The place is small. Really small. We’re in the kitchen-living room-wardrobe-closet-TV room. Burke is holding the dog, who is breathing on my neck. I am counting the flat owner’s nose hairs. Her husband is trying to turn around, but gets caught and breaks into tears. He raises his elbows and manages it. I can actively see him decide against a glass of water. I feel like I’m at the buffet table at an orgy. The realtor raises her hand and presses a portfolio to my midsection. The dog snorts.  

“Shall we go to the kitchen?”

She speaks in Czech so it takes me the requisite 21 seconds to understand. She turns to the left. “Here we are.”

The owners squeeze past us and go out onto the balcony. I think the woman is having a panic attack, but it turns out she’s just drinking.

Last Sunday, feeling that the weekend was getting away from us and trying to avoid that from happening, Burke and I harnessed the dog and went out for a walk. That walk ended up in (aka was aimed at) a pub. Pretty soon we were sipping pivos and chatting and having a grand ole time. Occasionally, I’d glimpse my watch and grumble about the inexorably slow march forward of time and let out a whimper.

Each day of the week brings with it a specific feel towards drinking. Friday and Saturday almost invite it. Thursday is easy enough to sway to a drink (it’s almost Friday, after all). Wednesday and Tuesday are fun on occasion, if only for the novelty of it, and especially if it occurs during sunlight hours. Oh I got drunk on a Tuesday. But Sunday is always a tricky day on which to decide for beers. Sundays are days for laundry and a lounge on the couch or a walk in the park. They’re for getting in bed early and reading until you doze off. But should one decision be made or should one little occurrence occur, then Sunday can just as easily be spent sipping pivos and arguing against that nasty old time bandit, who kidnaps your free time so easily and leaves you on Monday morning walking into work with a confused look on your face and a note in the back of your head to read up on how time moves faster as we age.

And so, after going out drinking, we went in drinking too. When I woke up Monday morning mouth filled with cotton, brain tinged with a drop of regret, I was greeted with the clear signs of afterparty. Two bottles of wine, glasses, an empty bag of chips. The shell of late night Oreos and pretzels. A vague memory of hitting the shop across the street. Billy Joel frozen on the screen within YouTube. Wikipedia on my computer screen, no doubt settling some late night bet (yes, Ty Burrell owns a pub in Utah). And what else did I see? A ghost. Before I needed confirmation, the ghost meowed at me.

It was time to face facts: someone in my house has a drinking problem. And that someone is my cat.

It’s not unheard of. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that animals around the globe thoroughly enjoy alcohol. Tree shrews have a noted enjoyment of alcohol. Each autumn moose in Sweden get shitty on fermenting apples. Macaques drink alcohol whenever they can get their hands on it. And the Bohemian waxwing eats berries specifically from the Rowan tree because it gives them a buzz. Evidence not only suggests that animals like alcohol, since they get it from fruit in nature that naturally ferments itself, it’s likely they’ve been getting tipsy for about 20 million years longer than we have. They’re seasoned veterans.

My cat is one of them. Though she doesn’t wait around for fruit to become fermented, she only needs to wait until I crack something open late at night and then pass out before I finish it. I have awoken to her dabbing a paw into the puddles at the bottom of pint glasses, brandy snifters, and wine orbs. At other times I wake up after a night out on the armchair or on the floor and the cat is sniffing my breath and licking her lips. Or if I can’t sleep and I pour myself a tumbler of bourbon to nudge me towards nighty nights, guess who is standing on the table waiting and thumping her tail against the cutting board? Yep. Cat. What a lush.

But it could be worse. The moose in Sweden totally overdo it on fermented apples and for the exasperated Swede the autumn is a time of lifting drunk moose out of trees and pulling them off their crushed porches. The Bohemian waxwing gets so drunk that a number of them immediately fly into buildings and this is not an unusual way for them to perish. Plus, they’re not Bohemian for nothing. The macaque is a notorious drunk, sometimes they’ll do it all day. The ones who live alone (I guess in captivity) drink much more than the others. The ones who have had a long day (for a monkey I guess this means a day of learning sign language and not being able to fling your feces) drink much more. The macaque might be our closest relative when it comes to booze.  

If anything alcohol makes my cat more pleasant. She meows less and she gets all sappy. She rubs her face against me and purrs, the drunken feline version of ‘I love you man’. Then she curls up in the scarf box and sleeps peacefully for hours. But boy is she in a mood if you reach for a scarf before she’s ready to get up.

I guess the worst thing about famous ships is that we only ever hear about the ones that ended up on the bottom of some body of water. We know the Lusitania and the Terror and the Edmund Fitzgerald. Nobody is reading a history book about the passengers who had a week-long binge fest on the Mauretania and who all ended up in New York a week later with dyspepsia and a negligible hangover. No, we hear about the ones that went down, the ones that were blown up, or the ones that burned on Lake Erie. If your name is somehow connected to a ship, there’s a solid chance you died on it.

There is of course the mother of them all, the one that hit the iceberg. There’s nothing much to tell you about the Titanic that James Cameron didn’t already show you. And he had Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet to help him out, not to mention that Celine Dion. You know it hit an iceberg, you could probably guess that around 1500 people died, and you’ve maybe heard some tidbits like they’d skimped on lifeboats and they sent out the wrong distress signal. (The signal they sent actually said ‘steer clear’, which might be the exact opposite of what you want to do when your boat is sinking in the Atlantic.) You’ve heard the folkloric stories of men bravely staying aboard, other guys dressing as women to get on lifeboats, the band playing until the ship went under. You may have heard bittersweet stories such as Ida Strauss almost getting on a lifeboat, but in the end deciding to perish with her husband, Macy’s owner Isidor Straus. They lay in bed together until the sea swallowed them. Then there’s the myths and legends, the heroic Newfoundland dog, the premonitions, the mystery ship nearby, the captain was drunk (no evidence for this, but it was 1912 and he was a sailor, so it’s a natural assumption). A book regales the ‘true’ story of a pig that lived through the Titanic, but as far as the evidence shows, the only pig on board was on first class dinnerplates.

Like every writer on Earth, I have been watching ChatGPT with rapt attention. It is, after all, evidently the AI system which turned 400,000 writers into editors overnight. So I have of course been having some fun with the old girl. And, like most of you out there, and mostly in retaliation for the fact that it has become more in demand as a writer after existing for 80 minutes, I have made my ChatGPT monkey dance in all sorts of tunes.  

ChatGPT, could you provide me with a list of items that I’d need in case I was teleported back to Medieval Japanese?

ChatGPT, write a 1,000 word ode to my shihtzu Maisy in the voice of Robert Browning that I can sing to the Dukes of Hazzard theme song.

ChatGPT, write me a 250 word love letter from Mark Twain without using the same word twice.

That sort of thing.

In a moment of inspiration augmented by boredom and several shots of Jamesons, I wrote:

ChatGPT, provide a critical opinion of Damien Galeone’s writing.

As an AI language model, I cannot provide opinions, but I can perform a search for critical opinions on Damien Galeone’s writing.

After conducting a search, I was unable to find a significant number of critical opinions on Damien Galeone’s writing online. However, here are some excerpts of reviews of his work:

• “Galeone writes with a clear and engaging style, and his stories are entertaining and relatable.” – Kirkus Reviews on “Senseless and Merciless Dreams”
• “Damien Galeone has a talent for capturing the absurdity and humor in everyday situations, making his writing both entertaining and thought-provoking.” – The Prague Post on “Dreams Are Unfinished Thoughts”
• “Galeone’s writing is witty and sharp, and he has a great sense of humor that shines through in his stories.” – BookPage on “On The Run Again”

Based on these reviews, it seems that Galeone’s writing is generally well-received and entertaining. However, it’s worth noting that these are just a few reviews and opinions may vary.

I was overwhelmed and overjoyed by the fact that my writing is generally well-received and entertaining, and it was only mildly off-putting that the pool for reviews of my work is roughly a puddle.

Somewhat more distressing was the fact that none of these reviews is in actual existence. As in, they are complete fabrication. Kirkus wouldn’t review my novel if I was handing out squeezers in their breakroom. I had never even heard of BookPage, which only seems fair because they have never heard of me either. A drop more disconcerting was that not only had the reviews been fabricated, but they were written for fabricated books.

In recent days, research has brought me to the Green Fairy, the Green Demon, Absinthe. When I first moved to the Czech Republic, a wee 2,230 years ago (okay, 2004), Absinthe was on the shelves. There were – and are – shops dedicated to it, at least in order to gain a tourist tromp. It was known to be part of late 19^th century Parisian and Bohemian culture and they play on that to get suckers (like me) to buy some strong liquor. Admittedly, it’s not hard.  

At my going away party at our little corner bar in Pittsburgh, one of my regulars gave me a book all about Absinthe. The book had beautiful pictures of Art Nouveaux green fairies, reservoir glasses, circular tables in dark Parisian cafes and their distant-faced Absinthers. Others showed ghostly humans being visited by the green fairy. Though there is an allure to these paintings, nobody really looks happy. It was 2004, three years after the film Moulin Rouge! gave us a sweaty Ewen McGregor drinking the elixir until Kylie Minogue came out and winked at him, a green, drunk, seductive, sexualized Tinkerbell. On the plane to Prague, I knew I would be trying Absinthe. 

It was steeped in booze lore and lots of unverified information was heaved upon it. It’s hallucinogenic, you see a green tint around everything when you drink it. It affected people either phenomenally or adversely, depending on the mood of the storyteller. ‘Kafka drank it all the time, right before he put out the Metamorphoses.” (NB: no, he didn’t) ‘I knew a guy who had to get an intestine replacement after too much Absinthe,” some guy once said. When he was prompted for information, he only muttered ‘wormwood.’

Wormwood became the little-known intoxicant of the hour. No one I knew could clearly define it, as Wikipedia, Smartphones, and ubiquitous Wi-Fi had yet to blast onto the scene making every drunk an immediate on-the-spot smartypants in the field of whatever was being discussed at that exact moment. We just knew what we knew – wormwood made Absinthe strong and hallucinogenic, so much so that it was illegal all over the place. But the fact that we were in Prague made it legal for us. And this made us downright neato. 

Making it – and us – all the cooler was the literary and artistic tradition Absinthe carried with it. Van Gogh, Lautrec, Joyce, Gaugin, Rimbaud, Maignan, and Hemingway. All of them visited by the Green Fairy. All undertook L’heure Verte. All considered European artistic geniuses.

Though times have changed and the Czech Republic’s expatriate demographic has changed over the years, back in the early 2000s Prague attracted a very specific expatriate. We had all done something in the field of arts – journalist, graphic artist, playwright. And it was these occupations we offered to our fellow expats at bars, instead of those which had been on our tax returns – bartender, cashier, pizza delivery aficionado. And yet just by buying a ticket to Prague and a sweater with elbow patches, we were now allowed into Bohemian society.  

And if you were going to be Bohemian, you had to try Absinthe. We rolled into an Absinthe bar and we went through the whole shebang. The waiter wore a vest. He brought our reservoir glasses and slotted spoons on silver trays. He clearly knew how to wow us wide-eyed expatriates, because that is exactly what we said: wow. I put some Absinthe in my spoon, on which rested a sugar cube. He lit our Absinthe on fire, a thing now which baffles me – why would I drink something into my body that could be set on and stay on fire? I wonder if Van Gogh ever asked himself the same thing.

I blew out the fire and drank it down. Aside from Mezcal, it was the worst thing I ever ingested for a buzz. So I had another. One of the others said there was a yellow haze around everything. Another guy abruptly stood and said he needed to walk around Prague. He left us his wallet, we think, in an attempt to be as ‘Bohemian’ as possible. We were rendered unimpressed by his gesture. I felt very drunk and my throat burned as if I’d been knobbing a cactus. The waiter kicked us out, closing time. We spilled into the street. We felt very Bohemian, so much so that I had to bring myself back down to Earth with a Big Mac.

Though the term ‘Bohemian’ remains an inherent quality that I fully comprehend, it has greatly changed into those things that are profoundly and undivorcibly Czech. It means checkered pants with tearaway calves, dipping rohliky into pink pastika and washing it down with a Branik beer. It’s train station pubs with little groups of blue-overalled construction guys sipping early morning Bozkovs and packing a week’s worth of lunches to bring on your holiday.

Absinthe has been the sufferer of a bad rap. In the late 18^th and early 19^th century it was blamed for murders and the decay of French society. Across the pond, the British didn’t do much to help Absinthe’s case. They say it as a barrel of high octane, high alcohol problems, and ones they didn’t need. The French had just been beaten in the Franco-Prussian War and were down men. The last thing they needed was Absinthe making more men less capable of defending their borders from – and correctly pegged, it turns out – an aggressive and motivated neighbor.

Much the way that rum was seen as a demon in late 18^th century America and Gin Lane was destroying the potential of Brits in the 1600s, France heaved all of its societal woes on Absinthe. It was destroying French society despite the fact that 72% of the drinkership was downing glass after glass of wine. Many countries made it illegal – Belgium, the US, and the Netherlands among them. Though there was a small sect of literati and artists petitioning for the artistic and unique insight that Absinthe’ s green fairy brought out in its drinkers, they were in a minority. Also, they were not doing their cause or themselves any favors by dying of alcoholism.

In the end, Absinthe – the ingredients used by ancient Egyptians and as a malaria-defence by the French in Algeria, was a victim of its own mythology. It would take a barrel of thymine to do what people suggest comes after a glass or two – hallucinations and dropsy insights. But this was no never mind. The Green Fairy isn’t welcome in most societies. And in the Czechs people need to drink it only once to realize that she should just stay in the bottle. 

So far I have to say that I have enjoyed my old age. Oh, there’s a few things, like sneezing my back out of whack or giving myself pep talks to get off the couch. Otherwise, it hasn’t been bad.

Based on most of the people I know who have hit their ripe old late 40s, I expected to become a very hardheaded, set in my ways curmudgeon who refuses to change his mind on anything. Not only was I OK with this, in some ways it has totally happened.

I need roughly three weeks’ notice for plans. Anything less short noticed than that and I feel like the person is pressuring me. Someone who suggests going on that day I think is deliberately antagonizing me.

In other ways, however, I find that I am mellowing in my old age. I add onions to things now. A thing which would have baffled the younger me. I also need to go to sleep in a clean flat and I talk about this desire in great length and in earnest with those around me. The very fact that I am a dedicated early bird would give Young Me a coronary. It’s remarkable. Ish.  

One of the things that has kept me fresh of mind and spirit is writing for a children’s magazine. I have been writing science and nature articles for kids for a couple of years and they are always rather eye-opening. Remarkable is that the magazines seem to know what will freak me out and then they ask me to write about it. I have been asked to write and have written about spiders and insect-cuisines and venomous snakes and BASE jumping and space travel and mushrooms. All things that freak me out beyond belief, and under normal circumstance things whose existence I would never in any way acknowledge.

We decided a few months ago to buy a flat. I delighted in saying this. It felt so grown-up, so sophisticated. When I say it aloud (either in my mirror or to others) I feel as though I am wearing an ascot and sipping a martini.

Why yes, I’m buying a flat in a European capital. All true, but the Thurston Howell III accent I put on it is a bit misleading. I can’t see he and Lovie perusing 2+KK’s in Kobylysy and obsessing over energy performance ratings (A is the best, C is average, and it goes to G, which means you’re rubbing sticks together under a hamster’s butt to encourage him to power your flat. But at least it’s expensive.)

Nevertheless, I slip it into conversations that I am buying, mostly hoping someone has an ailing grandmother who was one of the nine people who read my novel and wants to will it to me. This has yet to happen (fingers crossed), but on the bright side people do trip over their tongues to tell me how big of a pain in the ass the process is and how expensive flats are these days. And despite the terror they induce, there is a sense that I am being allowed into some other world, a world that only lets you in when you agree to spend a ludicrous amount of money to be allowed to stress over a 51 meter space for 20 years.

On an unrelated note, I have been day drinking more.

On February 28 1983, 121 million viewers sat down to watch the last episode of M*A*S*H. If you have lived in a biopod on Pluto for the last 55 years, M*A*S*H was a sitcom about surgeons and staff at a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War. When BJ Hunnicutt and Hawkeye Pierce hug it out and say goodbye in front of that helicopter, 121 million teary-eyed fans said goodbye right along with them, surely devasted that the only opportunity they’d get to catch up with the 4077^th would be in roughly 1,692 reruns a week for the rest of their lives. Hawkeye takes off in the chopper, Suicide is Painless plays one last time, and everyone in America went to the bathroom at the same time.

M*A*S*H was groundbreaking. It was the first non-zany war show (Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy had that corner covered). It made fun of war during the most unpopular war in American history (up to that point). It made fun of its absurdity, the oxymoronic and often lethal logic of the army, the stupidity of those in charge, the meaningless death. Characters died in non-gag ways. In a way no other show had done and in a way prescient to those that would come, M*A*S*H jokes came from all angles – language, physical, diatribes, cultural references. M*A*S*H tried to show the realities of war while making people laugh at it.

And that included booze. M*A*S*H was the first show to feature not only booze, but heavy drinking in earnest. The drinking of most other sitcoms was done by buffoonish drunks in comic relief. In the 80s and 90s, it was an episode-specific device: in this very special episode of Blossom or The One When Chandler Gets Drunk and Grows a Weirdly Long Fingernail. But in M*A*S*H drinking was a matter-of-fact part of the show because it was a matter of fact part of life at war. More than a prop, booze in M*A*S*H was always present, setting the mood of the episode. They chatted over beers in the Officer’s Club. Colonels Blake and Potter delivered bad news, celebrated joys, or augmented orders with whiskey. Charles Emerson Winchester III established his superiority with cognacs and brandies. But most of all they drank from the still.

I enjoyed a healthy obsession with MASH when I was a kid. Of all the reruns that wouldcome on in the early and mid-1980s, none excited more attention from me than Radar O’Reilly (pre)noting the arrival of wounded people on helicopters. My parents were sure that this would become less of an obsession after a while, but when I got to high school I found some similarly minded friends. One of which arrived on our last day of school before summer with a pile of video cassettes. M*A*S*H. All M*A*S*H.

My summer revolved around M*A*S*H and only M*A*S*H. I was hooked. I named my bedroom the Swamp, bought olive drab boxershorts, and brought a pitcher to my room that served as a still. I was a pre-binge binger.

On February 28 1984, M*A*S*H ended for good when I was nine years old with the specially long episode Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen. There was lots of crying in my house. Probably because M*A*S*H was gone forever, only to be seen roughly 1,000 times a week in syndication. How sad.

As I was nine, I had no idea what a cultural event this was. 121 million people watched the last episode, the most ever and the most that would ever be. As cable TV became more prevalent over the next couple of years, no other TV show ever had the chance again to command that kind of -at-the-same-time viewership. And of course though zillions of people have watched The Sorpanos and Game of Thrones, they didn’t do it at one time. Obviously streaming allows people to watch newer shows whenever and wherever they’d like. A year ago, a stomach flu kept me close to (aka living in) my toilet. It’s there that I binged True Detective.

The site had been discovered here in the early 1900s. British archaeologists uncovered vats and thought they’d been used to dry grain. The location, deemed run-of-the-mill, was then literally forgotten about. It was found again in the 2000s and only during an excavation on February 14 2021 did archaeologists realize what the site was. A brewery. A vast, ancient brewery dating back to about 3100 BC and the dynasty of King Narmer.  

Though other ancient world breweries had been found, this was by far the most extensive and organized. The brewery could produce 22,400 gallons of beer in one go. It was laid out in eight standardized structures. This place was engaged in industrial beer production. Most of it likely went to the royals. Some of it was surely used in rituals, as it was considered sacred (and still is, but it’s hard to imagine an Egyptian priest pouring an Old Milwaukee over a sacrificial cow).

But when did people start making beer? Crude ancient breweries can be dated back 7,000 years and there’s evidence of a cave brewery near Haifa that dates back 13,000 years. The earliest barley beer is dated to 3400 BC in the Zagros Mountains (Iran). (The earliest grape wine dates to 5400 BC also in the Zagros Mountains, which were evidently the party grounds of the fertile crescent). But there’s some discussion as to how it started. Some historians suggest beer was discovered by happy accident. In order to make grains more edible, ancient tribes would soak and heat them, then let this sit over time and return to them. Sometimes they noticed that the action of wild yeasts from the air fermented the sugar in the gruel into alcohol. The result wouldn’t exactly have been a Dogfish 90-minute IPA, but a fizzy porridge-like substance that would nevertheless help our ancestors forget they were being tracked by Asiatic lions and enemy tribes. Since raising grains took time and since beer took a while to ferment, it’s thought that this was a precursor to the Neolithic revolution and ancient humans casting off their nomadic ways.