Damien Galeone

It’s 3 am and I get out of bed, stretch, and go sit in my living room. I curl up on the couch and assess. I resist the urge of my phone and open a book. The dog joins me, but not so much out of loyalty as out of her crippling fear that she might be left out of a snacking opportunity. Sort of a YOLO but with rabbit livers.

The world is dark and quiet. I am wide awake and clear-headed.

Each year I head back to the U.S. for the month of August. I always look forward to this visit. I spend the month watching the improbably violent residents of Midsomer kill each other off in droves, witnessing the Phillies’ inevitable downturn, and blaming myself for ruining Philadelphia sports with my presence. I spend the month saying things like ‘Man, I gotta get back to a healthy diet’ seconds before shoving roughly 4,000 calories of carbs and meat into my throat. It’s all worth it. Sure, the Phillies won’t win a World Series and it’s my fault, but dammit I love cheesesteaks.

My troubles begin on the return to Europe. Well, I’m leaving my family and it’s the end of the summer, so it’s a little sad to begin with. There’s the impending return to work. But it’s the jetlag that really complicates everything.

My flight was at 7 pm and I landed in London at 6:45 am – aka: for me at that point, 1 am. Somewhere in between those times I was supposed to get a good night’s sleep, which at most could mean 4 hours but which in reality was an hour and some change. The flight crew turned off the lights and since I am regrettably not 3 years old, I didn’t automatically drop off to sleep. I had a 3-hour layover in Heathrow, but instead of reading or eating shortbread I decided to hover above a hallucinogenic exhaustion, hurt my neck by continuously nodding off, and then whimper when I realized I wasn’t in bed at home but rather in Satan’s lower intestine. I do not remember the 2-hour flight back to Prague. I’m told it was lovely. When I did awake at one point, everyone was eating a sandwich.

Getting a cab from the airport was the easiest decision I ever made in my life. The goal became stay awake until a reasonable time – 10ish would be great, 7ish would be acceptable. We went to one of our local pubs and drank beer. Occasionally, I would say: ‘I’m feeling OK, yeah, I’m feeling OK’ while checking my pulse and wiping a layer of cold sweat off my brow. After pizza and a pack of Tastykakes (two boxes lasted all of three days) I hit an unprecedented delirium. I begin giving answers to questions that hadn’t been asked in places where there are no other people (like my toilet). When I come to, I float to my bedroom and fall on my face.

When I awoke up at 3 am later that night, understanding instantly that I was screwed and that 3 am would be my jetlag witching hour. I was wide awake, like a little kid on Christmas morning. I headed into the living room and opened a book.

This was two weeks ago. Since then I have moved through the world in delirium and confusion, I have adopted the dual languages of babble and gobbledygook, I have seen through time while sitting on a bus but lacked the language or motor skills to tell an old man what time it was. I then realized that the old man hadn’t asked me what time it was, nor was he talking to me. I have tremulously met with friends and felt fine, only to hit walls of impenetrable exhaustion so dense and unscalable that I have abruptly paid my check and gone home. My only thought: bed; I need to be in bed.

The unsecret secret is that this has clearly gotten worse with age. As has every other minor ailment and condition. I can, after all, sneeze my back out and flu myself down to a 30 IQ. So jetlag is giving me a glimpse of myself at 93 years old. And it ain’t pretty. I ache everywhere. I’m confused and I’m always covered in food and not on purpose. My teeth feel weird. I can’t remember the last time I showered or if I remembered to clean myself while I was in there.    

The hilarious irony is that when I wake up jetlagged at 3 am, it is the most awake I have been since I was eight years old. So I am an unstable doddering sweaty idiot, but I am alert. And it is with this misguided alacrity that I undertake my work at 3 am. The jetlag witching hour. I write at this hour, I read, I make my schedule (but to be honest not a lot of people want to meet at 6 am). And it’s what I have done so far this early morning. If you are going to be jetlagged, you might as well get some work done while you’re suffering.

By 10 am I am useless. Words have stopped making sense in spoken or written form and so my writing ends before it degenerates into Syd Barrett after the LSD. By 11 am I am dozing on the couch. The pets gather round me. One of them pulls a blanket over me. I think it’s the cat, which is weird because she’s not usually that considerate and doesn’t have thumbs. They sing me to sleep and as I drift off I wonder if anyone can tell I haven’t showered.

If I wake up in Heathrow, I’m going to cry.        

It’s late August. Summer is fading, the long lazy days are getting shorter, the lax attitude cramping under the return of rules. The heat lingers, yet the shorts and the Magnum PI Hawaiians go into the back of the closet. The return to pants is imminent. You are sad. You need a drink. We all do.

Sure, you can sit at your kitchen table with a bottle of Makers Mark. You can scroll through your happy summer pictures on Insta and Facebook: beers at the Fourth of July barbecue; margaritas at the pool bar on your Mexican vacation; drinking with buddies at the Phillies game. You can make the inevitable late-night switch to YouTube. But this will surely have you understanding and cry-singing Morrissey lyrics at 3 am. No. you want to drink with purpose. You can drink to the good times you’ve had this summer. And that is why we are celebrating a group of 17^th century Dutch master painters.

Stick with me.    

The painters of the 17^th century Dutch Golden Age invented a genre of painting called Merry Company. This movement was the first to depict common people enjoying themselves in social situations and settings. By ‘social settings’ we mean taverns, inns, and brothels, and by ‘enjoying themselves’ we mean drinking, gambling, and cavorting with prostitutes. Say what you want about the Dutch, but they have long understood the importance of prostitutes in the general merriment of society.    

This (somewhat) debaucherous genre could have only happened in the Dutch Republic, as the 17^th century Dutch were even then known for their liberal stance on humanity, religion, and individual rights. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) had left them free of the religious oppression of Spain. After which they basically stripped off their clothes and leaned hard into developing distilled spirits and touching boobs. They were a safe haven for Europe’s political dissidents and religious outcasts. A haven used by the passengers of a little ship called the Mayflower before they eventually deemed the Dutch too liberal for their work, pray, die-in-agony religion and so off they went to the stark shores of North America and the tragedy of turnip beer. The Dutch made no apologies. They prospered in business, education, arts, and culture. And with those things in order, it was Molenaar Time. They placed a great deal of emphasis on abundance, food, drink, and social interaction. And this joie de vivre oozed out of their very realistic depictions of inns, brothels, taverns, and the delights of those places both epicurean and prostitute-based.    

It is August 25. Sunday. I awake at 5. It’s dark outside and there’s movement in the kitchen next to my room (the living room). Surely my sister (I hear the rotor of the Keurig and my sister’s dissipating will to live). It takes me a moment to remember who and where I am. I am Damien, a pizza loving teacher-platypus. It’s then I want to burst into tears.

As I have come to realize, the summer is broken up into about 4 seasons. And as all seasons change, they bring about a soul-crushing sadness that can only be cured by hours of situation comedies and salted meats in between complex carbohydrates.

Summer season 1 starts in June. My semester has just ended but I am still working. The summer is ahead of me. The weather is warm enough to wear shorts, but comfortable enough to use pants to hide my chunky thighs. The beer gardens are open and the joy is unbridled. It is the season of the happiness that exists before the happiness begins – it is the Christmas Eve of the summer seasons.  

Summer season 2 starts when I go on holiday at the end of June. A week in London. We walk around and I have left my laptop at home, thereby forcing myself to enjoy the trip. No work. I can relax. I visit cafes in the morning for my coffee and breakfast treat du jure. I worry little about the constricting waistband. I walk. Camden. Covent Garden. Trafalgar Square. I can look ahead at after-London and still be happy. At this point, I am moderately carefree.  

Summer season 3 is in the interim between London and my trip home. These are the work-a-bit and project days. I clean out my storage room and enjoy AC. At this point we begin speaking about London as though it had occurred six months before. It is also at this point that I realize in a panic one day that my summer is slipping away from me and it will be gone before I know it. I then wonder if this is a metaphor for something else, but get to a beer garden just in the nick of time to swat away any encroaching thoughts that may lead to discomfort. As long as my August trip to Langhorne is in front of me, I am well ensconced in summer.

Here are some things I’ve learned that keep me up at night for one reason or another.

Cows have best friends. They become sad if they are separated from them. And just like that I’ll never enjoy another steak. I’ll eat steak; I just won’t enjoy it.

A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus. Venus rotates so slowly one Venetian day takes 243 earth days. But a Venetian year is 225 days. I commiserate with this as one 40-minute Latin class was longer than 500 Venetian days.

Ninety minutes after the first British person is dispatched in some sleepy, picturesque corner of Midsomer County, Tom Barnaby brings the murderer(s) to accord. In that ninety minutes, four people were murdered, one of whom was a teenager, another of whom was a woman on her wedding day in her wedding dress – thus confirming the greatest fears of 45% of society.

You know when someone’s about to get it. They’re alone, content, relaxed maybe, but then something happens that alerts their attention. They go to inspect. You, as viewer, can do nothing but wait for the inevitable. Will it be a repeated ashtray bludgeon to the skull? Will it be a shotgun blast to the face? We can wait and see.

I let out a sigh of relief. Tom has wrapped things up with the good-humored help of DS Troy. Troy will have been teased, fed, or whipped in the face throughout the episode. He needs a break.

In the kitchen my dad watches Harm Rabb bring down some bad marines. He wraps things up and goes on his merry way as the credits roll. I go upstairs to check on my mom, who is just in the middle of Jesicca Fletcher’s dénouement. She lays out such a good argument and logical sequence of events that even the bad guy nods in appreciation as he’s led away by Tom Bosley as he curb stomps a Maine accent. All is well here. I go back downstairs to my bedroom, which is the living room.

There’s no mystery as to why we love mysteries in my house. In the first place, it’s damn fun to watch fictional British people get killed by other fictional British people. Damn fun. Second, you have the joy of trying to figure out who did it. In the case of Midsomer Murders, this is narrowed down to the three people in the episode who haven’t already been murdered. (hint: it’s someone very angry)

My brother and I walk into Citizen’s Bank Park. The place is electric. We have fortified ourselves with two $25 cocktails, so I have willed myself into an it-was-worth-it buzz.   

Today it’s the Phillies vs. the Yankees. A team I love vs. a team I loathe. And so it’s funny that I would come to the game, considering the fact that I am the Philadelphia Phillies’ worst luck charm in North America. Throughout the early part of the season (i.e. before I returned to Philadelphia in late July), the Phillies were 10 games up in their division. They were unbeatable. They caught all the breaks. They were playing baseball like the 1927 New York Yankees.

Since my glorious return to the land of cheesesteaks and Amazonian humidity, that lead has been dwindled to 6 games. They have been unwinnable. They miss all the breaks. And they have been playing baseball like the sickly kids the 1927 New York Yankees hit homeruns for on demand.

So when I enter the Bank, I worry that I might be recognized as the hex, the unretractable whammy, the fat-headed voodoo doll on their doorstep; I am their Jobu. We get to our seats after buying $50 worth of drinks (aka 2) and there’s an elderly couple sitting next to us. They are Yankees fans. A Yankees fan base has surrounded us, a genial man with kids in front of us, and a jovial guy with his Phillies-rooting friend behind us. My brother wishes them all a life of doom and disaster.

Now, I am no neophyte to the hex and the in which its malignant effects can be mitigated. As I walked into the stadium, I hit the turnstile with my right index knuckle twenty-four times. I rubbed my right shoulder against two Yankees fans in order to rub my bad juju off onto them. I even muttered a ‘go yanks’ under my breath in order to trick the bad luck imps into going after the wrong allegiance.

My efforts prove worthless when the Yankees start out the game with a grand slam. Nick Castellanos may or may not give me the finger from right field. The stadium announcer resists the urge to order an all-out attack on my seat number. I slink down. I sip $9 of my cocktail. In an attempt to quell the bad luck monsters, we decide on a walk. Yes. We jump up and walk around the stadium, drinking in the atmosphere. Genuinely buzzed, I weigh up another cocktail against paying my month’s mortgage and decide that banks are known for their caring attitude towards individuals. By the time we have re-reached our seats seven innings later, the Phillies have clawed their way back, which makes sense because there are 18 of them out there. And we make the foolish mistake of retaking our seats. Cocky bastards. When it’s over, my brother tells the jubilant Yankee fans what they can do to themselves on their ebullient ride home.  

We head to a pub and sit at the bar. I feel like everyone is looking at me. That’s the guy who caused the Phils’ loss. I hunker down and keep a low profile, ordering a beer and a shot. I don’t get the whiskey I want; I don’t deserve it. And though I really want dumplings, I get a sad pizza. The barman is a young friendly chap whose best days are ahead and whose only fault is that he has never heard alcoholic drinks ordered by finger-size. (He was marvelled by my order of ‘two-fingers of Jamesons’.) There are two women on my right, clearly enjoying a post-work cocktail. They chime in.

“I never heard that neither, Jeremy.”

It’s 4:55 am and I am in Vaclav Havel Airport. I am staring at the check-in board. My flight is at 7 am and so I took an Uber from my flat at 4:15. Public transport usually takes me an hour but it’s not running regularly at 4 am so I am forced into the Uber option. Along the way to the airport my Uber driver hits a wormhole and we somehow arrive at the airport fifteen minutes before I woke up. The check-in doesn’t open until 5.

Once I check in, it takes me ten seconds to get through passport and security. I have lots of time and it’s quiet so I stroll through my terminal. The boarding is slow and quiet. I get up to the door, kiss the plane and whisper my ten-word poem into her ear. I sit and put in my earphones. I doze off while the flight crew tell me how to open a seatbelt in a 1975 Chevy.

I am a wee bit depressed. To be sure, it’s normal for me – Mr. Set in My Ways – to feel sad about leaving home. But Vaclav Havel is like the Czech Republic – quiet, unassuming, on its own meandering time schedule. It’s a cozy little airport with two unassuming terminals. I can still buy a beer or a sausage if I want in its shops. It still reveals its little secrets now and then (Burke and I found a cafeteria tucked away before a flight earlier this month). This is a microcosm of the Czech Republic itself. Until we take off, I still feel at home.

The next time I open my eyes, we are in the air. We are flying through some sort of a pea soup, so I assume we are about to land in London. The woman next to me begins elbowing me in the ribs, I suppose in the attempts to stake her avenue to the aisle that I am blocking. The man on the window seat is scrolling through his phone.

t’s a quiet Friday night and I am teetering on the precipice of a tantrum. Lots of things do this to me: a stubbed toe, a late inning email, anything that comes out of the face of Donald Trump.

I am a mostly mellow person, but in some ways I channel my father, whose abilities to tantrum would have landed him in the Pol Pot Museum of Despotism and Volcanic Explosions. Today I think it’s a splatter of tomato sauce on my toe while cooking. Out came a rant that included many F bombs, many accusations of collusion amongst my kitchen utensils, and a vague comment towards the government’s coverup of UFO activity. (I’ve been watching a lot of Discovery Plus recently.)

It’s in the middle of this rant that I pick up a high-pitched though quiet whine behind me. This is different from the grunt of annoyance (accompanied with eye roll) that my tantrums elicit from Burke. And the cat has been spending most of her days in the under-bed region (the pants I have in storage under there look like a whole other cat).

I turn and find myself facing a one-foot-tall Shih Tzu. She is making her whiny face, her mouth is trembling, and her small cries occasionally pitch into something of a yelp. I offer her a piece of yellow pepper, which she accepts immediately, but once she’s swallowed it she goes back to whining at me. My heart stops thumping in my chest, the vein in my forehead goes back to a normal, non-apoplectic size, and I stop seeing double.

Huh.