Archive for January, 2025
Remember the Alamo
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on January 28, 2025

Every month I write texts for a few different companies. I send them out, they send feedback that requires rewrites – e.g. about level too-high/low, too long, too short, vague wording.
I read these emails and feedback, send a string of violent curses into my ceiling, bemoan my terrible writing skills, cry a little, and then, when I come back down to the form and blood pressure of a human adult, I realize that the feedback is fully warranted and I set out rewriting. Then I have a drink, the size of which would include the word ‘Blaster’ or ‘Gulp’ had I bought it at a 7-11.
But a few months ago, I received an email regarding feedback that hit different. As I scanned the email, I caught words that confused me. Unacceptable. Unsuitable content. Need to be changed.
This was new. Yikes.
The materials are for late teen kids and I went into a panic that somehow an alter-ego form of me had taken over and sent in a text about the Kama Sutra or a bio and technique guide of the Marquis de Sade. I slumped back into a gathering pool of flop sweat and foresaw my name in emails to HR and then ending up on the internet. Dear God. This is where it starts. Before that, I looked back at the email: . . . about war . . . about death . . .
My Dog, what had I done? With adrenalin-shaky fingers, I opened the accursed files.
Poe. As in, Edgar Allen. I had written a bio of him and a paragraph dealt with his suspicious death. Another text was about the Emu War of Australia. This was a good old romp in the 1930s when the Aussies brought in the army to kill emus who were damaging farmland and fences. They were 100% unsuccessful. Try though they did to kill the emus, since the emus were so fast and had a preternatural tactical talent for avoidance, the army trucks zigzagged, crashed into each other, and looked like the Keystone cops wearing gillies. It was a humiliating experience for them globally. Humor, I thought. War, they said.
Read the rest of this entry »Clash of the Young and Old
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on January 21, 2025

It’s a mid-afternoon class on Tuesday. After ten minutes, students are trickling in and I am marking off their names on the attendance list while imagining them being eaten by a giant aardvark named Ted who punishes late students in my brain.
And then I make a mistake. I make a joke.
See, I’m a relatively funny chap. People spend an awful lot of time either laughing with or at me, a distinction whose blurred lines I’ve grown increasingly unconcerned with. In class, if there’s a good laugh every 20 minutes or so, it goes a long way to release any tension or stress and the room’s stock of will to live and lack of interest in stabbing me is replenished.
The students in this class are very high level. That means my jokes can be linguistically complex and sophisticated. Phrasal verbs, metaphors, implied subtleties are all on the table. In fact, these students never cease to amaze me with the depth of their knowledge. I made a tramp stamp joke a week ago and saw a roomful of smirks.
The problem is, I sometimes forget that the students are 20-years-old and a lot has changed in the last 30 years. And, you see, the joke I made was about Led Zeppelin. Complicating matters is the fact that I included the word ‘album’. After my joke, 18 heads titled slightly to the right as they tried to understand what I was saying, the way my dog does when I say ‘do you want a hotdog?’ She knows it’s something she should know, but she just can’t pin it together.
Like the students. Album is a word they are familiar with. It’s used in an online context too, but less so for music. A music album to them is a mixed-up collocation, like if I told you I had bought a nosebrush instead of a tooth brush. Somewhere in the haze built of TikTok and watching other people play video games, they can imagine the concept, but they just can’t nail it down.
I explain that an album was a cohesive work of musical art. They say they know this, for they are not stupid. I relent a little. But I point out that with almost all the music in the world available at their fingertip, they surely can’t understand the joy of buying one album at a time. To this, they squint and scoff, but after that, they lean forward in a muted interest.
“One at a time, you say?”
“Yeah.”
I go on to explain that all these albums they have I had to buy one at a time. The White Album. Wildflowers. Born to Run. They counter with something called ‘curating a vibe’ on Spotify. They basically sequester all of their emotional needs into one playlist. Titles include: Monday Sad, Side Quest (a side quest is now anything that isn’t evidently a main quest, such as going to the pharmacy for band aids, but I don’t think you carry a sword), Bumping (I didn’t ask), Travelling Home.
Read the rest of this entry »46 Euros on Notebooks
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on January 14, 2025

Getting old is fun. Sure, there are days when parts of your body decide not to work. Your intestines are willy nilly about their ability to digest certain foods and products. And the new game in your life becomes ‘let’s see if I can remember that guy’s name before I have to look on Wikipedia’.
Spoiler alert: I can’t.
But one thing that comes around is your knowledge of yourself. Does this sound cliché? It most certainly does. It’s right up there on the cliché Hit Parade with ‘be true to yourself’ or some other mishigas about success.
If there’s one thing I love it’s a good notebook. My visit to Japan was almost cut short because I was ready and willing to hand over my entire bank account at a Kyoto stationary store. I would have saved enough just for an extra piece of luggage to carry home all of my new notebooks. My friend Mark is the only reason this eventuality didn’t come to pass. We went on to another week of exhilarating travel marred only by the fact that I was in possession of only two notebooks and I had brought them from Europe.
When I was forced to leave behind that shop, I convinced myself that there would be other stationary shops with those notebooks. But there were not. No matter how hard or where I looked or what I googled, there were no more notebooks like those. Those notebooks are being used by someone else – probably a Japanese guy, whose lifetime spent enjoying boundless and sleek efficiency won’t allow him to fully appreciate the notebooks. I hate him.
It was that sad state of affairs, the cliché that came before it, and about six tumblers of Irish whiskey that propelled me last Friday night as I careened towards the end of an online purchase. Seems the powers that be have made stationary rather accessible on the internet. It’s all right there and you can buy it too with virtually no supervision and no governmental regulatory policy.
But I had come across the motherlode. Slick paperback notebooks, size B6.5 – just perfect for a jacket pocket. They have a flap. A flap! With magnetics! A magnetic flap that locks the notebook shut and keeps all your secrets and laundry lists. I mean, I’m only human. A human whose intestines don’t like pods anymore. A human whose slippery memory requires the use of a notebook. And not just a notebook, 46 euros-worth of that notebook.
I had to justify it in the end. 46 euros after all is 36 euros more than 10 euros. And it’s on notebooks. I began justifying – I would use them, they would bring me joy, I wouldn’t go out for a week or so. But then I had another Irish whiskey and that jolted out a reminder: I am old. I can do what I want. So I hit click and today I received a box that contained 46 euros of notebooks and I have almost literally never been happier than at the moment I opened the box and gazed in at 46 euros of notebooks and realized they were all mine. And I was reminded of something that was said by someone in some movie and I tried to remember who it was but in the end I looked at Wikipedia and then I cracked open my first of the 46 euro stash of notebooks and I wrote down that name and now I won’t ever forget it and the notebooks have done their job. And that is what we call full circle, my friends.
Josh Brolin.
Murder King of the Forest
Posted by Damien Galeone in Blog on January 7, 2025

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?’”
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