Archive for October, 2024
Gone Fishing
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on October 29, 2024

It’s a Friday on a long weekend. Joy is ebullient within the flat. Even the dog and cat are getting along (i.e. not shrieking at each other). Lurking in the back of my head are my evening plans. Hiding behind that is the joy of knowing that for the rest of the weekend I have no plans at all.
I am not sure when it happens as you age or, as my pretend mental therapist Julio calls it, ‘careening towards your final just desserts’. But I view plans as a direct, almost personal insult. It should be nice to get invited places. But I just can’t see it like that. My Friday plans were all pleasant and involved nothing more taxing than getting together for dinner and drinks with a couple of friends. I didn’t even need to wear underwear. And yet, at the appointed time I slogged out of my house and limped towards the metro. I cursed my primate ancestors that decided social behavior was a developmental imperative. I had just taken off my pjs.
Burke always says ‘you’ll have fun when you’re there’ or ‘you’ll be happy when you get there’ and she’s always, infuriatingly right about that. I had a wonderful time and sure enough my Friday plans even enhanced the rest of the weekend’s inaction. But still. I never knew that aging meant making plans and then praying for a natural disaster to force them to cancel. For the three hours before I go out to meet friends (again, friends, not colleagues I don’t like, not my boss – friends) I look at my phone with thumbs held and fingers crossed. ‘Come on, come on, a call from the governor’. Nothing. Drat.
Sometimes I accidentally reflect of myself as a young person. After I recover from the three-minutes’ worth of shuddering and wincing this elicits, I sit in awe. I used to work as a bartender – at night. Not only at night, but until like 3 a.m. And then I would go somewhere with my bartender buddies and have drinks until around 5 a.m. Here’s the kicker: On the nights I didn’t bartend, I still went to a bar and I stayed there all night (or until one of my eyes gave up the ghost and crossed the other’s line of vision like a broken desk lamp). It’s almost impossible for me to comprehend my young actions now. I had a flat full of books, a DVD collection (yes, I’m that old. Even some VHS cassettes!). And yet, instead of stay in that house and read and recline on a couch in a body that didn’t yet creak and bones that didn’t yet ache just because it’s October, I went out. The FOMO was strong in me.
Read the rest of this entry »Sketches of Dr Seuss Gets Busted Drinking Gin
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on October 21, 2024

When I started college in the early 1990s, drinking was part of the deal. We lived in the Pitt freshman dorms – the Towers, which had rooms shaped like Trivial Pursuit game pieces. For this reason the six pieces of furniture we were given between two people just couldn’t quite fit. This in itself made drinking a way of coping.
So when I was busted for drinking the night before my freshman year began, I wish I had had that excuse in my back pocket – as opposed to my student ID. But we get over this.
What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that this problem had existed since universities in America were a thing. Edgar Allan Poe ran up debts at the University of Virginia because of his relationship with booze. While trying to get thrown out of West Point later on, he found that booze gave him the license to help purvey that goal and helped him show up to formation drunk and naked and since the army doesn’t love individualism, you know. Thomas Jefferson left the responsibility of drinking up to the students and then burst into tears months later in front of them when he realized just how bad of an idea this was. According to one student’s diary, it was not unusual to see students so drunk that they couldn’t walk to class. It was probably best for all involved that they didn’t get there.
Young people experiencing freedom for the first time often experiment with booze and realized that these things go together like peanut butter and jelly – gin mixed with tonic. The fact that they aren’t allowed to do it makes it all the more fun and all the more mythical. Smuggling cans of beer under a resident assistant’s nose was a wee thrill. Getting into a bar at nineteen was like being entered into a new world. These feelings don’t change, no matter when they happened.
Enter Prohibition. 1920. America. Now, drinking isn’t a thing young students can’t do, it’s a thing Americans can’t do.
Just as the rules of not drinking bring out the ingenuity of young wannabe drinkers, Prohibition brought out the ingenuity of American wannabe drinkers. In New England this was especially true given its proximity to Canada, a country which – say what you want about it – never lost its mind enough to prohibit drinking. And so towns and cities in Canada became the T-Town of 1920s America. They would cross at the border, get drunk, and come back. Others used connecting mountain roads and lake passes to smuggle booze into the US. Divers in the early 2000s have found huge caches of booze in Vermont’s Lake Memphremagog that had been ditched nearly ninety years before. Lighthouses were used as distribution points. Boats and fishing vessels used fake compartments to bring alcohol to the New England’s harbors. Shopkeepers used baby bottles (nipples and all) to sell covert flasks of whiskey.
New England itself (has) had an age-old relationship with do-it-yourself booze. Since the Mayflower showed up and spooked local residents, New Englanders have been making booze from things they found nearby their homes. Apples. Pumpkins. Turnips. So, for the US government in 1920 to suddenly up and tell them to stop brewing beer and cider was nonsense.
Read the rest of this entry »Club Fiddy
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on October 15, 2024

The only gifts I remember getting as a kid were of the GI Joe realm or Castle Grayskull. What I remember more clearly is that my gifts were always wrapped in the Sunday comics, a thing which made the inside spoils all the more enjoyable to dig towards. There was a birthday at Angelo’s Italian Restaurant I seem to recall, maybe my eleventh or so. I remember thinking when I noticed the stained-glass lamps over the tables I have clearly made it.
When I was thirteen birthdays began to get a little more complicated. This was because I didn’t know what I wanted. When I was a child, it was much simpler. I wanted to go outside with my Gi Joes and play like the kids in the commercials. Then a bunch of birthdays after that were connected to trying to drink, drinking, and then wondering I drank.
Twenty-one was fine. But even that night – along with what Jagermeister tastes like on the way out – I knew it was all downhill after that.
Thirty? Pbbt. Forty? Who cares.
People kept claiming knowledge of some inspiration I would get. At thirty I’d be just so confident. At forty I would no longer care what other people think about me.
I have worn sweatpants to a bar unironically – before it was the cool thing to do. So I imaging that at some point, when I don’t know, I attained the gift of who gives a crap and have maintained a rather hands-off concern with what people thought of me.
I doubled down on this in my late forties when I became a lapdog guy and began carrying around a Shih tzu in a little bag. If I don’t have a little bag, I carry her across my chest and I talk to her – to be clear these are full-on, concrete, information-based conversations. I do not think she answers me, but I don’t seem like that if you see me.
So by the time fifty rolled around, I was more or less ready for the change in tone regarding birthdays. ‘You’ll be free, man!’ changed into ‘You’re in the old man club now, boy!’ and ‘You’re not gonna have a care in the world’ morphed into ‘Have you been to the doctor recently?’
Read the rest of this entry »The Argument for October
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on October 8, 2024

There’s a great debate in my house at the moment. It centers around October and its rank among the months.
Burke is a summer girl (birthday in late June). She likes light at 4:30 am. She loves the green and the sun and the long, long days. She likes having the option of swimming outdoors. A beer is made 30 to 40 times better when it is guzzled outside while the dog lounges in the grass nearby.
These things, I can totally get.
But I am an autumn boy (birthday in mid-October). I like slightly shorter days that involve deep blue afternoons. I like chilly days that don’t go below 50ish and don’t go above 70ish. I like wearing a sweater and knowing all will be well. I don’t swim much, but I do love a walk on a cool day with wind and the bark of rain that never really bites. A beer is made 30 to 40 times better when had in a warm pub after a brisk walk in the cool afternoon air.
These things, she doesn’t get at all.
But I say October is the best month. The shock of summer’s end hits you in September. By October, you have accepted the inevitable horror of reality and are ready to sally forth into the autumn and (gasp) the winter. So you just enjoy what’s happening. The leaves changing, the cooling weather. The whole world gets quieter (as long as you aren’t reading political news or listening to the unrelenting stream of shit that comes out of the wrong end of Donald Trump). Whiskey tastes better in October. So does dark beer. I am a closet pumpkin fan in that I don’t order pumpkin-spiced anything, but will nod a cheers of support to anyone in my vicinity doing so. Same goes for apples. Another point in October’s favor is the associated holidays. I mean, who doesn’t love the Fourth of July, but there’s no competition against the triumvirate of holidays that October purveys.
Read the rest of this entry »The Cheat Day That Almost Wasn’t
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on October 1, 2024

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.