Damien Galeone

My barber is a little late today. I sit on the couch amid a few Vietnamese ladies and prop my arm up on the cushion. Upon being made to wait due to someone else’s lateness, my first instinct is usually anger. But I have been concerned recently at my inability to be present. Or at the very least, to lose myself in thoughts as opposed to Reddit. Recently, therefore, I have decided to actively attempt to use my phone less. And unfortunately, once I did that I found there was nothing to keep me from this horror show called ‘thinking’.

Now, I sit quietly and watch the mall people go by. When they prove distressingly real, I let my mind wander. Burke and I have decided to play hooky this afternoon and are going to a restaurant for some beers and pizza. At this moment, the world is my oyster and it will come on bread with mozzarella. But after three months of daily busyness to the point of exhaustion, an afternoon hidden in the garden of some off-the-beaten-track restaurant is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I am irritated with myself for wasting May and June this year. This is one of my favorite times of year – we are no longer teaching but only testing and doing other work. This year, however, I have bitten off more than I can gobble and the time has passed in a blur of stress and short fuses. It was in an attempt to rein that in that we came up with our hooky day.

Paní July – my barber – is still not here. Though I don’t know her well, she must have a medical condition which results in her believing that I am 21 years old. As a result, she cuts my hair as one would someone who is hip to modern trendiography™. She leaves my hair longer on top – as Burke has assured me is the fashion. And while I was disconcerted at first, the number of compliments I got from my 21-year-old students seem to support Burke’s thesis and Paní July’s follicular tactics. The one time I asked Ms. July if she could cut my hair on top a wee bit shorter, she replied, in a somewhat startling but not altogether unpleasant way, ‘No.’

For this reason, I cannot forego haircuts lest I begin resembling Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein in 1995. So while I usually let my hair go for two months, Paní July has convinced me that I should come every month. So here I am for the third time in three months like some Prima Donna. So I’ll get twelve haircuts a year instead of six. I’m trying to reckon with the extra time push. It’s a 100% uptick in time. Let’s say each haircut is 30 minutes, I will now spend six hours a year getting a haircut. I marvel a little at that – how the small things add up. And then there’s how the small things add up over the course of your life, not in hours, but in how many more times of an activity or a object your life amounts to. I make the mistake of doing math in my head. Let’s say I have 35 years left on Planet X (bringing me to a lucky, if irritable 85 years old) at twelve haircuts a year, including this one, that brings me up to 425 haircuts left in my whole life.

About 40,000 years ago, I was working as a bartender in an Italian restaurant-bar. OK, this was around 2000. This place was staffed with young, enthusiastic college or recently-post-college kids. They were optimistic and happy, having not yet been bludgeoned down by the real life waiting around the corner for them.

I had worked in dive bars before this and found this experience to be wholly more enjoyable. For one thing, I very rarely had to battle vagrants over a sixpack of malt liquor. I didn’t reach for a billy club at all in this job. And 911 was not on speed dial. This was one of those pubs that just felt nice to be in. It put off a good energy. The staff liked working there and had fun doing so. Many of the employees had formed fast friendships and, like many bar staff, they hung out with each other – oftentimes at the bar itself. Regulars fed off of these good vibes and gravitated towards the place. It was a great bar.

One day, someone – and I won’t say who – conceived of a Drink Off. A good old fashioned drinking contest. See, we had these 3-liter bottles of wine meant for large parties. However, somehow the idea that matriculated down through discussion that we make teams and each team would drink one of these bottles. Five teams of two (2) were created, made up mostly of waitresses and waiters, one bartender (not me), and one manager. We laughed about the potential shenanigans of this contest. We had visions of trash-talking waitresses and lighthearted rivalry slurred by wine.  

As luck would have it, I was the bartender working this drink off. The teams took up their spots around the bar. Ten people. Some had dressed in football jerseys and had applied eye black. The mood was light and the teams jibed each other in a friendly competitive manner. At 5 pm sharp I blew the proverbial whistle and they were off to the races. And then everyone started chugging wine – aka cry juice.

It was soon after this (let’s say 5:08 pm) that the on-duty manager and I realized the flaw in the plan. We had made a drinking contest based on how quickly everyone could drink one of these bottles, not on how much they could drink or not a series of drinking challenges. No. How fast can all young twentysomethings and one fortysomething drink a 3-liter bottle of wine. Huh.

The friendly jibes stopped because people were too busy bringing wine glasses to their mouths and chugging its contents. For the next forty minutes or so, these young, enthusiastic kids devolved into slouching, cross-eyed protohumans whose linguistic skills dissipated along with their ability to monitor volume, and, it should be mentioned, bladder control. About an hour later all hell broke loose. And I was in an island among ten of the drunkest people I had ever laid eyes on while sober. Never have I felt more like a character on The Walking Dead.  

Trouble? Yes.

Unprecedented? No.

Many times throughout history has alcohol made large groups of people go simply bonkers. Sure, sometimes the problem was the booze itself. In the Munich beer riots in 1844, people lost their collective Teutonic heads over a rise in the price of beer. The Irish joined the Germans during the Lager beer riots in Chicago 1855, when new temperance laws and bar closures on Sundays didn’t quite sit right. In the late 18^th century, Americans showed their early irrational aversion to taxes when they started lynching tax collectors during what would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.  

Sometimes the problem was giving a large group of people a lot of alcohol. Ten Cent Beer Night is a famous example of the equation of mob + booze x 1000 = uh oh. Ten cent beer night was a promotion held for the Texas Rangers-Cleveland Indians (baseball) game at Cleveland Stadium on June 4 1974. The beer was discounted down from 64 cents. Orders were limited to 6 beers per order, but no limit was placed on how many orders. Besides the uncannily dumb idea to give sports fans in a stadium cheap unlimited booze, this situation was set up by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad accidents, and more stupidity.

I walk through the doors of our local pub. Two of my three comrades are at the table already. As I walk in, I am hearing the tune of the Magnificent Seven. It is also possible that I hear that song because I am humming that song. My friends – we’ll call them Bertie and Jay – are in good spirits. Bertie has just received a renewal on his permanent residence. He is visiting after a long absence in Prague. Jay is in a good mood because we are in our testing period at the university and work for the day is well over. Done. Finished. A thing of the morning and the past.

It is time to day drink.  

When I was a younger man, day drinking was put into play on a whim. Any random Tuesday or Thursday could turn into a session with no help from anyone or anything except some guy who might ask ‘so you want something to drink?’ It might be mentioned that this person was often a paid employee of an establishment, and, given the time and context of his question, ‘something to drink’ usually meant iced tea or a coke.

But such were the frenzied outlaw days of my early outlaw life. When ‘liver health’ was a phrase I heard Thursday nights on ER. When a hangover was twenty minutes of discomfort in the morning and cured by a glass of water. Sometimes day drinking was a continuity of the night before, one of those special times when all hit right, everyone’s tolerance was shifted into overdrive, and you could just keep going, and so, in a way that was agreed-upon without a word exchanged, you did just that: kept going until you were done.

But now that my age recently stopped starting with a 4, things have changed. They changed when my age stopped starting with a 3, but I was stubborn. Nowadays, a drink at lunch can mean a headache until dinner. A hangover is a phasal thing, like the moon cycle, or a werewolf cycle. Day one is head pain, day two is joint pain, day three is anxiety, day four is when all the pieces begin to settle back into place, day five, I begin to find hope in the world once again. Just in time for the weekend.

So to decide on a program of day drinking is not done lightly. Affairs have to be put in order, obligations taken care of, organized, pet duties relegated to a mildly irked partner, meals plotted and planned. It’s a scene man. And when all of this is done, there is still one big ole X factor. And that is Knox Wren. And he has just walked through the door. The waiter’s knees buckle.  

Way back in January, I called the gastroenterology department of the clinic next door to my home and in childish Czech managed arranged a colonoscopy. We settled on May 26. I hung up the phone satisfied with my linguistic victory and slapped the referral up on the fridge under a Guinness magnet and went about my day.

I then went about my day quite normally, as if I had not just arranged for a group of strangers to navigate a long scope up my ass. For three and a half months that referral and that word ‘colonoscopy’ was a theory, a procedure of the future, a word that evinced a solid level of responsibility for a man entering his fifties. Since I turned fifty, I haven’t felt much different, as if I was still in my forties but someone had accidentally let me into a club I didn’t belong to.

But now with the word ‘colonoscopy’ I felt that I had convincingly entered that demographic. I could drop it into conversations like the older folks I have known. ‘Nah, can’t do it that week, I’ve got my colonoscopy.’ It’s just what you say. It’s routine. You’re fifty. You have a medical responsibility. But in the subtitle of everyday language, you are telling someone ‘Sorry. On the morning of May 26, someone is going to lube me up and stick at least one medical instrument up my ass. And that is why I can’t play Laser Tag that day.’

What you leave out to everyone, except for your close friends, live-in partner, pets, and those who have been there before, is what you have to do on May 25.

On May 6, I arrive at the department for the procedure’s prep meeting. The nurse explains to me there is a diet for 5 days beforehand (I didn’t know this) and then she sends me a prescription for the laxatives which will give the doctors ‘the clearest possible image of my colon’. Surely you can do the math here. To get a clear image of a lower GI tract, you need to clean it out. Totally. And what better to do that job than Clensia?

On my way out of the clinic I pop into the pharmacy and get my laxatives. They come in a white box with black lettering. The biggest word by far on this box is Clensia. The name sort of says it all. Though it leaves out ‘Clensia out until you are a weeping puddle of sadness’. The box contains 8 sacks of laxative (4 big, 4 small), but feels as though it’s carrying a few hefty novellas. I’d write that the pharmacist gives me a sympathetic look, but that would be a boldfaced lie. She has given out far worse for far worse to far unhappier people. She cares very little about my rump and its future.

Much like my referral, the box of Clensia sits and waits on a shelf, watching me in its theoretical usefulness for around two weeks. The days inch closer and closer until I have to read the instructions.

Oh, I have some idea of what this entails. You drink a powerful laxative concoction, which works its magic, shocking your body into action and submission all at once, and everything that ever existed in your body that isn’t bolted down comes flying out at the speed of sound. I make a simple plan. Obviously, I’m not leaving home. I have a lot of work to do. Burke will be on dog-walking duty for the day. I plan to sit at my desk and work, and when the need ‘arises’ I will head the twenty or so feet to the bathroom – which I have outfitted with my spare set of reading glasses and the book I’m currently reading. It’s all set. It won’t be so bad.  

This sentence’s job should be a hyperbolic description of how wrong ‘it won’t be so bad’ was. My powers of exaggeration, however, fail me. The concoction doesn’t so much do ‘magic’ in my system as it becomes fed-after-midnight-gremlins who then go to town on my colon like it’s Randy Peltzer’s kitchen. Oh, medical professionals also leave out the part where all that stuff flying out of your body takes with it any remaining electrolytes, any residual optimism left over from your youth, and your will to live. By mid-afternoon, I have counted the steps from my desk to the bathroom – fifteen. An hour later, I trade in my pants for a big towel. There’s no point in putting pants back on when they’re just going to be removed in a panicked state. By late-afternoon, I stop sitting down to work. Instead, I opt to stand at the kitchen counter, which is ten steps from the bathroom. Trust me, those five steps matter. I stand and do my work. In no pants. Crying.

I should stop complaining. Medical advancements and technology have come a long way in making fifty-year-olds in 2025 as healthy and vital as thirty-five-year-olds in 1985. They can replace our old parts like knees and hips. They have found ways to make sure we live longer and with a much better quality of life. And one of the big reasons for that is the colonoscopy.

The word ‘colonoscopy’ has become such a part of our lexicon that it’s maybe surprising to realize that it’s only been part of our mainstream medical culture since 1997. It became more common practice only in the early-mid-2000s. And the effects are undeniable. Between 1970 and 2020 there was a 50% drop in colorectal cancer deaths – basically due to the colonoscopy as a screening process.

Surely there are untold millions among the previous generations who would have happily dealt with a day of aggressive pooping before getting a scope up their rear had it prevented what was to come. While this insight makes sense to me now, post-procedure, it lacks the intended impact late in my prep day, as I have become a moaning, pantless fool who is sitting on the toilet for the thirtieth or so time that day.  

My procedure is at 7 am. I am brought in quickly, given colonoscopy pants (they are light and have, as you may guess, an easy-access gap in the rear. By the time I am pulling my knees to my chest and the nurse is sedating me, I am ready for whatever comes. And as I slip off into a definitely-could-be-deeper state of unawareness, I wonder if that’s a subsidiary goal of the prep day: to create a misery so profound that the misery that comes later is not as miserable.      

Well, at least I’ll have something to bring up to my 50-year-old friends.

I’m amazed by people who watch new things on TV every day. Someone who has a full day of exhausting work, navigates the maelstroms of daily interactions with other humans and then goes home and plops on a movie they’ve never seen or a show that you just want to try out. Wow.

My particular brand of mental exhaustion demands a period of attentive-inattentiveness in the evening. I work hard all day, reading, writing, editing, teaching, dealing with all the minutia in between and the last thing I need at home is new. I want old news. I want a show I have seen 81,293 times. I want a show whose jokes I know so well, I can skip them with precision if I want and still not miss the call back that comes 30 seconds after it. What this old show is depends on whim and mood. I go through phases. Brooklyn 99. 30 Rock. Friends. Cheers. Frasier. Do I feel like the 1990s? How about a little 1980s?

This isn’t to say that I sit and watch these shows. They are normally on in the background like light versions of light pop songs in the elevator. I usually read or do the little bits of work that couldn’t get attended to during the day. Burke usually goes along with whatever as she usually winds down her night working or playing on her phone and finding massively depressing news items to tell me about right before bed. That, or who Cher is dating or why we don’t like Susan Sarandon anymore. Or why Madonna wears gloves. I know it all. It gets through.

I understand that this habit makes me smack dab in the middle of the road normal. Everyone does it (except for those psychos who watch new stuff). And I have read about why people do this and I tick every single solitary box. Craving familiarity, fulfilling my emotional needs, the Mister Rogers effect, the Conjuring effect, and nostalgia therapy. All there for me. I’m not special.

Mid-April. It was a nice, quiet Tuesday evening, or some day that’s innocuous like a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday, but not tranquil like a Thursday or a Friday. I was in my armchair and I was reading. The TV was on in the background. We had eaten, so there was nothing to look forward to for the rest of the day, except maybe a yogurt. My phone buzzed and, being a resident of the 21^st century, I dropped my book instantly to find out who was contacting me.

My sister. I staved off the disappointment. I mean, I love my sister, but there could always be more exciting correspondents. The message was this: Hey.

‘Hey’ can mean a lot of things. It already meant a lot of things back when we spoke to each other in person with our mouths. It could be a greeting, a warning, a threat, a complaint. Nowadays, removing intonation, facial cues, and the 71,292 emoticons that usually accompany one of my sister’s messages, and it could be anything from remonstration to greeting to precursor to ‘I have some bad news. Are you there?’

And I was there. But I wasn’t sure if I was going to be there. Answering a message can make or break your day. It can lead to good information, a fun chat, information you didn’t want on an innocuous Tuesday or, worst of all, tasks you didn’t want to undertake. I had a few moments and considered my options. I plopped my phone in my lap and vaguely hoped for another vibrating text from someone more exciting.

This sister and I had not had any recent fights. So, ‘Hey’ was unlikely to be a ‘Hey, we need to clear the air here.’ This sister lives at home. Were there a problem with one of my parents she would likely be the spreader of that news. This could potentially be, ‘Hey, I have to tell you something.’ And this sister will, on occasion, just say hello and she can be a drop tone deaf. So it was possible that ‘Hey’ was simply ‘Hey.’ But could she want something else? I wasn’t sure. In a moment of familial loyalty that I’d kick myself for two weeks later, I wrote back.

‘Hey.’

The floodgates opened.

The gist. My mother had decided – along with the higherups at her work – that it was time for her to retire. This was a big decision. My mom has been working at the same company for almost three decades and, to put it in patently understatement terms, she loves her job. She is, until this Friday, a beloved and loyal employee. Moreover, the love that she has for this job and her colleagues and bosses is returned in spades by those bosses and colleagues. At the age of around fifty, my mom got the job of her dreams (organizing things for other people) and never looked back.

The problem. My sister’s ‘Hey’ was followed by ‘…can I ask you to do something?’ My mom’s bosses were throwing her a retirement party. They thought a neato thing to do would be to get her beloved family members – aka, those who’d ruined her uterus and were thus guilted into doing pretty much whatever she asked for the rest of her life – to record congratulatory videos. These videos were to be watched during the retirement party. So, not only did we have to record videos – closeups of our faces while speaking – but we were going to be watched by a party full of people we didn’t know holding paper plates with half-eaten slices of pound cake with vanilla icing up to their lips and asking their neighbor through plastic forks ‘who’s this again?’

That was ‘Hey.’

It’s a few minutes before 8 am and I wake up in a slight haze. It’s the haze of waking up still tipsy in a different city and in a hotel room you don’t recognize. I sit up. Oh, right…we’re in Munich. I get up and get dressed.

Burke and I travel well together. This is mainly because we both have a good idea of when walking around and looking at old stuff should transition into sitting down and sampling local delicacies and whatever the local version of Becherovka happens to be. Being in tune with your travel partner in this way is incredibly important. If you disagree, then you have yet to be on a trip with a person whose ideas of fun on a weekend trip differ from yours. The sweet innocent weekend trip has ended more than one relationship. It’s almost certainly ended more than one friendship. And it’s probably led to a murder or two. So, we’re lucky we agree on most points.

We have traditions too. One of them is that in the morning, Burke sleeps the sleep of a fairytale princess who’s been cursed by a witch, while I haul my hungover ass around our neighborhood to find us baked goods and some coffee. And it is such a quest for which I am currently pulling on my pants. After purposely forgetting to brush my teeth, I step out the door to find out what morning wares our neighborhood in Munich pitches.

The evening before, we noticed a place called Boogie Donuts, which seems right in line with what I’d like to destroy my waistline with on this weekend trip. I make my way through quiet – too quiet streets to where the donut place is. I visited Austria a month or so ago with my brother and undertook the same morning task. The result couldn’t have been better. The Austrians called me forth to their bakeries, explained their strangely-just-out-of-reach-linguistically cakes and pastries, congratulated me on the Eagles’ Superbowl victory, gave me a cake for free, and sent me home. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for something similar.

I first come across a local shop. There’s bread in the windows. It’s colorful inside and I see men inside working in yellow uniforms and the little hats of those ordered to keep their hair out of food. As I need toothpaste and maybe some juice, this will be perfect. I present myself at the entrance and step inside. One of the men lets off a string of (I suppose it was) German. He is wearing a smile of pure pleasure, as if he’s telling me I’ve just had a healthy child or that my mortgage application was just approved. I studied German in high school and hoped some of the old words and phrases (Das ist ein blauer Bleistift and Ich habe ein kleines Schlafzimmer) might come in handy. It doesn’t. To the chagrin of thousands of American second language students, language describing pencils and bedrooms rarely come into play while ordering breakfast.

Instead, I mutter that I don’t speak German. The man, no change to his face, switches instantly. He informs me, with the same genuine smile, that they open at 8 am. We both take that opportunity to look at the digital clock on the wall and watch 7:58 change to 7:59. I look back at him. With the (now creepy) smile, he tells me ‘just a few minutes.’ I take my leave for donuts. On the block and a half walk to the donut places it occurs to me that when a local shop isn’t open at 8, a donut shop isn’t going to open til 9.

One Christmas Eve many years ago, I stayed in Prague and cooked a big meal with friends. The food was subsidized by various bottles of wine, liquor, and clear stuff in bottles conspicuously void of label or descriptive promises. Late into the evening, as two of us watched Christmas Vacation as per Christmas ritual tradition 7761/24, I noticed that my cat seemed utterly fascinated with my wine glass. I watched. She was pressing her paw into the remnants of red wine at the bottom of the glass and licking her paws clean. Really clean. I noted this down for future reference and to tell my vet.  

Though we got a kick out of it, it shouldn’t have been so surprising. Animals have a long relationship with alcohol. Oh sure, there are cases throughout history of drinking animals. Like Wojtek the Syrian brown bear who became a soldier in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company in the Polish Army during World War II. He fought in the Battle of Monte Cassino and developed a taste for beers, given his military service. Likewise, beers and bears were often coupled at saloons in the old west. Because what better way to wile away your off-hours than to wrestle a bear who’s been drinking? I think it’s a Hemingway book.

But even today drinking – and even drunk – animals are an everyday reality. An evidently common sight in autumn in Sweden are drunken elk stuck in trees. They get into that fix because they are trying to reach the fermenting apples which made them drunk in the first place. Fruit bats also don’t mind a few pops of ethanol-rich fermenting fruit (hence their name). Scientists even believe that they have developed a stronger resistance to alcohol to keep from getting too tipsy. You know, being drunk is great when you can lie on your couch, eat pizza, and watch Netflix, but when you have to fly and you are surrounded by predators who want to eat you, you might want to keep your head a bit. Evolutionarily, it’s just smarter. In fact, one strategy used to catch invasive moths and flies is getting them drunk in beer. This way they stop eating crops and go to the McDonalds down the road or just pass out in front of the tube light.

The pen-tailed treeshrew seems to have one of the animal kingdom’s higher tolerances to booze. Which explains why the pen-tailed treeshrew is always the other animals’ designated driver. Hamsters too seem to be pretty good at warding off drunkenness. When researchers gave zebrafish alcohol (presumably through a straw?) they found they became more reckless, ignoring a robot version of their main predator – the heron. This is similar to when your mild-mannered accountant friend throws an elbow at a rugby player at the pub after a few beers. Neither are likely to survive long.   

It’s a Thursday, which means it’s my short day. I finish teaching at 10:30 and unless I have some pressing deadline of some pressing work that’s pressing my sinuses, I more or less have the rest of the day free. Sadly, it’s usually the former and I often come home to sit and work while my cat and dog surround me in an obsequiousness borne of sleepiness and too many treats.

Today, however, I seem to have the day free. Since I rarely take a full day off, I tend to take my days off in afternoons. My deadlines for the week were all earlier and as far as I know, nobody is expecting anything from me in the new few days. I decide to celebrate my liberation by attending to tasks, given that it’s too early to hole up in a bar. Besides, I’m on a mission.

A year ago, I bought a pair of light pants perfect for summer travel. But there’s a problem – cause when you’re 5’7 and built like a guy who swung a double-headed battle axe to save Middle Earth from Sauron – pants are never not a problem. These pants are larger around the waist than is totally comfortable. Perfect for sitting in a pub or a restaurant while on holiday and for providing extra space between waist and waistband in which to fit holiday food intake. However, these pants have no belt loop and, though they are comfortable while sitting, are just too large. The one time I used them I grew tired of taking pictures of the Janiculum while holding up my pants with my other hand. I need a solution.

That solution came to me in my sleep one night. I awoke with a vision. The vision made so much sense that I was near certain nobody here would do it. I would get another button hole put in the pants about 2–3 centimeters in from the original button hole. This would be the button hole used for walking when I need a tighter fit. The (original) button hole which made the pants looser would be for sitting and eating ice cream and his assortment of tasty siblings. I’m a genius. Now, let’s just see if I can a. explain it to a tailor and b. convince them to do it.

First, I need a tailor. Preferably one I won’t mind being rejected by. I read about a good one near my flat, but her shop is on the other side of the tracks. In this case, the tracks are those of the metro that separate us from the other side of the road. And, not to sound snobby, between their side and our side, there is a distinct difference in feel, mood, tone, and number of people mostly naked and under the influence of something that makes them think that being naked in public at noon on a Thursday is OK. Nevertheless, I get ready to go.