Love finds Andy Rooney

My current obsession

KERRI WOLOSZYN STAFF

My current obsession is Andy Rooney. Yes, Andy Rooney of 60 Minutes fame. The Andy Rooney who I would often watch before The Simpsons when I was young. And I’d have to wait and wait for this old man to get angry about something that I’d never heard of and then the clock would start to tick. The clock was the signal for the end of that old man’s lunacy. Time’s up.

But now I’m older and I can see the appeal of Rooney. He’s a curmudgeon. Rooney’s an old man with something to say. He’s not necessarily a wise old man, but he has been given a longstanding forum and that counts for something, surely.

Rooney is at his best when his discussions veer from the political into the wide world of everything else. Rooney’s done pieces on why we keep old boxes (he keeps the boxes from items he has bought but never puts those items back in them), on the merits of neckties (why don’t men wear them anymore?) and kitchen tools.

Two of my favorite recent Rooney rants were about things of seemingly little consequence: Girl Scout cookies and free stuff. That’s the truly wonderful thing about Rooney. He has the ability to take something I don’t care about and make it something I hardly care about. This man has spent his entire day thinking about it, for pete’s sake, it must be something of great importance. The Girl Scout cookie piece was a fascinating “deconstruction” of

America’s all-time favorite doorstep purchase. Rooney was upset (and he’s always upset) that Girl Scout cookies had become too complicated. There are too many choices, the price is too high, and there are far too many ingredients. In the free stuff piece Rooney’s mood was similar, but this time he was bemoaning all of the stuff that he gets from viewers. How horrible it is to have a room full of stuff you didn’t pay for that you don’t need. I guess it would just be too hard to give it all away.

I wonder what it is about Rooney that is so compulsively watchable. I don’t normally enjoy listening to people complain about milk or movie ads or acronyms, and yet with Rooney I’m all in. Perhaps Rooney reminds me (and all of us) about what we will become: cranky. Rooney is like the real-life version of Mr. Wilson, except that his Dennis isn’t a small boy with a slingshot. Instead, his menace is everything else that you would possibly think could annoy someone and a whole lot of things that you wouldn’t.

Rooney is truly a heroic creature. He has managed to find a job where he can do what he does best: complain. Rooney has seemingly always been just shy of 90 and he is one of those few things in life that get better with age. I fully expect the Rooney of 10 years from now to be far more enjoyable to watch (i.e. far more insane) and full of hostility towards everything than he is now. And I think of that as a good thing.

Keep that clock ticking.