Damien Galeone

The Girl and I are at Olšanské hřbitovy (pron: Ol-shan-ske herzzzzhh-bit-o-vee). It’s Halloween evening, approaching dusk, and we are walking down main street. Like most of the dozens of other people there, we are carrying candles looking for a loved one’s tomb.

Dušičky, the Czech Day of the Dead, is November 2nd, but some put candles on graves on the last day of October as well. And so are we.

And while it might sound ghoulish, it’s pretty romantic. An October dusk, leave-covered paths, dark trees, candles. Plus, cemeteries are filled to the brim with people who would stand up and tell you to live life to the fullest if they could.

And as the romance froths and cooks and comes to a boil, a lingering spur of Ethiopian dysentery hits me with a desperate urgency. As you can imagine, romance is put on hold as other concerns, which you can imply, come stampeding to the forefront.

I assess the situation, which is not good. We are in the middle of a cemetery, and as dead people are not known for their toilet use, there is no bathroom nearby. We have to go back to Flora, which is about a fifteen minute walk, thirty minutes employing the crabwalk.

The Girl asks me if I’m Ok.

I breathe. If this goes as epically badly as it can, this will be solid grounds for a dumping (ha!). Unfortunately, that’s not where the worry ends.

I have been dumped by women for a variety of reasons, some good, some bad, some dumb. But the most amazing reason was that I was a blogger. I thought she was joking. Blogger? I’m outta here…

But she was not joking.

I developed a three-pillared argument.

A. I explained that I wasn’t exactly an internationally renowned writer.

B. I do not usually give names or any personal information about friends on my blog. And even if I did…

C. I promised (genuinely) that anything that happened between us intimately would be off-limits to my blog.

My argument failed and we broke up on the spot. She spent the rest of the conversation staring at me with an uncomfortable intensity, as though she was trying to erase from my memory any physical contact we’d already had.

Now, the shoe is kind of on the other foot. I am dating a blogger. But then again, so is she. So I guess the shoes are on both feet. There are similarities between our blogs. Mine seems to revolve around the day-to-day adventures of your favorite quirky dork, whether in the realm of teaching, dating, eating, planning to eat, writing, or being a cat guy.

She writes about being a thirty-something single woman in Prague, sort of a mix of Bridget Jones and Sex and in the City. And while there are some differences – she gives more dating and personal info, she has sponsors – the main issue is that she is not me.

As a blogger, I allow you folks into what I want you to see, usually funny mixed with sad, awkward, annoying, or just plain goofy. No matter what, events are constantly chaperoned by what’s happening in my head. And the result is a balance between here’s what is happening vs. here’s what I am thinking.

But now there is another observer, and this one isn’t privy to my inner thoughts. She’s going to take her own angle on what happens. I am much more comfortable with You won’t believe what happened to me at Olšanské hřbitovy than I am with You won’t believe what happened to this guy I am seeing at Olšanské hřbitovy. 

It’s times like these that I want to go back and temper my blog posts which feature other people – my family, friends, girlfriends, cat. I want to tell them that I understand what it’s like now, and that I get why they have viewed me with wariness at times. Almost literally. They sometimes give me suspicious looks when we are talking about a sensitive or personal subject, or when we do something silly. It’s a look that says: you’d better not be writing this in your head, you son of a bitch.  

I will go on to tell them that I am not only dating a blogger, but one who is far more famous than I am. She has a large (mostly female) following in the Czech Republic. So the potential for my trademarked brand of quirky dorkiness to be read twice a week by the female thirty-somethings of Prague is not out of the realm of possibility. And it could be anything. It could be everything. The weird sweatervested cat guy who wears something called ‘a writing kufi’ and awards himself hotdogs for good days, all from another writer’s perspective. Terrifying.

Or this adventure at the cemetery.

Spoiler alert, we make it to a pub in Flora. Catastrophe averted.

Later on, The Girl meets the B Monster. The B Monster doesn’t care who anyone is, she only cares that her human playground has come home. She climbs me like a monkey, sits on my shoulder like a parrot, and bites me when I pet her. She gets so frenzied that I am forced to put her into “machine gun position,” which involves holding her horizontally, belly up, and holding her head in my outreached hand and her lower back in the closer hand. It is her “calm” position. The effect is that I look like I’m wielding a furry machine gun.

I think it’s hilarious and will carry the machine gun B Monster around the house for minutes on end. I do so tonight. When I look at The Girl, she is giving me a funny look, a smirk, one eyebrow raised, as though she is writing in her head.

Uh Oh.