Sesame Street Oscar The Grouch Quotes

Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos. There are 7 people in my house. We each have different genders. I cut my hair over the bathroom sink and everything I own has a hole in it. There is a banner in our living room that says “Love Cats Hate Capitalism.” We sit around the kitchen table and argue about the compost pile and Karl Marx and the necessity of violence when The Rev comes. Whatever the fuck The Rev means. Every time my best friend laughs I want to grab him by the shoulders and shout “Grow old with me and never kiss me on the mouth!” I want us to spend the next 80 years together eating Doritos and riding bikes. I want to be Oscar the Grouch. I want him and his girlfriend to be Bert and Ernie. I want us to live on Sesame Street and I will park my trash can on their front stoop and we will be friends every day. If I ever seem grouchy it’s just because I am a little afraid of all that fun. There is a river running through this city I know as well as my own name. It’s the first place I’ve ever called home. I don’t think its poetry to say I’m in love with the water. I don’t think it’s poetry to say I’m in love with the train tracks. I don’t think it’s blasphemy to say I see God in the skyline. There is always cold beer asking to be slurped on back porches. There are always crushed packs of Marlboro’s in my back pockets. I have been wearing the same patched-up shorts for 10 days. Someday I will stop being young and wanting stupid tattoos.

I was coming down off the last painkiller left in my dresser drawer after Autumn tossed my stash. In that moment I was so groggy and happy I would have accepted a date with Oscar the Grouch - and planned to do some serious feeling up on the green furry beast too. Yeah, stooping to pharmaceutical-inspired sex fantasies about garbage can Sesame Street characters - that had to be the best Just Say No drug lecture a girl in a leg cast could ever receive to make her go cold turkey off the meds.

A word I keep coming back to tonight. Word of the day. My life is now Sesame Street, and I am Oscar the Grouch. Pretty sure Elmo just brought me my wine.

My life is now Sesame Street, and I am Oscar the Grouch.

It’s as though the gentle reggae strains of Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” have been sped up to a ska beat, and both worrying and unhappiness are now treated not just as a taboo but as an affliction you have a responsibility to treat. Curmudgeonly remarks, high-strung habits, and skepticism once merely meant you were a certain type of person, negative but relatively harmless, like Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. But these days, “grouchiness” is often encountered as a condition for which you require intervention: a prescription, more meditation, more self-care, a subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine.