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.

It’s Friday night. For the general populus, Friday has a different feel. This is true no matter what you do: Stay in, go to the pub, eat a bag of fries on a park bench. For example. When you do these things on a Friday night, you do so with a calmer mind, one setting at arm’s length the previous five days of work while looking forward to a day or so of rest.

Usually.

This Friday night has been dampened (for me and, by the transitive properties of grumpiness, the other inhabitants of the flat) by a working Saturday. So, as I make dinner, I think about the next day. As I tidy the kitchen, I think about the next day. As I read, I think about the next day. My brain can’t process and forget a week’s worth of the joys, stresses, minor humiliations, and personal epithets that come along with a life of teaching. I have been robbed not only of a Saturday, but of the calm contemplation of a Friday night mostly found through TV and a drooling that might suggest the recent removal of my frontal lobe. But, no, not this Friday. I show my displeasure for this by throwing several tiny mini-tantrums. These mostly involve colorful language regarding people and what they can do with their Saturday. 

Making matters worse are the facts. The facts that refuse to modify as I examine them under a microscope in the hopes of rendering them less invasive. That is, there ain’t enough lipstick in Europe to make this Saturday pig beautiful. This Saturday I work from 9–17:10. In other words: all frickin’ day. No matter how I put this into my spin factory, it all comes up that I will spend the 8 hours the next day in front of students and others online. People on their way to the chopping block have had brighter futures.  

What’s worse, the other inhabitants in the flat have become used to a cycle of sorts. The dog and cat understand that there are a few days, we’ll call them Monday through Wednesday, where we humans get up very early and there’s a subdued tone of misery and hopelessness in the flat along with the smell of coffee and soap. The dog wakes up each day in a state of absolute joy, as if she can’t believe she gets another day of being spoiled, walked, fed. She licks us like a happy white mop with dark eyes and then rolls onto her back waiting for the day’s inaugural belly scratch. She also knows intuitively that on a few days a week, the optimism that we return to her is a bit … forced. She knows that on a few of those days – we’ll call them Thursday through Sunday – the optimism is truer. The cat may also understand this, but does not alter from her routine of standing outside the bedroom door screaming at us until we feed her. 

I worked in a bar for a long time, which made my working hours other peoples’ leisure hours. I showed up to work on Friday and Saturday nights, right when people were in full unwind mode. This was the first time I explored my Other Self. You see, for me to not only work when others were relaxing, but to work to help them reach higher levels of that relaxation, it was necessary for me to put myself into a state of mind and I had to do this without pharmaceuticals. Enter Jimmie Kuhl. Perhaps the grandest of all bar gurus. I related this to him once – namely, that my jealousy was getting the better of me – and he said he fully understood. He had been at this bartending game for much longer and had come up with a system.

It’s a Monday night. I am walking, well walk-pulling, our easily distractable Shih tzu along a path. Our walks involve a few optimistic steps. Then there’s a hunt through grass and a satisfying pee (sometimes the dog pees too). After that, the dog will play along with this whole ‘sure, you own me’ thing and walk. But after a while, the small animal starts adding up the context clues and deduces that I’m probably not the one in charge. Surely, the fact that I follow her around, pick up her poop, and feed her blueberries can only logically add up to one conclusion.

When this conclusion is reached, the doggy decides it would rather not go on and lies in the dirt. Whether or not this is a power move is answered moments later when no amount of tugging or of picking up and placing on feet will result in anything more than the dog slipping back onto her rump and watching me try to explain with facial expressions to passersby with well-trained dogs that that I am in charge.  

When everyone’s gone, I take out a blueberry from my blueberry pocket. (Nota bene: I now have a blueberry pocket in most cardigans, as has been realized by my fascinated and somewhat disturbed students. I also have a poop bag pocket too. Usually unfulfilled). When the dog decides this mishigas is over, she emits a high-pitched offkey song reminiscent of Donald Sutherland’s terrifying scream at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s then that I give in and pick her up for the final leg of our walk. And a reckoning begins.  

Like many boys growing up in the 1980s, I took a lot of misguided life lessons from movies. From TV I learned that learning is half the battle (GI-Joe!), I learned that nobody put Baby in the corner, and I learned that action heroes had very little sense of humor. Action movies were the ones I wanted, as My Dinner with Andre was still out of reach for my fledgling gray matter. Action heroes didn’t smile. Why, who had time to smile when they were about to go fight the Russians or a terrorist cell at the local mall. Those men would be easily identifiable by the keffiyehs they were donning.

These action heroes also had a dog. If not overly large, then sturdy, and either dark brown or black. This dog could do math and save people from avalanches. This dog was loyal to the hero, he knew who the bad guys were, and he could take a shot if need be. He also looked really cool walking alongside the hero in the woods after his successful mission when he has some time to get back to nature and solitude.     

The movie antithesis of the rugged character with a rugged dog was a comic character with a comic dog. He was a harmless neighbor, an accountant, maybe, or a lawyer, some brand of overly-officious nerd who was there to present a bureaucratic issue for the hero to swat away as he has bigger fish to fry, and what could a defaulted loan mean to a man who just killed ten terrorists hiding in his yard? This guy in the 1980s movies wore light clothing – pink golf shirts, white shorts, white shoes. Perish the thought. And my 1980s-movie education told me that these officious-type guys had lapdogs and those lapdogs were meant to be an appendage of their urbanity and unmanliness.

You’ll be happy to know that the movies of the 1980s don’t rule supreme in my life view anymore. For example, my dreams of fighting bad guys with Arnie got sidelined when I realized just how great it was to read on my couch and not get shot. But would it be so bad to be the officious next-door neighbor? That officious guy was rather admirable when I think about it. At a time when boys were being told what boys should be, in that little fictional world, dressed in white and carrying around a poodle, he was being true to himself. It’s almost heroic.    

Heroics are part of the last leg of our walk journey. I have put the dog back down and she has agreed to walk for a little while. She is only a foot or so off the ground and can sleep sixteen hours a day, but even she has the killer instincts at times. I recognize the look of the hunt. So, I let her chase me. I run away and she comes after my ankles and growls and chews the bottom of my pantleg. Then I chase her back and she runs away, quickly dashing between my reaching hands. She would be able to avoid any 1980s-movie terrorist. Then I run away and let her catch me. I eventually surrender. I let her know she has won, she gloats and allows me to live another day.

We finish the walk feeling content, ready for inside. She’s tired, she’ll recline on her little bed and I’ll sit on the couch and we’ll watch TV. I’ll probably treat her to some blueberries or maybe even a piškoty. We’ll relax this evening mindfully safe in the comfort that the officious man’s house brings, not a terrorist nor a bureaucrat in sight.

After college, I moved back to Langhorne, PA in desperate search of a job. I wanted something I had trained for. Something on a newspaper or a local magazine. What I wanted was to start a career in writing and editing. What I got was Kahunaville.

Kahunaville was a themed bar & restaurant, done up to look as though you’d just walked into the exotic rainforest where they were filming Jurassic Park. It would have simply been a rainforest but for the droves of confused-looking white guys in khakis. Also it was in the Oxford Valley Mall, so the Sunglass Hut visible from the bar sort of smashed the effect. Attempting to immerse the clientele was the occasional and abrupt screech of a kookaburra and water fountain shows set to music – as if those things happen in the real rainforest all the time. If that wasn’t enough to make the diners choke on their burgers, then the hourly bar-top dance-party the staff were forced to endure surely did the trick. It definitely did it for me. I lasted two weeks before disappearing on Halloween night on a search for a wig that has yet to end.

For ages, people have been drinking in theme bars. People have sipped cocktails while mermaids swam around a tank behind the bar. Others have pounded mugs of mead while men in armor battled in an arena near a hotdog stand. Business lunches have been held at Hooters, Golden Oldies, and inside giant replicas of the human heart. For generations, kids have been searing their lips off with pizza cheese while animatronic hillbilly animals play a jamboree at Chuck E. Cheese, no doubt instigating at least three lifelong fears in one blast.

Anyone who has been handed a butter beer from a guy with a wand tucked into his pants has wondered where this whole theme bar thing started. Well, they can thank the good folks of the Belle Epoque.

I realized at an early age my general incapacity towards taking care of other living beings. Growing up, I was unable to keep a hamster alive. Not one particular hamster who dined on roast beef and smoked Marlboro Reds. Any hamster who ended up in the cage in my room met his end in under a few days. I didn’t do anything bad to them, I was no goon or budding sociopath, It was evidently the sight of me that keeled them over. Hamsters everywhere were sent to me to die. I was the Florida of hamsters.

Not that this stopped me from trying to own animals. There was a pond near our house, where I would try to collect fish and frogs for my homemade terrarium or aquarium. Not possessing the first idea how to take care of a pond animal – we didn’t have the internet then, so researching things like this took more than 3 seconds – these animals would go on to their great chum block in the sky very quickly. I soon stopped trying to collect these animals as I wanted nothing to do with hurting them. Not that it mattered, as it became clear that the clarion call was out on me at the pond, and upon my arrival it would go dead silent as all the pond life would go deep, dummy up, or play dead to avoid interacting with me. I took the hint and stuck to feeding bread to the ducks, who kept one eye on the bread and the other eye on me.

Later on, we got a golden retriever. His time with us was very brief. He was too big and too wild and my dad had (i.e. has) the patience of an SS guard with a bad hangover and a hemorrhoid the size of a table lamp. There were four kids in our house, and not a day went by that one of us wasn’t bleeding, lost in the woods somewhere, or bashing his or a sibling’s face into a wall in the name of cartoon scientific research. If Tom and Jerry can do it … Neither ADHD medication nor medical marijuana had yet to reach the mass market, so my mother spent a lot of time in the middle of the Battle of Little Big Horn wondering what exactly she had done to deserve this. Yet, for some reason, my dad decided that what my mother needed was a large, energetic dog who needed to be walked and entertained roughly 140 hours a day. This dog’s time with us was brief. I believe we gave him to a man who had 16 kids and hunted turkeys for a living.

As part of my family’s plan to keep my blood pressure at the near-explode level, one of them visits me from time to time. Now, I love my family and it’s always a great visit. But when family visits, I find that I end up doing things I wouldn’t normally do. And since I have a relationship with my comfort zone that doesn’t veer far from uterine it can be mildly trying. I knew this before my brother came to visit, and yet, like when one beer descends into two and then three and then six, I just let it happen.

And thus, it came to pass that on a Saturday morning in the earliest part of March I was standing at the base of a cable car on the outskirts of Salzburg looking up into an Alp. This is almost totally true. I was in Salzburg and at the basecamp of a cable car ride, but while I was looking up into an Alp, extreme fog meant I was looking at two cables disappearing into a cloud. I could nor for the life of me understand why they would run telephone wires in the same area as a cable car. I noted this aloud.  

“Look at those telephone wires. What are they doing there?” Subtext: what are they doing there in the place where a vast mechanism to carry a two-ton cable car and its inhabitants should be?

My brother was lost in his own curious horrification. So when he said “they just don’t look like enough to carry a cable car” he wasn’t answering me, he was saying the same thing in a different, equally horrific, way. Our realization was simultaneous and tumultuous. Those cables are carrying us up a mountain. Correction: not up a mountain, above a mountain.

My brother was adamant. He wanted to take a cable car into the Alps. He said, “We’re in the Alps, we have to do this.” My feelings on the subject were far less certain or rather, were certain, but in the opposite direction. I figured I had time to talk some sense to him, but had forgotten, and the next thing I knew I was in line for the cable car at 9:58 am and the cable car’s departure up was at 10:00 am. And then we left. Just like that.

We are with 10 other people – I counted people and calculated weight. They were all Asian and had smaller builds and it became radically clear very quickly that if anyone’s weight was going to disrupt this journey, it was going to by mine and my companions. Nevertheless, our travel partners didn’t seem in the slightest perturbed by events. Neither did the cable car operator.

He got on the cable car, sat in a little slot and pushed a button. The doors slid closed. Everything seemed professional. Once we were moving, he took out a book and started reading. I marvelled at this man’s opportunities for humor each day of his life. After he locks the door and we take off, what’s to stop him from taking out his phone and having a loud one-sided conversation about his colon cancer diagnosis or the stocks and shares that have rendered him broke as a joke, or the wife who is leaving him for the neighbor and taking the kids. What’s to stop him from making like how whole world just crashed around him and he has nothing to live for? I guess, integrity. But still.

It takes ten seconds for us to realize this was a mistake. This is pointed out by my brother (adamant about this trip) and it is seconded and then mentioned almost constantly by me. The trip takes 13 minutes. During this thirteen-minute-period we disappear into a cloud. When we come out of the cloud, we are charging towards a mountain.

When Howard Carter opened up King Tut’s tomb, he found board games, a trumpet, a wardrobe, and underwear with his name embroidered into it (word has it that thugs in the afterlife will steal your undies). He also found jars of, well, Tut, food, and booze. Wine, both red and white. All of these things were meant to accompany and assist Tut on his long journey into the afterlife. I only hope they left him a few Advil and a tube of Pringles.

An old Polka song explains, ‘In Heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here.’ Aside from being a brilliant argument to one’s soberer family members for sipping on earthly nectars, this sentiment does seem to brush up against the thinking of ancient cultures.

Alcohol is commonplace at ancient tombs and death rites. The Sumerians believed that their dead went to a dark and dusty cave called Kur, where they wallowed in terrible thirst for eternity. To quench this thirst, Sumerians poured libations into the ground. Akin to how we ‘pour one out for a homie’ the Sumerians took it more literally and put clay tubes into the ground and poured beer through to their ancestors. This tradition carried over to the Greeks and Romans. Everyone in Hades was confused, thirsty, and irritable. They passed the time playing games that their relatives had put in their tombs. The Greeks would thus pour drinks into the dirt to refresh their friends and loved ones in the afterlife. This was no doubt appreciated by the Greeks whose relatives had left them with Monopoly.    

In ancient China, people were buried with beer so they could still have a drink in the afterlife. These days, on Tomb Sweeping Day, a communal day of cemetery upkeep that takes place more often than I clean my kitchen, custom states that people bring their relatives beer. That is, of course, unless they went to Diyu, a hellish maze of death and torture that bad people go to (like our hell or the DMV). They don’t get beer. In fact, they get eviscerated, decapitated, mauled by tigers, and set afire until their bodies dissipate. But don’t worry, they regenerate in to their original physical form so they can go through the maze again. Sort of like the worst video game ever.

The Chinese are not the only to juxtapose alcohol in the afterlife to death. Vikings who die gloriously in battle went to Valhalla, an eternal beerhall where the honorable dead drink mead for eternity from the golden udders of a goat named Heiðrún. Hopefully part of the entrance fee isn’t pronouncing the golden-uddered goat’s name correctly. Those who don’t die gloriously in battle – not bad people, mind you, but just didn’t die in battle – go to a place called Hel. Yeah. You might know this one. It’s a dark, cold, miserable place where there is exactly, yep, no beer and no mead. No word on whether Valhalla revelers get a night in Hel now and again just for a quiet place to sleep it off. I have a feeling these questions weren’t asked much in Viking culture.