Whenever I get grouchy, I sentence my mind to a workout, groaning and sweating to compass material it doesn’t know. In yesteryear, I’d dispatch my body, but as parts deteriorate, that’s problematic. “Good run” is an oxymoron. My lumbering galumph soon gives way to a limp not to mention self-lampoon. My body was never a star performer, but these days it’s luggage to lug. Oh well – I’m alive – that’s something.

My mind, though it’s lost a step, still revels in exertion. Puzzles afford workouts to many lazing cerebelli, but they’re not my thing. I need to believe of whatever I’m doing I’m progressing, “getting somewhere,” improving somehow, though I know that’s nonsense. I’m making progress alright, but it’s toward manana, not Nirvana. The more I think, the more certainty melts, like butter in a heatwave.

The news these days makes me grouchy, very, you may have noticed. The idiocy of our species distresses, depresses. It’s not just a few bad apples, the whole barrel’s turning vinegar. Thank heavens for puppy Henry’s jovial good sense to keep me from slithering into a “slough of despond.” (“Slough” by the by is pronounced sloo or slow, not sluff, the verb, a heteronym, but unrelated. You probably knew this but I had to look it up – the sort of inquiry that rescues me from headlines for a while.)

I never cottoned to grouchy old guys who compared bad today to the good old days; I dread becoming one. My mom was that way in her final years, everything was terrible, you had to brace your spirit for a visit. I want to be happy, to brighten your day, to perfume my moment not pollute it, but it keeps getting harder, and if I did show up rollicking under the circumstances, you’d rate me daft. Our moment is grim, there’s no getting around it, our symptoms are dire, and to insist otherwise is to emigrate to la-la-land. No more in 1348, as the Plague decimated Eurasia, could one easily crack a smile.

Yet we must live and to live we must love and laugh and celebrate the delightful and revere the good and make the most of our hour since it’s the only one we’ve got. Yes, we must grump, in deference to truth, but then focus on better, what’s possible, pleasant, “turn that frown upside down.” To mope, however tempting, is moral sloth. Plus, it’s lazy, letting us off the hook. If everything’s terrible, why bother trying? Why not just live it up?

Language is the health club where I do my workouts, my Equinox, Crossfit, Planet Fitness, Curves. Just now I was mucking around in linguistics, phonetics, phonology, the amazing variety of noises humans make. I ran into these sentences from a college brochure which struck me as hilarious: “Phonetics is the study of speech sounds as physical entities (their articulation, acoustic properties, and how they are perceived), and phonology is the study of the organization and function of speech sounds as part of the grammar of language. The perspectives of these two closely related subfields are combined in laboratory phonology, which seeks to understand the relationship between cognitive and physical aspects of human speech.” (Say that three times fast!) We humans are marvels really, to scrutinize ourselves so minutely and discover so much. I jotted a little list of unfamiliar linguistic words – fricative, sibilant, plosive, guttural, strident, uvular, alveolar, ejective, vocable – which tickled, dazzled, dazed. We humans are so loathsome and laudable at once – we must rejoice – and reform!

I return from my brain workout refreshed, refurbished, ready to resume the fight.