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.

Though I have avidly travelled around Europe for the last 20 years, I have always been apprehensive about Spain. This has nothing to do with the culture, which is wonderful, or the Spanish people, who in my experience are absolutely wonderful. As one of the warmer counties in Europe, Spain is the place I fear I might run into a tarantula. And then there’s the mealtimes.

As I thought I knew, Spain has legendarily late mealtimes. Pictures I have had in my head concern a table of very good looking dark-haired people speaking the gibberish language that makes for Spanish in my head. They are sitting around what I thought tapas were and they are casually ignoring the clock on the wall, which says 11 pm.  

I have nothing against eating late – I used to be a major advocate of the midnight snack. In college the hours between 11 pm and 3 am were prime feeding hours. Amazingly, this is where my weight issues began.

However, it’s in my forties that eating after 8 pm leads to stomach issues and heartburn that could light up Newark. Nevertheless, upon buying a ticket to Barcelona for the weekend, I had to face my fears of mealtimes.

My mood was lightened when a little research told me that there were five mealtimes. Any place that has five mealtimes can’t b a bad place. I decide that Sunday will be my day to observe all five mealtimes of the Spanish.

Desayuno 7:00-9:00

This evidently should be a sweet snack. I opt for the churro with chocolate dipping sauce and a Viennese coffee (with whipped cream – go big or go home). I cry.

Almuerzo 10:30-12:00

This should be a salty snack to follow up the sweet breakfast, sort of like a reverse dessert. I go for an Iberian ham sandwich and a cup of Viennese coffee (if it ain’t broke…). I become drunk on joy and ham.

Comida 14:00-16:00

At lunch, I decide to get actually drunk on booze. I get a pitcher of sangria and wash it down with tapas, or, as I have begun to refer to it, my reason for living. Tapas are whatever you want them to be as long as they come on small plates and you share them with someone nearby. Today’s are fried artichokes, fried cod fritters, and ham croquettes. Ham croquettes taste like cream chipped beef fried in breading and if I don’t have them every day for the rest of my life, I will lose my shit.  

Merienda 17:30-19:00

This meal is meant to tide you over until dinner. It’s usually a sweet or a pastry, but a sandwich is also OK. Today it’s paella and shrimp with a liter of sangria. I chase this down with a shot, more like two shots, actually way more vermouth that one should drink. In Spain they drink it on ice and cut it with an orange slice. The end of merienda is a bit fuzzy, but I am bolstered by the fact that I’ll be able to eat in another 2 hours.

Cena 20:30-22:30

This is dinner. For dinner, I decide to get a burger. The waiter all but forces me to get a beer by pointing to a drinks menu. I have two before having two more.

I crawl into bed by 11:45 (I think). What have I learned? I learn that I love Spain. I adore a culture that makes sure there are only 90 minutes in a day (2 maximum) before you get to eat again. I have pledged my blurry allegiance to sangria, Spanish vermouth and wine, light beer, and chasing it up with tapas. I could live here. Ole.

I have been watching the TV show ‘Severance’ which centers around employees for a mysterious company called Lumen. These employees agree to undergo a process in which they have their brains altered so when they are at work they have no memory of knowledge about their outside selves (their outie). Likewise, when they are in the world outside of work, they have no idea what they do at work or about their colleagues, processes, or anything.

The plus side is that their outies are not bothered by work and their innies are not bothered by personal problems. The downsides are that their innies feel like they never leave work, because they are only conscious when they are there. So they are perpetually at work.

I’ve decided that I would get over this issue in favor of severancing for my work. The thing is, I already feel like I’m always at work and so at least when I’m there I won’t be bothered by things like whether my outie is skipping exercise or his upcoming dental appointment or if he’s considered an asshole by other outies who meet him. He’ll be unbothered by annoying social gatherings after work that evening and will thus not spend all day trying to come up with excuses to stay home and eat potato chips on his couch (a clear violation of my outie’s diet that will not bother my innie the next day at work). It will be a period of complete freedom.

As a person who makes money writing, I was indeed alarmed to learn that Artificial Intelligence will soon be hired to do those jobs. I need a job.

I’d offer to whore out my writing skills for people – I like writing shopping lists, I love writing recipes on the back of envelopes, and I have a zeal for drawing nooses during meetings. I’d be glad to bring you in on that. The problem, yet again, is that pretty soon my blended will be doing those things for you. With writing and noose drawing off the table, I needed some way to spend the rest of my life. I need direction. I’m turning to the most obvious course of action. Only Fans.

Now, I still have research skills and I use it to find out about the broad range of interesting and highly disturbing services that people are offering in exchange for money. After exploring my bag of talents, I opt for the following services.   

Watch me eat! For the low price of $37, you can watch me eat while I watch TV. This includes chicken wraps during Frasier or a roast chicken leg while watching 30 Rock. If you pay an extra $12, I’ll engage in witty banter with you about the show. Highlights include “They don’t make ‘em like Frasier anymore” or “Boy, 30 Rock was sure funny.” For an extra $18 I’ll describe my meal to you, and for $26 extra I’ll let you pick the show I watch, as long as it’s one of the six shows I watch while I eat (full list available on my page, but think 1990s psychiatrists).