Damien Galeone

Whenever I wake up in a grumpy or sad mood – every day, different reason, this morning is a stubbed toe – I go to the most cheery webpage online. Recent Deaths on Wikipedia.

Before you judge me as ghoulish or morbid for reading the obituaries over my morning coffee, let me explain a couple of things.

First of all, Recent Deaths is just the start off point. Any given Wikipedia page has the tendency to lead to several other, totally random pages, and Recent Deaths is no exception.

The problem with this is that it makes me a font of useless information, even more than does being an ESL teacher. And that’s saying something.

A few days ago I employed Recent Deaths to cheer me up after receiving a bad email. The first name that caught my eye was Lynn ‘Buck’ Compton of Band of Brothers fame. Compton played baseball with Jackie Robinson at UCLA, jumped into Normandy on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge and was the district attorney who prosecuted Sirhan Sirhan in the assassination of  Robert Kennedy. For the rest of the day I annoyed students with stupid facts stemming from these points. Sirhan is incarcerated at Pleasant Valley State Prison in California along with Charles Manson and the guy who murdered Bill Cosby’s son. Also, who thought of naming a prison Pleasant Valley? The mascot of UCLA is the bruin, which is a Eurasian brown bear. Traditional Chinese medicine enthusiasts use the bear’s gall bladder to keep their penises erect.

Secondly, when you’re feeling low there’s no better pick-me-up than reading about someone who has had a worse day than you.

This does, however, backfire.

This morning as I open up Recent Deaths to extinguish a bad dream about making out with Rip Torn, I see the name Davy Jones.

Davy Jones was a jockey in early life and had the coolest hair. He got to go on a date with Marsha Brady and serenade Sabrina the teenage witch, two girls I would have killed to sing to or dance with at two very different times in my life. And above all that – he was in the Monkees!

How can I compete with any of that? How can I compete with Sabrina the teenage witch, Marsha Brady and Mickey Dolenz?

This realization hits me hard as I pour my second cup of coffee. Now I’ll be depressed and jealous of a dead guy all day.

Oh yeah, Michael Nesmith’s mother invented Liquid Paper.