It’s Friday night. We are in the living room, watching 30 Rock in the background. Liz Lemon is barely holding on to her life. We are both working. More than ever before in my life, a quiet Friday night at home with a book or a TV show is just about the closest to heaven one can get without holding a cupcake. A long week has come to a close; you are in loungewear and so society has no say on whether or not what you’re wearing will end you up on a list somewhere. No talking, no need to discuss, present, rationalize. You just sit and read or watch. The next day is when the weekend starts, so Friday night – if played well – is like a free weekend day. The day before. The Eve. Everyone knows the best part of the thing is the day before the thing. Usually.

There’s one point to make. Saturday is Cheat Day. And not even a relaxing Friday night can match Cheat Day.

If you’re one of those who has to incorporate a cheat day into your life, you get what I’m saying. The logic is simple. All week you eat a healthy diet, fruit, veggies, bulgur; you drink water, you never eat anything ‘bad’, no burgers, no heaping plate of pasta. Pizza? No, sorry. Your plate is bedazzled with an array of colorful vegetables that you choke down with a side of moral superiority. It’s great. Healthy living is great.    

But once a week, there’s Cheat Day. Saturday in our case. Cheat Day is the day you can let the thirteen-year-old that lives inside you choose all of your food. It is the best day in the world.

Start the day with overnight oats laden with raisins and figs? Hell no. Doughnuts. Lunch on a veggie wrap? Pbbt. How about egg sandwiches with bacon and hashbrowns. Dinner of salmon and veggies on couscous? No sirree Bob. Patty melts and French fries. It was gonna be glorious.

Saturday morning we rise like kids on Hannukah. My coffee – usually black as my soul – is white with cream and agave. It’s like chocolate milk. I dance. I have more coffee. I dance to the bathroom.

I put on 30 Rock with arrogance and purpose. When you are forced by nature to eat a healthy diet and to get your gastronomical jollies on a day specifically apported for it, everything is a lie. In our case, that everything is how Liz Lemon eats and looks. Liz Lemon is played by Tina Fey, a lean, fit woman in her mid-30s. Liz Lemon eats junk food and meatball sandwiches and pop tarts all day long. The very fact that she is portrayed as a glutton and can still fit into pants made for a person whose weight starts with a 1 is absolutely preposterous. And since 30 Rock is our background show, we get to see her eat all of this bad stuff all week long while we have salads and convince ourselves that quinoa is better than pizza. Then I struggle into pants that are so tight they could be worn by a ballerina and I white-knuckle it til Cheat Day.

But today is Cheat Day. I can live and eat like Liz Lemon.

Burke goes out for doughnuts. I eat the remainder of a bag of M&Ms that I couldn’t finish before midnight last Cheat Day. (Yeah, there’s like a gremlin thing to it, I guess.) I am humming. I am ready to go.

A picture comes to my phone via Messenger. The local store is closed today.

“Huh. Weird.”

We decide that she should go to another store nearby that also has doughnuts. But I am alittel uneasy. When my phone rings, I know there’s a problem.

“Is today a national holiday?”

“I don’t know.”

It is. Saint Wenceslas can kiss my vastly expanding ass.

The whole day is thrown. We have not shopped before today as we planned to do it on Cheat Day itself. (A Cheat Day shopping excursion is more fun than drunk shopping. Highly recommend.) But now we have to rely on potravinys (sort of little shops/convenience stores). This means patty melts are out the window. We get potraviny doughnuts, which is like expecting ice cream cake, but getting a snickers bar instead. It’s okay. But it ain’t okay.

We decide to go for afternoon beers. This improves the mood, takes the sting out of our stymied Cheat Day where audibles had to be called. We order food after we get home. Everything is fine. It’s a moderately successful Cheat Day, but the plan was thwarted by Saint Wenceslas and his bad timing. We only had 986 years to plan for this and we blew it. On the TV, Liz Lemon mocks us. She might as well say: “Well, every day is Cheat Day for me, suckers.”

When midnight comes, I’m glum and tipsy. I have no reason to be, as I have eaten the weight of my pets in beef and French fries. As I get into bed and doze off, I think: it’s OK. Another Cheat Day is just around the corner. In 6 days.      

Each morning when I get up, I write some set points in my planner. I write a BOD (beginning of Day) note. This can be anything from ‘who the fuck made 5 am so goddamned early?’ to ‘Be happy and work hard today!’ to ‘Why don’t my feet work in the morning? Getting old is fun!’

I also write a To-Do list of the day’s errands (pay phone bill, work out, call doctor about morning feet). But it’s my 3 MIT (most important tasks) list that really sets the tone for the day. I only allow 3, which means I have to be choosy. One of those tasks is always ‘2×60’ or ‘3×40’, which denote the breakdown of my daily writing. Two one-hour blocks or 3 forty-minute blocks. Either way, it’ll always end up as two hours. More writing can always be done in the afternoon, but as long as I get my two hours of new text done in the morning, I can go to bed with a clear conscience. If I don’t, then I don’t. And everyone in the house knows it.

As for my second MIT, there’s usually a major task bearing down on me, which obviously gets put into spot 2. This can be an edit, an article, or a content job under deadline. This leaves the coveted third spot in my MIT list. The Third MIT. What will it be? My other assortment of tasks awaits with bated breath. Will it be them? I put a lot of thought into the third MIT. Sometimes it’s a task, sometimes it’s an imperative, e.g. ‘stop being a dick’ has appeared a few times and was struggled to be put into action, while the one or two times ‘go to the pub’ ended up as my third MIT it wasn’t so rough to pull off. The Third MIT just depends on what is needed at that given time.

On Friday, I surprised even myself when I wrote the word ‘walk’ into that spot. See verbs like walk or breathe or eat shouldn’t be put on reminder lists, they should just be done. As well, I currently have many more pressing tasks that surely should have been prioritized. But, sure enough, when I looked back at my list later there was the word, the verb, the imperative: walk.

Since I was a kid, walking has been my favorite way to get places. So easy. So free. Just put on shoes and walk outside and you can go wherever you want. Bikes never did for me what they did for my chums. Skateboards suit neither my personality nor my natural-given coordination. And the slew of things these days that people will use to avoid walking – scooters, hoverboards, unicycles – nah, not for me. Perhaps this is why I get irrationally irritated when I disembark from an airplane and am confronted with a bus. Just let me walk. And even though I will occasionally go for a run, I don’t get the same benefits from that as I do a good walk. Also, I hate running.

In August, 2015 I was visiting my family in Bucks County when I remember hearing about Donald Trump for the first time. To be clear, this was the first time I had heard about Donald Trump the presidential candidate, not Trump the casino owner, hotelier, or reality show joke.

Everyone was abuzz about his stupid fucking golden escalator. I listened to what he said and instantly applied a Gertrude Stein-esque observation: there’s no there there. He said all these words, but no phrases coalesced into meaning, no words teamed up to act as purveyor of a point, a salient observation, or anything that made much sense. In the thousands of words he spewed, he didn’t say a damn thing. Everyone once in a while he said ‘build the wall!’ and that got people going. Probably because he’d finally said something they could decipher.  

It was then I made a mistake. I sauntered up to my laptop, sat down, opened Facebook, and typed up a delicious and witty attack on the orange ball of venomous gas. I clicked enter and awaited the legions of appreciative responses surely on the way to me. For I had made sense and nobody I knew could support such an idiot.

I was wrong. Bigly time.

I was attacked by a swarm of angry Facebook friends. I was stunned, but it was clear: I had misjudged the zeitgeist. A friend wrote in the wake of these attacks.

“Hey, saw you get knocked around on Facebook. This country is completely different from the one you left – at Christmas. We’re in trouble.”

He was right. We were in trouble. We had no idea what was about to come.       

In grad school pragmatics, we learned that rage is a temporary emotion, but nobody has told that to Captain One Inch, who has been unleashing a stream of rage for a decade. Since he rolled down that escalator, the orange bag of feces has done nothing but cry and whine, bitch and moan, attack and cry victim. It’s day-in and day-out. Not one time in the last 9 years have I heard anything uttered or seen anything written by this man that isn’t dripping with attacks, accusations, belligerence, misery, and bile. Not one tweet that says simply ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Birthday!’ or ‘What a great win, [enter sports team here]!’ Never in that time has this man talked about music, a musician, a movie, or an actor without an attack. Not one time in this past decade has he reached out to compliment a person who isn’t him. And even in the tweets when he compliments himself, he always makes sure to smack someone else with collateral damage. For each time the orange clown gets a compliment, it comes at the expense of someone else – usually the person actually responsible for the thing he’s taking credit for.

I have never hidden my dislike of this man. He was a shit from day one and he has grown nothing but fetid since. As the days go on and things look worse and worse for him, he becomes quite literally more unhinged and more insane. He lost an election, but his fragile little ego can’t handle it, so he has thus tried his hardest to destroy the very basis of American democracy.  

I’m so tired. I think everyone is. The people who support him, those who know he’s a fraud, those who claim not to care. We are all so tired. I think many of us – secretly or not – want to be done with him. We’re in a toxic relationship, one in which we have had a morbid curiosity for a long time. (The first thing I do on Reddit is look for politics news.) Sure, we feed off the toxicity and the bile.

But isn’t enough, enough? Can’t we just be rid of this awful man?

It’s now that there’s hope that I am most nervous. What if he wins again? What if, just as we are on the precipice of eliminating him from our daily intake, all these massive attempts to suppress votes and decertify results works and we are stuck with an actual illegitimate president who most of the country despises? These are thoughts I almost can’t bear. I just want Donald to go away forever.   

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.