Querulous
Adj. Complaining in a petulant, whining manner; peevish, fretful, or given to incessant grumbling, often over trivialities.
Derived from Latin querulus, from queri (to complain), with roots in Proto-Indo-European kwes– (to wheeze or sigh).  Late Middle English snatched it up around the 15th century, slapping it onto those who moan like a creaky floorboard under a fat man’s boot.

My office in the Safe House, where the Dissolute Desk sits, has become a bit derelict, maybe even ramshackle, lately.  It’s a literary warzone of crumpled manuscripts, half-empty bourbon bottles, and cigarette burns that map out my existential crises.  I’d been drowning in my own detritus – pizza boxes stacked like postmodern ziggurats, dust bunnies breeding with the ferocity of roaches in a California dumpster – so I hired a housekeeper.  Enter Mrs. Fingerbottom. 

She arrived, a wiry specter in a floral apron, her face a topographical map of disapproval, lips pursed like she’d just sucked a lemon through a straw.  I’d hoped for a stoic domestic warrior, a Mrs. Doubtfire with a broom and a can-do spirit.  Instead, I got this querulous old bat, her voice a nasal dirge that could make a saint chuck his halo and reach for the whiskey.  “The curtains are filthy,” she’d whine, brandishing her feather duster like some scepter of judgement.  “And these books – stacked like a hobo’s lean-to!  How do you live in this squalor?”  Each syllable dripped with the petulance of a dowager who’d found a fly in her vichyssoise. 

I tried to ignore her, barricading myself behind my typewriter, hammering out prose while she shuffled through my chaos, muttering dark imprecations about the state of my socks.  But her complaints were a sonic assault, a relentless drip-drip-drip of grievance that eroded my sanity faster than a three-day bender in Tijuana.  One day, she stood over my desk, clutching a moldy coffee mug like it was evidence in a war crimes trial.  “This,” she hissed, pissed off, “is an affront to hygiene!”  I wanted to set light to her.  I wanted to scream, to tell her to take her sanctimonious scrubbing and sit on it and spin, but I just grinned, and poured another shot.  Because I’ve come to understand that in this ridiculous existence, even a nagging witch like Mrs. Fingerbottom is just another character in the lunatic narrative I’m apparently doomed to write. 

N.P.: “My Love” – Die Symphony