Irritating Male Syndrome

You don’t notice the shift at first. Nobody does. You think you’re still easygoing, reasonable, intermittently delightful.

Maybe not Cary Grant witty and charming. More Robert Mitchum nonchalant. With a jot of Jimmy Stewart earnest relatability.

Then one day you hear yourself say, “They don’t make extension cords like they used to,” and you stop.

Because you’re not joking.

You’re testifying. And you’re genuinely livid.

That’s when it crosses over. What began as irritable male syndrome — fatigue, moodiness, a low-grade sense that all your socks have turned against you — mutates into something far more advanced:

Irritating male syndrome.

Stage IV. Self-propagating. Now available in aerosol form.

No cure. Only containment, and the occasional mumbled non-apology apology that somehow includes footnotes. “Now look what you made me do.”

The distinction matters.

Irritable male syndrome is something you have.

Irritating male syndrome is something you broadcast.

I saw it at a barbecue. Mythopoetic old men arranged in a Robert Bly-style loose circle, like a support group for knees of retired middle linebackers. We orbited the grill as though awaiting a tribal drum beat.

Nobody ate. We diagnosed.

“Too hot.”

“It’s not the heat.”

Pause.

“It’s the distribution.”

Distribution. Of heat. On a grill. We’re not cooking burgers — we’re auditing fire.

At some point, without discussion, we all agreed the grill had failed us.

I contributed nothing useful, but with authority. Some charred baloney about premium carbon steel griddles. But it’s not the grill in urgent need of replacement parts. It’s me.

Because now I have opinions. Not opinions you can set aside — no, these are infrastructural opinions. Opinions with zoning permits.

Meanwhile my left leg has gone completely numb, which I interpret as dissent.

When did this happen? When did I become a man who has a position on preferred toaster brands?

Simple: the moment inconvenience, because I was tired and grumpy, started to be interpreted as persecution.

A light switch delays half a second and suddenly you’re filing charges against time itself. Who approved this lag? Where are the strata minutes? I want names.

That’s how it spreads. It colonizes new territory. Conversation. Public space. Family dinners. Weather.

Oh, especially weather. And funerals.

You’re no longer reacting — you’re declaring. Issuing findings. Drafting white papers on the moral collapse of paper straws.

Put three of us old ginks together in a food court and it becomes a closed-loop ecosystem of grievance.

“The problem with food courts,” the first doofus says, “is too many choices.”

Too many choices. In a food court.

This from a guy who once spent four hours researching Costco patio umbrellas and emerged with a hot dog and a hose nozzle.

And we nod. We all nod.

Because choice used to feel like freedom.

Now it feels like an exam administered by strangers. And there’s no way you can study for this all-encompassing sense of functional obsolescence. Now that nobody needs us, what are we for?

Something is happening here and we don’t know what it is, do we, Mr. Jones? A low, steady realization: this is not the life we ordered. Late last night, I heard the screen door slam. And a big yellow Uber took away my old manhood.

Boy, the way Bob Dylan played. Songs that made the hit parade. Guys like us, we had it made.

Those were the days, my friend. We thought they’d never end.

But they up and left us for some foreign guy. So now we compensate with groundless certitude.

About traffic patterns. Thermostats. Bridge engineering. Quantum entanglement.

Venezuelan beaver cheese!

You don’t need to understand it. You just have to have a position on it. And a compulsion to let everybody within hearing distance know.

I used to find men like this exhausting.

They are.

But now I understand the life cycle. First you’re tired. Then you’re irritable. Then, slowly, you become a publicly funded lecture series.

A roaming seminar with no intermission.

I caught my reflection in a grocery store door the other day, aggressively test-driving a wobbly cart like I was preparing expert testimony for The Hague.

And I thought: there he is.

Not the simply irritable one. That guy just needed a nap.

No — this is the upgraded model. The one who has taken private discomfort and scaled it into a community initiative.

A punch-drunk custodian and bullhorn arm-pumper of minor inconveniences.

I pushed the cart again.

It wobbled.

Of course the frigging thing wobbled.

At some point I became convinced the wobble was deliberate. Engineered. A message.

From the Chinese.

And now, the end is near. And so I pop the final Cert in. I’ve pushed a cart that’s full. I’ve pressure-washed my driveway. And more. Much more than this.

I did it, Huawei.