by the ten authors on the list: all of The Corrections (mainly out of spite for Oprah), about three-quarters of Less Than Zero when it was allegedly all the rage nearly thirty years ago, and maybe half of one of Martin Amis's sour missives years ago when I actually thought being well-read included familiarity with his work. Looking over the list of these supposed grumps makes me so grumpy that I'd rather reach for a three-month-old copy of US magazine in a random dentist's office than pick up one of their books. And my coffee's cold but I'm too grumpy to walk the six steps to refresh it, and even if I wanted something cold to drink right now, nope, because the fridge is on the Fritz and I'm too grumpy to click the few buttons to find out whether I've grumped about the phrase "on the Fritz" before in these pages or, if not, to click a few more and discover where that phrase came from and wax grumpily on the original poor Fritz, and did I mention that the first floor toilet is out of service too so that I now have to climb the stairs every time my coffee gets the best of my bladder, which--my bladder--feels its age more and more each day, and sure I love that the Indians are in first place but mainly because I know that they'll crash and burn eventually and at least I can console myself all next winter remembering that back on May 8 they led the division by two games (and isn't it pathetically grumpy that that will be one of the highlights of my winter?), and isn't the word grumpy too colorful to waste on a bunch of sad sacks? And poor Beverly Lewis, writer of dozens of Amish romance novels--I bet she's never made anybody's grumpy list, and I'm sure she feels a bit grumpy from time to time too, but no one ever notices I bet because if you're the James Patterson of the Amish romance genre, everyone must assume your life is nothing but perfectly raised barns. I feel your unappreciated grump, Beverly.