Cranky Bear

Fozzie is a cranky bear today.

Oh, who are we kidding? Fozzie has been a cranky bear, largely, for the past few months or more.

If we're really, really honest, Fozzie Bear has been cranky since Oct. 30, 2012.

That's the day after Hurricane Sandy took out the Muppet Daily News' building.

There have been "up" moments - moments of the usual Fozzie Bear behavior - since then, but they have been few and far between.
And right now, Fozzie is hitting an all-time low.
He's off the charts on the grump-o-meter.

Part of it is long-term isolation - he lives at the end of the hall here at the Muppet Daily News and, despite multiple times he and we have pointed out he needs to get out of his bear-cave down there, he sits, he lives in isolation, he broods.

You know "Here's a solution, but I'm not going to do it, because that would eliminate my excuse to be a crabby s.o.b." 

Of late, anyway, there is an additional reason for Fozzie's being a bear. (okay, grumpy as a non-Fozzie-bear). 
Fozzie has empty bear-cave syndrome.
The youngest cub has gone off to bear-school, and Fozzie doesn't deal with this well.
We all know this, because this is the third cub to go off to bear-school.

So knowing the reason, we'll do our best to cut Fozzie a break ... for a while anyway.  We will let him wallow in his crabby-bear-ness.
He gets a week.
Then he needs to pull up his big-bear-pants and move on.
Because his miserable mood is (a) contagious; (b) impacting what everyone else does here; (c) affects his - and thus our - workload and work schedule.

Now as far as his long-term crabbiness? There is a cure. It's a fairly easy cure.
But he'll just keep ignoring it and grousing and growling at us instead.
Maybe it makes him feel better to not only be miserable, but to share that with the rest of us.
So far that hasn't worked out so well for him ... but Fozzie will do what Fozzie decides to do.
As long as he doesn't expect me to buy a ticket on the crabby-train next to him ....

Much like stupid (and he's not that), you can't fight someone determined to be a miserable, crabby old bear.