As Saturday night was snowy and frigid, the weather all but begged us to stay inside and to watch movies. We followed this directive and soon chose to watch Salem’s Lot. This adaptation of Stephen King’s awesome 1975 novel was pretty damn good, considering they squeezed 750 pages into 90 minutes.

Vampires. A writer comes to a sleepy Maine town around the same time as a vampire and shit hits the proverbial fan. Nobody trusts strangers. I won’t spoil anything but I will say that even if you have read the book go ahead and watch the movie. You’ll have plenty of fun. Also, the film did a great job of capturing the 1970s America vibe and mixing it with the hopeless despair only Stephen King can not only supply, but can also demand $20 for and get it with unequalled speed. We were soon pleasantly freaked out, spooked, and casting looks out into the dark night.

When one horror movie ends, it’s time for another. No need to break the vibe. So we put on These Woods are Haunted, a documentary-style show about people’s terrifying encounters in the woods. The show is very well done and some of the stories genuinely creepy. It’s a great show if only to utterly enjoy the ironic tales of Bigfoot hunters being hunted by Bigfoot. And we can only hope with all our crossed bits that somewhere in the Northwestern woods Bigfoot is telling his friends the same story from the other side. We can only chalk its meager three seasons up to a lack of people who’ve been terrorized in the woods. Or a lack of survivors.  

The opening starts out with informative bits about the vastness of American forests (800 million acres) and then proceeds to spook you (the viewer) out by saying things like ‘who knows what is lurking in these forests?’ Now, there’s no better lexical phrase to get me in the mood for a spook than one like ‘lurk in the forest’. And so I repeated it.

“I like that, ‘lurking in the forest.’”

 Burke looked back at me. It was dark but I could tell there was something like confusion cum surprise on her face.

“What?”

“Did you just say, ‘I’m the Murder Kind of the Forest?’”

It’s New Year’s again. This means drinking in a crowded place in a sweater you got a week ago while you sort through what a shitshow this last year has been. And then trying to get home before the streets start looking like a 28-themed zombie movie…but with drunken idiots. It’s awesome.

But perhaps you could enjoy tonight more if you embraced your inner pagan. The truth is, we all have an inner pagan (though for some of us it resides far closer to the surface than in others). Still, you can have a Happy Pagan New Year without pillaging your neighbors’ homes or getting arrested for public nudity. But how?

First, go wassailing. You’ve probably heard of wassailing (not sailing), but what does this really entail? Well, there are two versions of wassailing. The first is the house-visiting wassail, in which a group of people go from home-to-home singing and offering sips from a wassail bowl in exchange for gifts. Think trick-or-treating meets caroling, but with boozed instead of candy and golden-throated sanctimony. But the origins of wassailing are in the cider heartlands of England and were meant to secure a good apple harvest. Apple (or orchard) wassailing involved singing and banging pots at apple trees to ‘awake’ them and to scare away evil spirits that might screw up an apple harvest.

Either way, booze was a big part of wassailing as it takes a snootful to sing in public either to neighbors or to trees. The apple-wassailing drink of choice was a mulled ale with curdled cream, roasted apples, eggs, spices, sugar. So, to access your inner pagan, drink some hard cider and then go serenade that cute little birch tree in your yard or just do karaoke. Waes hael in Old English means ‘be well’ so no matter who you sing to, be sure to offer them that wish.

Second, enjoy libations. Now, since our modern understanding of ‘libations’ means a drink, you may think I am simply suggesting that you drink. ‘Well, duh’. But libations in the pagan world was to pour out a drink on the ground to honor our gods and ancestors. Yes, we do this these days when we pour one out for our deceased friends and loved ones (henceforth known as ‘homies’). So Norse, Celtic, Roman, and Greek Pagans all poured out some mead, ale, or wine to honor their deities and ask for blessings.

On Friday afternoon, I wrote an email. I checked it twice, then hit send. I couldn’t believe it – I was done for the holidays. Tears began formulating in my eye. I then dressed and walked through the park to our local pub, where two of my friends were waiting to ring in the season with food, beer, and several darts of 80 proof liver juice.

In the morning, I suffered what could only be described as the worst hangover on Earth since Alexander the Great woke in Macedonia and said ‘I burned down what…?” I leapt up in a panic. I walked through the flat and then through the other room. I walked out onto the balcony and rummaged through a few boxes out there. I sat at my desk and wrote a few sentences that grouped themselves into a paragraph. Some character formed himself on the page and I named the character Willy.

I went with it. Let’s write this guy out, shall we. I had coffee. Willy was having trouble finding his bearings. He was at a local park where we was looking for a group of friends to take part in a pickup soccer rugby match. He couldn’t find anyone, but he did find the field. The place was desolate. Paper bags and a lone empty vodka Becherovka bottle littered the corners. People had been there, but they weren’t there now. Feeling edgy, Willy then stows his rugby ball behind some bushes and sets off on a little trek through the woods. It’s there he finds a house. He goes in and finds the place warm, decorated for Christmas, but a real mess. He clicks his tongue and starts cleaning.

I stopped writing and laid down. Good ole Willy. Why, I wondered does he feel the need to fill his time with work. Can’t just sit down and chill out. I drifted off to sleep and woke up in a panic ninety minutes later. Burke peppered me with a few questions as I ran around in a circle trying to figure out what it was I had forgotten to do. It was something out of my dream. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but there was something I was meant to be doing – fill out a form, click a button, sign in to something somewhere for someone. When my heart stopped palpitating, I slowly came back to the reality that I didn’t have to do anything. I was – for the first time in 5 months – under no obligations, burdened with no duties or tasks, and absolutely free.

Seems my dog-given anxiety and my tendency to overwork and eschew days off has crept up to bite me in the existentially angsty rump. I – it seems – have lost the ability to let go and relax. Though that might be overstating it, I have certainly been conditioned to not chill out in recent years. And this is where I promised that I would relearn that skill over the Christmas break. I shall celebrate the Horizontal Christmas. That is, I will rush to no task, I will do no work for any group that doesn’t share my name, physical dimensions, and social security number.

Twice a semester, we have to teach a full Saturday. This day starts at 9 and ends at 5:15 – in teaching hours, it’s ten hours of class.

Saturday is a day for lying back and eating small pieces of fat out of a bag. It’s a day for lazily reading until the vixen of sleep lures you back into her warm, fluish embraces. It’s a day for taking an aimless walk that ends at a place that sells beer. But alas, this Saturday I was forced to be in the ten-hour club.

In terms of the semester, the ten-hour Saturday is like the big boss you have to beat before you can get to your Christmas break. And it’s a doozy.

I arrive in the dark to find notes on my desk and more emails than a decent human deserves on a Saturday. I whimper. My colleague comes walking across the hall with another piece of paper. No doubt I will be observed by the president. He informs me that one of the students will be there online but with no camera.

“He can show up in a Santa Claus costume for all I care.”

“Yes,” he looks back at the note, “but he will be there with no camera.”

My classroom computer needs an update on MS Teams. I attempt this, but my uselessness with technology and computers takes on a Laurel and Hardy aspect when this attempt is made in Czech. I believe at some point I access the Voynich Manuscript. The IT guy shows up and I pop off to the bathroom to let out a quiet stream of expletives that would stun a team of carollers in their path. After my last string of F-bombs, I put on a smile.

“Good morning!” I shout to the students as if I’m Arsenio Hall and these folks respond with laughter and smiles and shouts as if they are, indeed, my Dog Pound. We begin. There’s a little hesitancy. We have to spend 10 hours together and we are sizing each other up. I make some jokes that allow them to decide I am not a local representative of the Gestapo. They eagerly engage in the coursework so that I decide they are not La Résistance. Together, we move forward amid a jungle of collocations and future forms.

The first break comes. The students chat and laugh. I fiddle with an upcoming exercise and count down the minutes to the next class.

Saturday work reminds me of my old bartending days. I worked three nights a week and one day and the money was solid – it couldn’t get better than that. Until, that is, you were walking into work while everyone else was walking out of work. Until, that is, you were going to a place to work where everyone else was going to a place to relax from work. When I began teaching lo so many eons ago, I became one of the day people. I went to bars at night to sit and relax instead of to stand and work. I understood the misery behind the barman’s eye twinkle. And what comes along with being one of the day people is not working on a Saturday. It’s a systems failure.

There is no worse class on this day than the second. The first class is the start – there’s adrenalin; there are tasks like sizing each other up; there is abundance of material; I am new, they are new. The hallmark of the third class is that at the end of it comes lunch – an hour of sitting and not talking. The fourth class is the last class when anything meaningful happens and the fifth class, of course, is the last.

But to get to the third, fourth, and fifth, we must get through the second. You are a castaway who has found a map in a bottle telling you there is a better island nearby and so you are swimming from Island One to Island Two. The second class is the deepwater channel between those islands; the time when you can’t see either island.

It’s Saturday morning around 8 am – a fact evident on the five clocks on various devices in the living room. Otherwise, there’s nothing to suggest it’s morning. The sky is just now going from a pitch-black midnight to a dark, impenetrable, the-rapture-came-and-went-and-you-weren’t-chosen gray. I walked the dog in the middle of the night, or, in technical terms, 7:40 am.

It’s been gray and foggy since mid-November, so this is nothing new. It comes and goes each year like this, though this year does seem particularly glum. There’s the period between early November and mid-January when the daylight allotted the citizens of the Czech Republic does not survive the workday. I have been here before, but it is disconcerting to hear traffic when it seems that everyone should be in bed. It’s as though something has happened and we won’t find out until Dave Bautista and Ron weaselly knock on my door.

Nevertheless, it’s Saturday morning and even though it’s in December we try to do our normal things. The coffee boils. We put something on the TV and chat about the day ahead and the week behind. Today’s plan: do nothing. I have just crawled out of two weeks of extreme busyness, a perfect storm of writing, editing, planning, teaching, and making ESL materials. Everyone needs something in December. It seems to be a rule. Next weekend I have to teach an intensive course all day Saturday, so this weekend I will spend it doing nothing.  

By 11ish, the light has gone from dark gray to neutral gray. It’s quiet. Out of the 7 zillion options on our various streaming sites, I settle on a movie that’s an adapted Roald Dahl story starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I love all of those elements and put it on. However, I soon realize that the film was directed by Wes Anderson, who no longer make movies featuring human people speaking how humans speak. So, in a very short while, I am overcome with the deeply confusing anxiety that can only come from watching a Wes Anderson movie made after 2014. Nowadays, it’s timeless pastels and dialogue which sounds like nobody on the planet earth has ever spoken aloud. This causes something like a reverse epilepsy wrapped in a deep dread.

I give up in twelve and hand the remote over to Burke, who goes for a true crime show that gives me the shivers. I retreat to bed with my book. The book is about a brutal murder in France, but there’s a lot of cheese, so I can deal with the evisceration which starts the book. The dog and the cat follow quickly and embed themselves in the nooks my body parts create. They get cozy. I pretend my bladder doesn’t exist and isn’t fifty years old. It’s around 1 pm, the lightest it’s going to be today and I try to soak it all in.      

I have learned something about myself in my old age: I hate going out and doing things. Fortunately, I live in a time and day in which people can bring me groceries, booze, and medicine. Others bring me just about anything I want to order Ye Olde Frontier Amazon Shoppe.

To entertain myself, my TV carries, in one way or another, just about every movie or show ever made in history. I can hear music from the heretofore unreachable and grimy catacombs of music’s past. Nobody is safe: not Bob Dylan, not Bob Dylan’s son, not Bob Dylan’s friends. I can hear them all. Moreover, anyone I want to talk to (who also wishes to speak to me) is available on my computer box. I call them and up they pop on my computer. We talk and while we talk, I drink some of my home-delivered booze while a movie from 1967 plays quietly on my TV. It’s a good setup.

I recently became aware of the importance of glasses to my overall health and ability to see things like whiteboards, computer screens, and charging trucks. I fretted, for this all but guaranteed a visit to some place where someone would touch my face and watch me look stupid with different shapes decorating my eyeballs. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

“It’s OK,” Burke said. “You can order them online now.”

“Ooh,” I added gracefully to the conversation. “Whoops, be right back – that’s Rolik with our groceries.”

September 8 1974, Snake River Canyon, Idaho. A battered dude named Evel Knievel straddles a Skycycle X-2 at the base of a ramp. 1600 feet away across the canyon is the ramp’s twin. No motorcycle can make that jump, so the Skycycle is a skyrocket rigged to blast him across. He revs and starts up the ramp. His red-white-and-blue starred white jumpsuit and cape make him look like Captain America after some questionable life choices. 3.5 million spectators watch at home and another 15,000 people have crowded the canyon area to see the spectacle. What everyone is about to see is as American as apple pie and unaffordable healthcare.  

We humans have long enjoyed spectacle. Droves gathered in the Colosseum to watch humans maul and brain each other. In the UK, families would pack a lunch and go watch the public executions or public punishments. Nothing complements a fruit cup and a ham sandwich like the sound of someone’s spine snapping on the rack. In Elizabethan London, dog and bear baiting were rabidly enjoyed by a drooling audience. Sometimes the bear would break loose of their chains and turn on the audience. All in the price of the ticket.   

So, when Europeans showed up in the New World, they brought their inherent want of spectacle. And this was fortuitous because America was filled with things of size and grandeur. Canyons, waterfalls, cliffs, rivers, animals, party subs. So it was only a matter of time before someone recognized the opportunities within this grandeur to entertain people and make money. After all, there’s little point in having a grand canyon unless we can pay to watch someone jump off of it. Thus arose a profession aimed at entertaining spectators at the doer’s peril. The dare devil.

The dare devil specialized in climbing up, walking over, or jumping off high things in front of a crowd. In 1859, Charles Blondin became the first person to visit Niagara Falls and pointed out that what was missing from this natural wonder was a man walking above it on a very narrow rope. A mistake he corrected. In 1901, a schoolteacher named Annie Taylor celebrated her 63^rd birthday by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel she designed – but not before testing out the barrel on her cat. Both survived. Taylor was a widower and her barrel stunt was to lead to financial security for the remainder of her life. Unfortunately, her manager stole her barrel and ran off to Chicago (the traditional destination for barrel thieves). She spent the money she’d made trying to track it down. In the end, she had nothing and had made an enemy for life in her cat. She should have just moonlighted as an Uber driver like all the other teachers.  

At the forefront of America’s early dare devil craze was Jersey Sam Patch. Dubbed the Jersey Jumper, in the early 1820s Patch had made a name for himself jumping from a mill into a reservoir. Noting his rise in popularly, he moved up to jumping off waterfalls. At Niagara Falls, he jumped from Goat Island into the roiling waters below. People came from far and paid to watch him jump. But Patch was more than a jumper; he was the forerunner of Knievel in his swagger and personality. He was witty and vocal. A wit evidently lost in his most famous and blindingly bland aphorism ‘Some things can be done as well as others’. He walked around towns in all white clothing (in the early 1820s, this was like going to a bar wearing a solar system diorama on your head). He had a pet black bear. According to the flyers for his jumps, sometimes the black bear jumped too. Like Annie Taylor’s cat, the black bear probably wondered where it had all gone wrong for him.

I’m walking into my doctor’s office. It’s 7:45 am. I am carrying a vial of my own mountain-sourced, mineral-rich, pristine, untouched urine. The nurse greets me warmly. She eyes up my arm and accepts my warm bottle of urine. She points me to a chair.

My arm is tied off at the bicep and I am told to exercise to work up a vein. In any other time or place this wouldn’t be hard. I learned the trick as a kid: let your arm dangle, squeeze fist rapidly, and suddenly you look like Stallone in Rocky. But in the early morning, my veins seem to have a sixth sense about being tapped and they are shy. They have descended into the sunken place and watch in quiet as the nurse probes. The nurse has none of it. She prods until a little blue earthworm appears. She goes in with her needle and hooks in her venom vials. I become interested in the clock.  

She takes my blood pressure and nods at the numbers.

‘It’s a little high.’

‘Um.’ I am fairly sure that 145 is never a good number unless it’s the score of a basketball team you have bet for.

‘You are nervous, you just gave blood,’ she says. I finished off her list of excuses ‘and I walked here [pause for effect] from IP!’

‘Oh, pbbt,’ she scoffs our concern. ‘The doctor will be here at 8.’

Despite our nerve-quelling dialogue, the hot second my ass hits the chair in the waiting room I consult Dr. Google to find out about blood pressures. According to Dr. Google, 145 is not a number you want anywhere near a blood pressure unless it belongs to your arch-nemesis and he lives next to Dennis the Menace.