the Incredible Grump

I was in a grumpy mood the other day. I mean all day long. An astrologer once told me my personality can swing from extremely high sattva to extremely low tama. Well, telling you this was one hella tama kinda day.

I don’t even remember what kicked off this particular grumpfest, but once it set in it was stonelike. I couldn’t be moved from it. Everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, or thought about made me either depressed or mad. I cursed inanimate objects (a favorite pastime while in dark-ville). I used vocabulary absent from any Sanskrit dictionary.

People who don’t know me very well – that is, practically everyone except my wife — think of me as mild-mannered, meek, quiet, lighthearted, and occasionally funny. I’m here to debunk such thinking. For example, when I’m in one of my modes, and I do mean modes, I’m likely to out and out willfully break things. Once, while adjusting the position of a plastic storage crate in our living room, the crate wouldn’t budge, so I considered it appropriate to curse it in language that would melt the ears off Long John Silver while punching it until it shattered.

“What happened to that crate?” my wife asked, a few days later.

“I punched it,” I said.

“What the HELL? You think you can just go around punching things? What’s WRONG with you?”

Most of the time, I am indeed levelheaded. I don’t wantonly and constantly lash out at household furnishings. It’s just every so often, I don’t know what comes over me. It’s like I morph into a fiery demon with Tourette’s.
This most recent case of the ultra-grumps had me depressed on top of being grumpy; “Why should I have to be this way? This is awful! This sucks!” I remember praying to our Deities for relief. As I sat before Them, feeling like the most condemned, miserly curmudgeon to ever besmear the face of the planet, I reached for the Krishna Book.

With aggravated fury seeping out of every pore of my body, I opened the book, searching for some antidote to my inner foulness, until I reached the adventure of Krishna killing Jarasandha’s army multiple times and sending him back, defeated, again and again.

As I read about the carnage inflicted by the Supreme Personality of Godhead on Jarasandha and company, I felt fifteen pounds lighter. I began to laugh. By the time Krishna led Kalayavana to the cave where Mucukunda was sleeping, and Mucukunda awoke and burned Kalayavana to ashes with one angry look, I felt completely revived. I was cracking up. I felt like I was back to as close to normal as I get.