I don’t carry it to excess, but if I can have an uninterrupted three-day grouch two or three times a year, life seems a little more tolerable. For those three days I refuse ever to smile or cheer up.

For those three days when someone greets me with a casual “How are you?” I answer, “Rotten.” If someone says, “Let’s have lunch sometime,” I say, “Why?” If the telephone rings and I answer and a voice says, “Will you hold, please, for Mister Success?’ I say, “No,” and hang up.

This affords a healthy respite from life’s routine, most of which is a mass conspiracy to persuade ourselves that we always feel fine, enjoy socializing with people who don’t like us any more than we like them, and respect people who are more successful than we are. For three days I can wallow in rigorous honesty.

After that I’m ready to participate again in the social fictions, pretending to feel fine, pretending not to know that I bore’ people who say, “Let’s have lunch sometime,” choking back the envy and malice I feel toward Mister Success.

For reasons that make no sense, though, Americans hate to see a fellow enjoying a bit of grouchiness. Last month, while seeking grouchy relief, I was incessantly badgered by meddlers.

“Smile,” they insisted.

Apparently not, if I judge correctly by the number of persons who recoiled in shock when I snarled, “I am having a splendid time feeling grouchy this week, and I am sick and tired of smiling, and sick and tired of other people smiling, especially politicians who have the atom bomb at their disposal.”

Being sick and tired of almost everything is characteristic of a first-rate onset of grouchiness. Sick and tired is to grouchiness what rum is to a Caribbean vacation: you can’t get in the mood without it. And mine was a grouchiness of the highest quality.

I was sick and tired of January and sick and tired of February following January year after year like famine and pestilence following war. I was sick and tired of football and sick and tired of football being followed by ice hockey and basketball as pestilentially as February followed January.

I was sick and tired of everything except being sick and tired of it all, which I enjoyed immensely. I was especially sick and even tireder of the tyrants of English usage who said it was illiterate to say “tireder.” Because, you see, I was determined to let the world know that, sick and tired as I was of almost everything, I was even sicker and tireder of people interrupting my grouch with commands to smile and cheer up.

What has happened to tolerance in America? The catalogue of things we now tolerate is hair-raising. We tolerate filthy movies, the destruction of the telephone company, prime-time television, statesmen who don’t know where Albania is and defense-industry crooks who charge us $9,000 for an 11-cent piece of hardware.

If we can tolerate all this and keep smiling and stay cheered up, why can we not tolerate a person whose only wish is to enjoy a three-day respite from smiles? Can it be that we all, collectively, fear the contagion this fellow may spread?

Yes, it is terrible to imagine the consequences of 150 million Americans all simultaneously enjoying a three-day grouch. Of such stuff are revolutions made. So when one is spotted, he is instantly harassed by happiness brigades, lest he bring down the entire conspiracy of contentment.

My own grouchiness passed weeks ago. How do I feel? Fine. Lunch sometime? Let’s do that one of these days. Hold for Mister Success? Ah, well, he can’t help being a swine.

1. Why does the writer periodically feel the need to be grouchy?

2. What do other people do and say when he becomes grouchy?

3. Are most of our social conventions really sincere and honest?

4. When feeling irritable, he says he’s sick and tired of what?

5. What are the writer’s feelings toward “Mr. Success”?

6. Why does he plead for tolerance from others?

7. Is the writer grouchy now?