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.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but the world’s in a pretty ugly place at the moment. Yes, I know that 1000 years ago you could die from a hangnail. Yes, I know that 600 years ago you could get strung up in France for having red hair. Yes, I know that if you were a woman 400 years ago in New England who had an eerie skill like the ability to do math, you would be accused of being a witch and crushed under some rocks. And yes, I realize that fifty years ago people had to listen to disco music on a daily basis.

I get it, the world has always been a bad place.

Disco music.

Shudder.

But if you’re a normal Schmoe it’s hard to feel optimistic these days. See, much of the decisions made on the planet are being made by assholes. Assholes. And, further, it seems that a great deal of the motivation for making the decisions they’re making is to be an asshole. This doesn’t really jibe with my whole life philosophy of ‘please don’t be an asshole’. Or, at least, don’t be an asshole to others.

Oh, I’ve been an asshole. Epically. And I’ve even been an asshole just to be an asshole. But when I was finished being an asshole, thousands of people weren’t out of a job because I was an asshole, whole countries weren’t less safe because I was an asshole, the sovereignty of peaceful neighbors wasn’t in question because I felt the unquenchable need to assert my assholeitude. My gay friends weren’t in physical danger because I felt like being an asshole. And if you say anything, the assholes that support the assholes say things like ‘Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave!?’

But I have experience being an asshole. See, was an asshole. Then I stopped being an asshole. Then I felt bad about being an asshole. Really bad. And in the end, I vowed to be an asshole less often because being an asshole is no way to go through life – it eats away at the asshole and those in the proximity of the asshole. If you keep being an asshole, then at the end you are nothing but an asshole. And nobody wants to sit on the bus next to an asshole. Nobody.

I don’t sleep well anymore. I get overheated easily and I now share my bed with a dog who has found the most comfortable bed in the whole house is between my legs. What physical discomfort can’t do to keep me awake is taken up by my brain. Right when it’s time to shut off for the night, I list the next day’s work, think about someone I wronged in the third grade, or wonder how many frogs are in North America.

Sunday night, along with making mental notes to email Kate Breslin and look up frog census numbers on Wikipedia, there’s also a football game. In fact, it’s the Superbowl. Now I’m not going to pretend to be a diehard football fan, but I do love my Eagles in a lateral I-live-across-the-world kind of way.

I’d gladly watch football every Sunday, a thing I did more or less religiously when I lived in the U.S. if for no other reason than that’s what all my friends were doing. But football for me is now on at 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock. Nevertheless, when I get a chance, I watch the Eagles play just like I sometimes rouse at 1 am during the spring and watch the Phillies play.

However, I noted an interesting detail this last year – when I did not watch the Philadelphia Eagles play football, they won. When I watched them, they lost. This clear case of post hoc ergo propter hoc is unavoidable to any Philly sport fan. Like many sports fans, Philly sports fans are absurdly superstitious. If the Eagles win when you shave and lose when you don’t, you shave. If the Flyers win when you popo twice in the morning and lose when you poop once, you take an extra one for the team. And you keep doing these things until the experiment proves incorrect. Now, science, the laws of probability, enough academic study to fill a stadium, and the logic of the universe tells us all that we – as fans – do not in any way influence professional sporting games. Except we Philly fans totally influence games. So, because I love my hometown, I stopped watching the Eagles in October and would only follow along on ESPN’s live game updates. It is very clear to me that this Superbowl victory is due to my heroic self-neglect.    

My personal damage to Philly sports aside, one thing I do miss living abroad is watching sports. Sure, I can tune in to a Phillies game or an Eagles game. And as long as I can get the game, who cares about the environment I watch it in. I more or less recreate an American living room in my house, after all.

But it’s not the same. What, after all, can make up for a Sunday afternoon football game with bad seasonal commercials to take up the space during a half’s 26 timeouts. Hoagies and beers, the community shouts coming from the houses on your street. The pizza guy asking if the kicker shanked the field goal and getting a full descriptive playback. Same with baseball. I can listen to or watch a game in July. But if the neighbors don’t understand why I’m shouting ‘swing the fucking bat’, then it’s just not the same. Nor is the same as when your city’s team is in the Superbowl and the whole city wordlessly agrees to give each other a hall pass the next day.   

As I awoke this morning, the first thing I noted was the profound lack of messages. Nothing from Facebook. Not a slurred congrats from my brother, not a message from my mom followed by roughly 700 emoticons and 400 exclamation points. Nothing. My heart lurched. Surely this meant that things had gone south. Last I checked we were up by 17. And either coming back and winning from a 17-point deficit was almost as peculiarly Philadelphia as blowing a 17-point lead. I gritted my teeth.

My fears were alleviated moments later. We had won it. Amazingly, we had blown them out. My brother sent me a picture of him and our friends wearing boozy red faces. I am sad to have not been involved, but enormously happy. So happy, in fact, that I have given myself a hall pass for tomorrow. I’ll go to a bar tonight and cheers them on: Fly Eagles Fly!    

King Charles I had been found guilty of high treason, tyranny, and defeat and betrayal. He was sentenced to death, his execution to take place on January 30 1649. He spent most of that day with his kids and his most trusted companion, William Juxon. Juxon convinced the king to have a piece of bread and drink a glass of claret before the big event.

Charles asked for an extra shirt and, according to some, had a posset (a hot milk-based drink mixed with wine, ale, or spices). This was to avoid shivering from the cold – a reaction that he didn’t want mistaken with quaking in fear. At 2 pm, he walked the gauntlet through masses of belligerent people who had been drinking since morning. Beer and alcohol vendors had kept them well-lubed. The King was almost certainly pelted a few times with rubbish or bad fruit as he made his final walk. He laid his head on the block and the executioner took his head off with one clean blow. He then raised it up and bypassed the words ‘behold the head of a traitor’ because he didn’t want to be recognized. He was wearing a hood and a mask.

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Executioners in early Europe existed as outcasts and often lived outside of town, consorting with lepers and prostitutes. They often doubled as torturers in their off-time, so they were feared and reviled. And the methods of execution they carried out were not for the weak-stomached – literally. Most of the condemned were hanged, nobles and royalty were granted beheadings, but if you were particularly disagreeable, you were drawn, hanged, and quartered. This consisted of being dragged to the site on a hurdle, then hanged – but not until death. You were cut down, disemboweled, castrated, and cut into four pieces. Your head was put up on a spike.

So you can say that executioners had some job-related tension. And that’s before they actually had to do it. Separating a head from a body with one blow with a heavy axe is not exactly easy. Let’s take into account the person isn’t sleeping, there are 150 drunk people watching, oh, and you were probably really drunk. Because executioners drank. They had bad jobs, they were outcasts, and, if they screwed up, a very drunken crowd would boo them, throw trash at them, or, if it really went off the rails, demand that your head get snipped off. So yeah, they drank.