I wake up at 5:30 in a warm, comfortable bed. The air has lost any indication that summer lasted up till ten days ago. It’s crisp and cool. It’s still dark and will be for a solid hour more. I stretch. A small white dog senses my movement and instantly approaches for head scratches. I have had a good night’s sleep, or not bad anyway (only got up to pee once, heartburn stayed at bay). An optimism that can only come from being prone and without a full bladder at the same time allows me to approach the belief that today will be good.

And then I make the fatal mistake of reaching for my phone.

With 45 seconds (at most) I have been inundated with the unbelievably bad news. Not only from the day before – no no no – my phone and Reddit make it possible for me to be filled in on the world’s worst events up to about eight minutes ago. I have been informed of murders, shootings, rich peoples’ attempts to permanently screw those who made the disgraceful move of being born with less money. Before I stand up, put on my slippers, or hit the button on my coffee machine I have heard the day’s threats, complaints, and woes from the president of the United States, I have rolled my eyes at the outrageous lies of those with right-wing political agendas, shaken my head at the mere existence of ICE, and I have balled my fists in anger and frustration at the astounding hypocrisy of the American GOP.

Then I pee.

I suppose the saddest part of all this is that if you live in the Western world then my morning probably sounds a lot like your morning. Maybe not the dog. Because of real time news apps, Reddit, and any other number of apps, the worst news in the world is delivered to us at all times of the day: before dinner, after dinner, before we get out of bed, in the middle of a meeting. It doesn’t matter; it gets to us at all times.   

Fifteen years ago, this might have seemed like hell. Who would want to be informed of all the bad things going on in the world at the touch of your finger? But the funny thing is, I look at this information – eat it up, really – on purpose.

On this little box that I find that information on, I can also read poetry, any classic of literature, erotica; I can read the beautifully-poetic and resonant insights of Marcus Aurelius. I can look at any work of art that has ever been discovered.

But I don’t.

I can tell my personal AI assistant to conjure up any kind of comfort, encouragement, or positive affirmations it can think of.

But I don’t.     

I look up the bad news of the day and I spend the rest of my day under the unbearable weight of the shit world being a shit place run by its shittiest people who treat everyone else like shit.

I mean, it’s been worse. I’m sure people woke up with more angst during the Bubonic Plague. The leadup to the sack of Rome probably wasn’t a great time of comfort for its citizens, Vandals bearing down on them with quivers full of comeuppance.

Oh, I know things will get better. They have to. There will be a swing back to reason and hope and kindness. But to be honest, I’d be happy if the American president was not the biggest asshole on the planet. That fact alone would make getting up to pee at 5:31 am an easier thing to do.

Sometime in the late 18^th century, a bunch of French people got it in their heads that rather than walk around, they’d like to fly around. To accomplish this, they looked towards China where inventors in the 2^nd century BCE developed Kongming. Though this sounds like a dynasty of giant apes, it just means ‘sky lantern’. They used hot air to make paper lanterns lighter than air and used them to send military signals. It’s from the idea of Kongming that French wannabe flyboys created the hot air balloon.

Just as space programs sent chimps and dogs into space, balloonists played the same game. On September 19 1983, the Montgolfier brothers loaded the world’s first hot air balloon, a 42-foot-high balloon made of fabric and paper, with a sheep, a duck, and a rooster. The sheep was a stand-in for a its perceived nearness to human physiology. The duck was a control accustomed to high altitudes. The rooster was to test the effects of altitude on a flightless bird. We can only hope the rooster enjoyed irony. The flight lasted 8 minutes. There is no record as to the animals’ reaction.

The first manned fight took place on November 21 1783 in a paper and silk balloon. Francois Pilatrê de Rozier and Francois Laurent stood on a circular platform and fed wood into a fire through openings on either side of the balloon’s skirt. The balloon reached an altitude of 500 feet and travelled about 5½ miles before landing in a farm field. However, the sight of a fire-breathing behemoth landing near their homes had startled the locals, and the two Frenchmen were being charged by literally pitchfork-wielding villagers. The balloonists had no choice but to soothe the terrified villagers by offering the champagne they’d brought along. The world’s first in-flight drink was enjoyed a month later when Jacques Charles poured a glass of champagne for his fellow passenger while floating above France. Thus began the era of drinking in the sky.   

In the 1920s–1930s a lot of that sky drinking was done on giant hydrogen-filled airships called dirigibles. Zeppelins. Airplanes existed as an air travel option, but they were unpressurized, turbulent terror machines that flew so low that one could frantically wave to people in tall buildings. Dirigibles offered the day’s elite a much calmer – and much more lavish – experience. Dirigible travel took time (Brazil to Europe took three days) so there wasn’t much else to do but eat, drink, talk, and look out the window. The range of cocktails served on the Hindenburg, the world’s most dubiously famed dirigible, was impressive and categorized under sours, flips, fizzes, cobblers and cocktails. So much drinking was done on dirigibles that the menu offered hangover cures. With the Hindenburg disaster in 1937, dirigible air travel literally went up in flames. It seemed that televised footage of air catastrophe along with the shrieking pleas of a commentator stayed alive in people’s nightmares no matter how much booze they drank.

So, we moved on to drinking on airplanes. The Douglas DC-3 pressurized cabins in the mid-1930s, but things really changed when the Civil Aeronautics Board regulated prices and seating. This limited airlines’ competitive strategy to offering luxury services – i.e. good food and alcohol. Airlines created unique menus and signature drinks. Pan Am went luxury with coursed meals and fine wines. Delta’s Royal Service offered free Champagne, canapés and cocktails. Mini-liquor bottles became ubiquitous in the home bars of businessmen all across America. Others went slightly more off brand. In the 1960s, Mohawk Airlines places were decorated like rail cars, with stewardesses dressed as dance hall ladies serving free beer, cigars, and pretzels. Western Airlines served Margaritas on Mexico routes. Continental Airlines became the tiki-lounge in the skies, serving passengers with Mai Tais and Dungeness crab. The jet age brought lounges and piano bars. The Boeing 377 Stratocruiser featured a spiral staircase to a downstairs cocktail lounge. American Airlines even installed a piano bar. From 1969, the Boeing 747 could fit more than 1 ½ passengers than any plane up till then, potentially getting 400 passengers shitcanned in their 30,000-foot-high bars and lounges. The party ended with the Deregulation Act of 1978, which removed price and route controls. And from there it’s a slippery slope to Ryanair charging passengers for carryon bags and, no doubt at some point, to be on planes with windows.

It’s great when a plan comes together. And terrifying. We decided a while ago to get our place painted. I guess there’s something about white walls with occasional patches of ‘who knows what that was’ that doesn’t quite shout ‘home.’ We needed some color.

Well, that’s the fun part. You get to look at swatches and imagine what the flat looks like in yellow or maroon or light green or the kind of blue that looks like a nice day even when it’s raining. But the thing is, you can do that forever. You can pitch, snoop; there’s an app wherein you can apply paint to a picture of your living room. And so Burke sent me 540 pictures of me sitting in my armchair reading an e-reader and sipping a coffee with the orange, yellow, blue, and gray walls. It was like the Civil War.  

Finally, we found a company online and, after a few texts, there was a man standing in my living room suffering through my bad Czech and zapping my walls with an electric tape measure.

“Probably October,” he said.

“That’s fine.” And I meant it. For there’s nothing better than doing something and getting things into motion. But if there is, it’s doing something, getting things into motion and then not having to do anything about it for a while. I went back to my John Langan horror stories, lived my life, and breathed a sigh of relief.  

A day later a text came: How about Tuesday?

This Tuesday? As in six days from now, Tuesday?

Yeah, that one. Tuesday.

OK! Sure!

I went into panic mode. Now, I had to do things.

In the last year, the first number in my age became a 5. Now, I have not had the reaction one might think I’d have. I didn’t run out and get my lips bee-stung and while I can comb my hair with a towel, I have yet to put in an order for Propecia. It’s just getting older and it’s not too bad as long as you don’t mind permanently sore hips and the fact that you may end up in the ER if you sneeze while doing math in your head. Otherwise, I’m good.

We have so much more information these days than when my dad became first-number-5. When he did that back in the late 1990s, his doctor probably introduced his forefinger to old Mr. Rectum and told him to keep up his calcium levels. If such tests were done in the early 1970s, I’m sure the doctor even put out his cigarette to give a similar test to my grandfather. Nowadays, medical advancements help us avoid some terrible outcomes that were otherwise a fact of life for older people. And there seems to be a much more informed online peanut gallery in terms of how to age well. We now have several thousand people telling us how to be a 22-year-old 60-year-old and a 30-year-old retiree.

As far as I can tell, I should eat loads of spinach, one steak a week, chicken like it’s going out of style, and fill my mornings with flax, grapefruit, vitamins B, C, D, magnesium, and zinc. In between shovelling those things into my mouth, I need to run, lift, do palates, and as many push-ups as I can without dying on the floor. I can have one soda a year, one beer a decade, and if I so much as look at tobacco my face is going to explode.

No problemo.

I head into the living room at 6:20 pm. I take up the rocking chair. I warm up with some Phillies pregame. At 6:40 pm my dad comes in and takes up the armchair on my right. The game begins.

My schedule when visiting home is pretty open, but there are a few scheduled events. Dinner is at 5:30 every day, the house is more or less empty of young people by 8 am, and I am expected to be in the living room for each Phillies game.

I am fine with each of these rules – especially the game. Nobody else in the house enjoys baseball besides my dad and I, so game time is more or less quiet time. Each game time I arrive at my rocking chair like the at-heart octogenarian I am. I have my water and pretzels. My dad has a water and whatever kind of chocolate he found on his way in.

Baseball is one of the few visual media my dad and I can watch together without ending up in prison. His taste and mine has deviated greatly since I was four months old. My dad likes Korean pop dramas and I like Columbo. It was never going to work. But with baseball, we become the commentators nobody can hear. A thing for which I am enormously grateful.  

We discuss actors, movies, books, lakes in Geneva, the good points and failings of each player. And hoagies. And when it’s over, we mosey on with the rest of our day.  

After a five-day roadtrip, I return to the rocking chair. It’s quiet. We’re both a little under the weather. Then I get a lot under the weather. He adjourns to the kitchen, which is right next to the living room separated by a window with two shutters. Our banter continues, but it’s louder.

‘Hey, nice play!’

‘Are there any pretzels in there?!’

Two days later. I am watching the game. Schwarber is up to bat. The count is 2–2. The crowd goes quiet. The sound of a clap comes from the kitchen. The pitcher throws a ball. 3–2. A kitchen table rattling under a hand slap. Schwarber strikes out. The next inning, Realmuto is down in the count 0–2 when a cheer comes from the kitchen. Three seconds later, Realmuto hits a homer into the upper deck.   

It’s not a crystal ball he’s got; it’s a TV that’s three seconds ahead of mine. While this wouldn’t have an effect on me in general – I don’t care if Junwoo kisses Jiwoo under the eucalyptus tree before he meets Jiho near the enchanted forest of Gly-ho. But the excitement and enjoyment underlying baseball is sort of predicated on not knowing what is going to happen until it does. When you have the human spoiler alert watching the game twenty feet away, it sort of gives it away.

I let him know about this and the struggle becomes clear instantly. You see, my dad can’t keep a secret. He thinks he can, he says he can, but he cannot. This goes hand-in-hand with my dad’s movie-watching habits. He will directly give away a movie ending – in the middle of a movie. ‘No, it’s not him, it’s his sister who’s the killer.’ At the very least, he’ll let you know he knows something. ‘Just watch this. This is a great scene.’ If he picks up a throw pillow, someone is about to get eviscerated onscreen.

So to tell him not to give away the next play is a tough ask.

That evening, Bryce Harper is up and the bases are loaded. Harper’s got a 2–2 count. The pitcher starts his windup. A groan from the kitchen. It’s quickly followed by a strangled cheer. Harper strikes out. An inning later, the third baseman for the other team grounds to second. As the second baseman fields the ball, I hear my dad say ‘Oh fucking God-yay!’ The second baseman throws the ball into the stands.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Yeah.’

Despite these attempts to silence his radar, it’s too hard for him. The game for me becomes a series of grunts, yells, table slaps, cheers, claps, and hurrahs. I find an old pair of bombardier headphones and affix them to my ears. This seems to do the trick. Then I remove them and it’s still quiet. I head to the shuttered window and watch my dad bite his tongue to avoid broadcasting his disappointment in the last batter of the inning.

The fix comes when we put masks on. We talk through them and look like two guys playing birds in a movie. He pulls down his mask to take a bite of a popsicle. I fit a few pretzels under my mask.

‘I knew he was going to strike out.’

‘Yeah. What a jerk.’  

We the people are clearly animals. This isn’t a dig or a comment on society. I mean, people just act like different animals. I once spent ten hours working in pairs with a guy on a course and at the end of it I could say without hesitation that he was a squirrel. He was on a steady diet of caffeine and so his head and upper body twisted and observed in jerky, frenetic movements. He also had a seemingly unending supply of snacks, which he pulled from pockets and bags and his hat. He was a squirrel.

Some might say this denotes one’s ‘spirit animal,’ but I am not sure I even buy into this. I think we are just animals. And surely as happened with you, I one day sat down and asked myself: What animal am I?  

I used to watch my cat lying around the flat, moving from warm spot to warm spot, following the sun as it arced through the sky. I had more time on my hands back then. After some hours, the cat would get up, yawn, stretch, and then go eat. Eventually it would poop. And then start the whole thing over again. Sometimes the cat avoided the world for hours or even days by hiding in some cozy spot. I needed no further evidence: I am a cat.

Now, this isn’t something you go bragging about or slapping on your resume. You don’t sit across from an interviewer and say ‘Sorry Mr. Jackson, working on a team doesn’t really suit me, because, well, I am a cat.’ No. But as time went on, I came to terms with the fact. I even enjoyed it. I don’t like drama or loud noises. When I drink too much, I get quiet and smiley and sometimes I lick the back of my hands and clean my hair. Yes, I thought, cat.

It’s lunchtime. I take my eyes off of the computer screen that seems to rule my waking hours and I stumble through the closet la aqua that separates my quarters from the rest of the household. I open the door. I have no idea what to expect.

Visiting home used to be something of a predictable affair. It was me, my mom, my dad, my sister, and her two kids, who were starting lives of their own. During the day I’d be home more or less alone. My mom worked all day and my dad worked in the dental office whose waiting room I now sleep in. He’d come in for lunch and, depending on the day, be done early or later in the afternoon. In any event, it was usually a predictable month.

Things have changed. Mornings and dinnertime have become variable based on the simple fact that my sister had a kiddo. This child is best described as a mix between Elmo and Nero. Moments of undeniable charm and unimaginable cuteness are punctuated by moments of terror and tantrums that will only be complete when she’s wearing a toga and ejaculating her epithets from atop a hill of human skulls. But that’s dinner – good old fashioned American dinner.

Lunchtime is up in the air. It all depends on who’s sick.

I come back to Langhorne each August for a month of family time. Langhorne has my family, food that offers a more robust attack on my colon, and a quiet suburban life. We are a small town tucked into the woods – like every other town in Pennsylvania. We are surrounded by trees, small animals, ticks, and cicadas.

The night I arrived, my sister showed me some pictures from our driveway’s security camera. We are visited nightly by a menagerie of quick moving animals. We get a squirrel and a rabbit. But there are also deer and a fox. A long-tailed little guy running across our porch and towards, no doubt, my dad’s car, which at all times puts off a scent of Tastycakes – a delicacy my dad allows in the car on the way home from any errand.

“There was a bear,” my sister tells me.

“What?”

I have always harbored a secret desire to witness civilization go back to the animals. We took it from them and I can’t imagine it’s something they have let go of quite yet. They probably view us and our cars and lawnmowers and our political choices and wonder what the hell it is we’ve done to the precious environment.

I take three walks a day while I visit home. Considering my raised level of calories, walks help keep me out of a motorized scooter. They are also a way to observe the town and keep me from committing patricide or matricide or any-other-family-icide you’d care to name.

Also, I want to see that bear.

He’s a black bear. I have named him Kevin (for obvious reasons). Once I told my sister and mother that I wish to see this bear, they scoffed and told me he had been relocated.

“They relocated Kevin?”

“Who’s Kevin?”

“Never mind.”

For the first two days, my walks are not fruitful. I see some dogs and birds and neighbors. Everyone says hi and I am confused at first. But aside from small woodland animals and a hairy mailman, there are no other animals. Definitely no bears.

But then, as I passed a tiny patch of woods on the road that would bring me to our street, I noticed movement. Kevin? I thought. No. but it was two deer. One adult, the other young. They were sitting at the edge of the woods and eating some guy’s lawn. I slowed. They looked at me with massive and seemingly trusting eyes, a round, deep black nose popped on the edge of their snouts that would make Rudolf jealous (in the beginning of his song). They chewed grass and did nothing.

I walked away.  

Yesterday, after working out, my sister informed me that I should take a walk to a shower and then use it. I told her I would shower after my walk.

“Cool. Don’t walk near any of our neighbors.”

“Fair enough.”

Maybe, I surmised, if I smell like one of them, Kevin will make himself known. At the same patch of woods, another movement came. The deer again. This time they were much closer, just a few yards away. I stopped. There she was – the adult, Patty (obvious reasons); she was about six or seven feet from me. Flo was not with her now. Patty came even a little closer so that I could take two steps and pet her side if I wanted to try. But something told me not to.

When confronted with an animal I normally don’t see on a daily basis – a deer, a nutria, a beaver, a horse, a cow – I am always amazed by the size and the, well, realness of them. Animals are always larger and more intimidating than you’d think they are. This is probably because when animals (even docile ones) are on TV or movies, they are there as a joke. Or maybe they are anthropomorphized: a talking spider, a pig who herds sheep, an indecipherable duck who wears only the top half of a sailor’s uniform. Media has not prepared us to deal with animals in the quasi-wild.

This is a deer, a symbol of mild euphemism and softness, metaphorically depicting speed, inaction, or a eunuch; a walking pile of steak. And yet, the muscles rippling in its side, its strong legs, its surprising size, all tell me that if I stepped out of line, this animal could knock me into the weekend. I did not touch Patty. She looked at me, sniffed at my shoe and, evidently agreeing with my sister’s assessment of my post-workout aroma, took off across the street.

I spend the night marveled by my experience. Right there – nature! I then remember that on another visit home way back in the 1990s, I walked across the street from my friend Eddie’s house and saw, standing right on our porch, a buck. A huge buck with lots of points on its antlers. Even drunk I knew to avoid this guy. He was less gregarious than Patty and took two giant leaps and was in the woods across the street.

But then it dawned on me: I am king of the deer. This realization was something of a surprise as I had always figured I was Lord of the Hermit Crabs. But you cannot argue with nature.

On my walk this morning I saw Flo and Patty. They were crossing the street to another patch of woods. A driver was coming up the road and I waved with two arms to warn him. He slowed down and let our buddies pass. I smiled in wonder as he drove past me, hoping to engage him in a shared ‘can you believe that?’ moment. But he didn’t smile back. He looked at his watch and made an annoyed face.   

And he’s right. Nothing happened. It wasn’t interesting for him. I’m telling you a (non-)story about a (non-)run-in with a deer. Not Kevin the bear or Terry the bobcat or even Samantha the hawk.

I come home and try to figure out why I’m writing this. Oh, I’m sure there’s something about the circle of life and blah blah blah. But in the end, what I want to say is that if civilization does go back to the animals, then Flo and Patty can have my room. And, if they occasionally had Kevin over for mojitos, that wouldn’t break my heart either.  

It’s been a few days in the land of the Cheesesteak and I’m acclimating nicely. By that I mean that I have yet to stab anyone with a pencil. Being home offers its perks – the family time, the food, the increased blood pressure. Then there is the comfort of being at home, which makes me feel about ten-years-old.

I have slipped into my family’s summer routine. There is camp and work and little trips. I do my part to help out and otherwise stay out of the way. My family and I get along great – until we don’t. Fortunately, I have a room of my own. So, when the fam stresses me out, I can go to this room and, hypothetically, lie facedown into a pillow and scream curse words until I fall asleep. This works well and not only because I am usually awakened by my mother calling me into whatever meal is appropriate to that time of day.  

I have slipped into my own routine here. I get up early, write, walk, work out, drink coffee, eat Grape Nuts, sprint to the toilet. In the unbearably hot Langhorne afternoons, I retreat to my cooled room for work and reading. When I have control of the living room TV, it is playing a show in which a bad British person is murdered by other bad British people and some other less bad British people try to figure out who did what and why.

It seems that everyone around here is doing their part to help me feel at home. They are too loud and they invade your privacy. A man broke the sacrosanct bubble of quietude at a bank’s ATM vestibule by shouting complaints into his phone while standing two feet behind me. It made for a disconcerting transaction on my part. In the Czech Republic, that man may seriously have been arrested. A woman at the next table in a diner yesterday overheard our conversation and commented – at length – in a personal way that didn’t relate to what we’d said at all. Despite enough free tables to run a speed dating night, minutes later a man and woman sat directly next to us on the other side and proceeded to have the loudest conversation in the history of the world.

These things stressed me out, proving with surprise that I have a little more of the Czechs in me than I thought possible. But I crunched my toes and prayed for a car to drive through the window. Instead, we paid our check a few minutes later and I was home on my pillow until Mom woke me up for third lunch.

Whenever I go to Italy, I have pictures in my head of what it’s going to consist of: warm, sun, pasta, and pizza so good that it could take the place of a meaningful relationship.

The problem is, I forget about the little frustrating things that Italy means too. Things move slowly at times, time is a rumor, and public transport schedules run on astrological forecasting. In restaurants, food moves faster than drinks. Waiters are usually pleasant but seem to need a lot of breaks in between tasks. They can be seen at a table breathing deeply in between the aperitivo and the first plate rounds.

Sure, the Italian lifestyle is known for being slowed down and easy. But if you are, hypothetically, a stressed-out type, a guy who loves nothing more than making schedules and then sticking to them, well, the la dolce vita can be a bit of a strain.

I spend the first day in Italy trying to make sense of the waiters’ strategy. So far, it seems to very attentively get us through the door and get a drink in front of us. Then, they bring us a little snack to keep us there (which works really well. Catching flies/honey). Then they disappear for a while as we try to divine liquid from the bottom of the glass and trying to catch the eye of a person wearing a uniform. Any uniform. It’s as though he wants us to want him. I would be annoyed if it weren’t so effective.

I know it’s my issue. Relaxation and I are like fourth cousins. I never see him and only on the rare occasions when I do am I reminded of how much I love him. It takes a while for me to unwind, even in Italy, where the very atmosphere tells you that you might as well chill out because nothing is going to happen very quickly anyway. Nevertheless, I move and think like I have things to do. When, in reality, my To Do list consist of these things: wake up, drink, eat, walk over there, find more food, maybe get tipsy, sleep.

It’s when I give myself over to la dolce vita that I will find some joy. It takes a while. I walk too fast and up hills, too. Burke is annoyed with my inability to chill. I look up bus schedules and metro stops. I am keenly aware of how long it takes me to get from one place to another. We walk up a huge hill to a city square and I do it like the Bataan Death March.

But then, something clicks on the third day. We drink beers at lunch and then head back to our apartment to sleep for a few hours. When I wake up, I walk to the local store for some supplies. No, I mosey. Yes, mosey. And then, I mosey back. We take our time. If we don’t do things, then it’s OK. We have a drink at a local pizzeria and order two pizzas to go. By the time they arrive, I have forgotten that I had ordered pizzas to begin with.

I slip into this wonderful state of mind and bliss for the remainder of our time in Genoa. So, about four more days. Four days of shrugging off bus schedules. Four days of not planning dinner. Four days of drinking in the afternoon and then taking a guilt-free nap. Four days of no email or work.

When I wake up in a mild panic on Sunday, I know the game is up. We have a train to catch and then another train. Tomorrow night we have a flight. Even if I enjoy myself to the fullest in Bergamo (today’s destination), I know that la dolce vita for me is a thing of the past. I clean our kitchen and check for things hiding in the bathroom. We walk out the door, my legs forcing me to move more slowly than usual when running for a bus. What I wouldn’t give for an aperitivo right now.