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.