Nothing shows your age more than how you travel. Plus, the number of sounds one makes when standing. When I was younger and didn’t look so much like every school comedy’s representation of a history teacher, I travelled on a shoestring. I lived on street food, grocery store wine, and end of day discounted bakery goods. I’d go for hostels, rooms in flats, couches. One time that couch was behind a building. My motto used to be “Why pay for the Best Western, you don’t travel to sit in a hotel room.”  

I was wrong. One of the best parts of this recent trip to Italy was the hotels. Nothing can squash the exhaustion and low grade misery of walking around in the Roman heat, but knowing that I was returning to an air conditioned hotel room with clean sheets and an episode of CHiPs dubbed into Italian sure helped. (It’s somehow better when dubbed into Italian, a language whose only vocabulary I know are those words needed to order gelato.) Each day a cleaning fairy came and dropped off new towels and more toilet paper. The bed was huge. The TV was bigger than the bed. The water pressure was set to elephant cleaner, the heat to Louisiana in August. Glorious.

We talked about our hotel rooms as if it was an attraction in a guide book. We admired the Art Deco Best Western in Rome as much as the Coliseum, we talked about the air conditioning in the B&B in Monopoli as much as the Adriatic Sea. In my thank you note to the cleaning staff of the Hotel Aria, I told them to say goodbye to the breakfasts for me. A note, by the way, I wrote while wiping away a tear with perfumed tissues provided by the hotel.

I’m just going to say it: I’m old. That’s right. It’s true. Not only did I gather this by my change in attitude towards hotels, but there were other clues. The initial clue was in my bags. I packed an entire Ziploc bag dedicated to the various creams that make my body’s life easier. I excitedly told the soccer player next to me on the plane that Ryanair is a phonetic palindrome. I complained about my feet and knees every day. Whenever I caught the eye of a fellow old person, we gave each other the eye roll whose subtext was ‘Man I miss my knees.’ I called a waitress ‘young lady.’ I called a waiter ‘good sir.’ All of the waiters and waitresses called me sir. The six compartments in my pill box had 1. Vitamins A and D, 2. Aspirin and ibuprofen, 3. Benadryl, and 4. Tums. The box came home empty. Compartments 2-4 were empty by day 10.

It was in the town of Monopoli that I realized the true lengths of my oldness. Monopoli is an ancient city on the Adriatic Sea. Narrow cobblestone streets meander between white buildings in the old town. An old stone path has run alongside the sea for centuries. Our first day, we ate at a restaurant on the sea. This place is the first of which we would refer to as ‘a hipster place.’ In our estimation, a hipster place is a restaurant which is trendy and hip and employed by people who are trendy and hip, but neither the place nor those employed there are good at producing food. In this hipster place, we dined on lightly breaded cod pieces with vegetables (i.e. fish sticks on lettuce). The only reason I know the food at hipster places is good is because they tell me it is. Enjoy a moderate of rich parma ham with thinly sliced cheese on crusty artisan bread and wash it down with in-house effervescent oxygenized hydrogen (i.e. a ham and cheese sandwich on old white bread and water). What’s more, everyone else just seems to go along with it, basically because (like me) they don’t have the energy to argue, we just don’t go back to the hipster places. It is the culinary world’s greatest quiet conspiracy. It was while first writing the phrase ‘hipster place’ that I recognized that I am now old. I fretted mildly, but then took an Aleve and that helped.

My suspicions were confirmed on our first morning in Monopoli. I awoke at 6 am and without a Denny’s early bird special to take advantage of, I instead worked out. After exercising, I decided that the best way to cool off was to go to the local old town swimming cove. I put on my trunks, took my vitamins, and walked down there. The swimming cove is part of the old town and generations of Monopolians have swum there and started their day there. I was eager to join in that tradition.

When I arrived (at about 6:45 am) I was not alone. There were probably ten others. All of them were solidly in their 60s. The cove was a soup of old people, floating, breast stroking, and remembering their knees. I got in with them and swam around the broth, bringing my own recollections of a time before hipster places.

They accepted me. Each early morning I went to the cove and swam. I back stroked to the rocks across the way. I breast stroked back. Each day garnered me a few more nods and smiles. I felt a little like Jane Goodall. It was on the third day that I realized they weren’t accepting me as an outsider chimp, they were accepting me as a fellow old person. It was my right as an old person to swim along with all the other seniors who wake up at 5 am and groan as they get out of bed. I drank at lunch that day. Followed by two Aleves and a Tums. I suffered, but at least I suffered in an air conditioned hotel room with Chips in Italian to keep me company.  

When I was in school there was a thing called a ‘senior slide’. The concept here, in case you don’t know, is that when the end is in sight, you slack off work and take a lackadaisical, carefree, ‘you do it’ attitude towards everything.

I used to employ this attitude at most times of the year. Typically it started after the first month of school and would last until everyone else would start slacking – around Christmas, before summer holiday. Surprisingly, it took me 6 years to graduate college.

But some years ago, something quite frankly rude happened. I decided (again, rudely) that my holiday (summer, Christmas, etc) would be better if I did my scheduled work before them and not after them. I don’t know when this awful change in my personality occurred, but it’s a personality failing I regret.

Tomorrow I am leaving for the Adriatic coast of Italy. I have twelve days of pasta, seafood, wine, and lounging to look forward to. And yet, for some reason, I have holed myself up to work on projects that need attention before I go.

This wouldn’t bother me so much if it weren’t for two things. First, I’m supposed to live in the moment, be present, live my life, follow the deep philosophical entreaties of YOLO and “dude, fuck it.” And I’m not. I’m anxious and obsessed. This makes me decidedly less cool than I used to be. Assuming I was then. Second, it’s so nice outside. The beer gardens are calling me, the wine gardens are calling me, gardens are calling me. And yet I hunch over my computer and work and write.

I press myself forth with the knowledge that in something like 20 hours I’ll be on a flight to Italy, my belt will be loosened and I will reject no beer in the airport. Moreover, this allows me to preach the rules of preparedness to my students. And I do this a lot. So you can imagine how much they love me. “Do your work early and you can relax later.”

The ceremony in Rome, New York was impressive. Fanfare, politicians, locals. Probably a big pair of scissors. Maybe a buffet. They were undertaking a radical proposal, one that Thomas Jefferson called ‘little short of madness’. The same sentiments cast at his radical proposal 42 years earlier. But he was sort of right. They were about to build a 363 mile canal that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. It was America’s first great infrastructure project.

When it was finished eight short horrifying years later, the canal would change everything. It would connect the western interior, make shipping much easier, and open the world to midwestern farm products. It would increase national trade, usher in migration to the West, and cut by half the two-week journey from the Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes. Like an early America version of a lazy river ride, but with fewer dads sipping on cans of Pabst. It was a marvel that would exponentially improve lives and change America.

But for that to happen, someone had to actually build the thing. In the beginning, local farmers and homesteaders dug the canal. But the work was painfully slow and as they moved into the mosquito-rife Montezuma swamps, which exist somewhere between Dante’s fourth and fifth circles of hell, those workers suddenly developed bone spurs. Almost overnight, Irish immigrants were enlisted to take over the digging. Other than locals passing the buck, this change of duty made sense. First, there were loads of Irishmen around. Not only had they been immigrating to America for decades, 1816 was a particularly big year. And they had all come through New York City, where they now lived in great communities adding salted beef to cabbage. They were also in high demand for this kind of work. Irish laborers had built canals, roads, and cities in the French and British isles; they had experience, skills, brawn, and knowhow.

Late June 1348 was probably an ordinary English summer in Melcombe Regis. People were preparing for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, which is the half-year twin of Christmas: exactly 6 months later, summer solstice vs. winter, longest day of the year vs. the shortest, celebrating light instead of preparing for the dark. People made bonfires of different wildflowers and marched through town with banners. Newcomers to town put out tables in front of their homes with beer, cheese, and bread to greet neighbors. Nothing makes friends like cheese and beer.

During the festival, the ties binding the lower classes were purposefully loosened. Peasants and farmers lived a life of constant and endless toil, but if they didn’t piss off God they would spend an eternity in paradise after dying in misery at 38. But on the Feast of St. John, they were allowed to let down their hair, which took form in dancing, feasting, and drinking. This got rowdy, and worried officials watched for riots. Partially relieving tension were violent sports such as mob football, which involved uncounted players trying to carry an inflated pig’s bladder across a marker ‘by any means necessary’. The proceedings led to gouged out eyes, broken limbs, and a death or two. Think MMA, but with less TV coverage and in a Russian gulag.  

As a harbor town, the inhabitants of Melcombe Regis were used to strangers in town. Soldiers, sailors, prostitutes, and their syphilitic counterparts were probably a common sight. So when a couple of ships ported from Gascony on June 20 (or so), nobody would have noticed. It might have been sailors from a spice ship or soldiers returning from the Hundred Years’ War. Soon, however, it became clear that someone had brought something to shore. By June 23 the chronicle of the Franciscan Friars at King’s Lynn recorded that the men of Melcombe who had been infected by the sick seamen were dead, noting it had barely been three days. The Black Plague (aka the Great Mortality or the Great Pestilence) had entered England and would dominate life and society for the next two centuries.

I won’t go into the gory details of the Plague. The gist: everyone died – badly. The long-term effects of the Plague were unprecedented. For starters, there were a lot fewer people. Two million people had died, which equalled 40-50% of Britain, complete towns disappeared. It halted the Hundred Years’ War between France and England; when people were dying at home there was no reason to send them off to die in a foreign country. The Plague also changed the position of the lower class. Since everyone else was dead, the people who were left found they had something novel – bargaining power. Though the gentry tried to quell this newfound position of strength among the peasantry, the power of the market was stronger. Manpower was needed, manpower was scarce, living manpower could charge better wages. It’s estimated that incomes rose 250% from 1300-1450 (and in the U.S. about another $1.25 since then).  

As it’s national candy month, I (like you) have been devoting the last few days to reflecting upon my favorite candy. This is often a private and introspective activity, not unlike sitting in a church and wondering just how you’d ended up there. As I live in Europe, I have to contend with all sorts of American candy bashing, usually under the auspices of ‘it’s too sweet’ which, to me, sounds sort of like ‘gosh I hate fun and enjoyment. Instead of candy, I’d like that bag of nails.’

I thought I’d offer you my list of five favorite candies. I would give you an opportunity to rebut, discuss, or debate, but the fact is that 1. I am right and 2. See number #1. In effect, it is not only a list of my favorite candies, but a list of yours too.

I have

Snickers

Snickers bars are to candy what Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan are to their respective sports. They are often overlooked but only because they’re too good. It’s like leaving God off your dodge-ball team.

Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups

The best day in the history of the Czech Republic was the day they finally woke up to the glories of globalization and welcomed the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup into their store shelves. It is a perfect cup of taste – half peanut butter, half chocolate, all love. Though there have been a number of variations, crunchy, dark chocolate, nothing is better than the original. It’s like coca cola and probably whiskey. There is, however, a special place in hell for the execs who came up with the white chocolate peanut butter cups).The woman who runs the shop across the street knows me as ‘that guy who buys the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on Saturday.  

Admiral Rozhestvensky’s Baltic fleet was originally intended to relieve Port Arthur on the Liadong Peninsula (then Manchuria, nowadays China). But General Anatoly Stessel baffled everyone by surrendering to the Japanese. Instead, they were heading to the only other Russian port in the Far East – Vladivostok. Admiral Tōgō of the Imperial Japanese Navy knew this was where he was going and knew that he would take the dangerous route through the Tsushima Strait. This strip of water lie between the Japanese home islands and the Japanese Naval Base in Korea. He lie in wait. Admiral Rozhestensky had journeyed 33,000 kilometers, a feat which is astounding in the age of coal-driven ships. Japan then proceeded to open a can of naval whoop ass on the Baltic Fleet, two-thirds of which was soon decorating the floor of the ocean. Of the fifty-two ships of the Baltic Fleet, three made it to Vladivostok. Russia was reeling. They had suffered a brutal defeat in Mukden two months before and with Russia suffering internal pressure to end the war, they had no choice but to sue for peace.

Though the Russo-Japanese War was relatively short and is oft-forgotten, it had significant repercussions. As the first major war of the 20^th century, it foretold much of the weaponry, equipment, and tactics of the upcoming Great War. Namely, equipment such as barbed wire, trenches, and machineguns and tactics such as getting out of those trenches and walking directly into the bullets coming from those machineguns. Moreover, by beating Russia in war, Japan became the first Asian army to defeat a Western power. By sinking Rozhestensky’s Baltic Fleet Japan had knocked out its only rival in the East Pacific. The war halted European expansion into East Asia as Japan became the unquestioned military and sea power in East Asia. And the world suddenly stopped being completely European centered as a pole of strength had been added in Asia. And boy will those chickens come home to roost.

When Russia entered into the war, they thought it would be a fast and easy victory. Indeed, on paper, the Japanese should have lost to the Russians. Japan was outmanned and less technologically savvy. Their army was younger. However, the Japanese continuously outmanoeuvred and surprised the Russian army. They also took advantage of various missteps, hesitancies, and mistakes made by Russian high command, Stessel’s handing over of Port Arthur among them. There had been a huge leap in maturity of the Imperial Japanese Army and the professional Japanese soldier between this war and the one that took place ten years before with China. Though there’s also a hint of the samurai culture in Japanese military, the fatalistic “human bullet” approach to frontal assaults that will exemplify the Japanese soldiers of the early campaigns in World War II.  

I find that a lot gets done around my house. Cleaning gets done, emails get written and sent, laundry gets folded, students get responded to, and shopping lists get conducted. The impetus to these things happening is very simple and the same in every case. I put on my workout clothes.   

As part of my never ending quest to not end up looking like a balloon with pants on, I work out five times a week. Not only does it help with that, but it also assuages any guilt I feel about eating bad food or drinking beer.

But before I work out, I stall, I hesitate, I walk around in shorts and a T shirt and find things to do. Though my workouts usually take about 30-35 minutes, I usually block off an hour because I know it takes me so long to get to it.  

One of the exercises I do most often is a little slice of hell called ‘the burpee’. If you’re in a self-loathing mood or your body does something to piss you off, then I suggest doing a few burpees to get back at it. How, you ask?

Stand on the floor with legs shoulder width. Squat down and put your hands palm-down on the floor in front of you. Now kick your legs back so that you’re in a plank position. While you’re in this position, torture yourself by doing a push up. Then bring your legs back so that you’re in the same squat position as before. Stand up and hop into the air. A burpee.

Sometime in April, a fisherman in West Texas happened to catch sight of a strange thing. There in the wetlands was a flamingo. He was standing on one leg just like that guy from Jethro Tull. The man was looking at Pink Floyd, an African flamingo who escaped from the Wichita Zoo in 2005.

Pink Floyd, whose zoo name was a downright unimaginative #492, has been on the run for 17 years and has evidently covered over 700 miles. He escaped with a friend, #347 who is still AWOL and unaccounted for. Along his travels he has made friends and been seen in the company of a Caribbean flamingo who might have been blown off course by a storm back in 2006. But they haven’t been seen together since 2013. Otherwise, Floyd seems to be a loner.

Stories of runaway animals always make me a little leery. For as long as I can remember, they have been part of our urban legend rollcall. As a kid I remember a story about a boy who had come across a baby alligator in Florida on holiday and which he smuggled back to the Bucks County area of the Philadelphia area. His mother found out and of course ordered him to get rid of it. Then, holding a great deal of respect in the boy’s judgment and evidently having never met another teenage boy, she left him to it. He flushed the alligator down the toilet.

That was merely the backstory. The main story was that this alligator was now grown and very sad and pissed off at having been not only discarded but discarded in a toilet. He was now swimming up toilets biting off the pendulous parts of boys’ anatomy in an effort to exact revenge. Forgetting that the alligator was now too big to swim up a toilet, I still spent a few weeks peering into my toilet before using it and then tapping a nervous foot while using it. No alligators ever appeared.

There are similar, though possibly true, stories of people buying tigers and pumas and then tiring of the big cats when they realize the cat A. can destroy their furniture and B. instinctually goes after one’s jugular. Thus the woods and glens of that area get an apex predator that wasn’t meant to be there.

In 1886, the United States was a confusing place. The New World was running away from the Old World. While Industrialization and urbanization created completely different lives for Americans, what had forgotten to keep pace was medicine. So, people suffered from ailments brought on by war, living in cities, and working in factories, but treatments were decidedly 18^th century. This left the field wide open for hucksters and charlatans.

Enter the patent medicine boom. No western movie is complete without a snake oil salesman pitching the cure all benefits of their liniment. These were often pitched as medical panaceas, fixing everything from hemorrhoids to massive depression. The ingredients were often exotic and had names that vexed the mouth. 

Dr Bateman’s Pectoral Drops would cure your chest or lungs, Magician John Hamlin’s Wizard Oil promised ‘There is no Sore it will Not Heal, No Pain it will not Subdue.’ And Daffy’s Elixir would cure you of all your stomach ails. Though many of the patent medicines were made from harmless ingredients that would also do no good, many used a variety of liquors and elicit drugs. Dr. Bateman’s Pectoral Drops wouldn’t fix your chest but it was made of opium, so you didn’t care. No wonder John Hamlin’s Wizard Oil subdued your pains because it was made up of 60-70% alcohol including ammonia and chloroform. The marketing genius here is that you can’t feel any pain if you are blacked out on your bathroom floor. And Daffy’s Elixir would cure your stomach pain until you sobered up from the brandy in it.

The mother of them all was Vin Mariani (French: Mariani wine). This was a coca wine created in the 1860s by Angelo Mariani, a French chemist. Mariani saw the economic potential from adding coca to booze and selling it as medicine. The ethanol in the wine acts as a solvent and extracts the cocaine from the coca leaves. It originally contained 6 mg of cocaine per fluid ounce of wine but Vin Mariani that was to be exported contained 7.2 mg per ounce in order to compete with the higher cocaine content of similar drinks in the United States. Advertisements for Vin Mariani claimed (almost certainly accurately) that it would restore health, strength, energy and vitality. Which might be the exact nouns one might use to explain the effects of taking cocaine while drinking before they ran off to do some jumping jacks and hit the bathroom again. Not surprisingly, It was ridiculously popular. Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, the Pope, and the Rabbi all adored it, teaming up some very random people. 

I walked into the kitchen last week in search of candy. It was a Sunday and I had convinced myself that since Sunday was the day reserved by many to praise deities, I could have candy. In the kitchen, Burke was aiming her phone at a package of ham.

“Are you taking a picture of the ham?”

“Hm?”

“Is the ham doing something interesting?”

“No…I’m scanning the calories.”

Against all my instincts, I asked for an explanation. And then I got one.

It seems that the not-getting-fat or the getting-less-fat people are the target market of lots of apps. There are apps to motivate you to eat better, to motivate you to eat less, to motivate you to eat nothing. Many of these apps are meant to deter your appetite. For an app to be successful in doing this with me, it would have to turn into a cheeseburger and stuff itself into my throat. The app Burke had found works on the premise of counting calories. This is a sadist’s app. So, let’s say one buys a packet of Oreos at the store. He is joyous, for he has bought Oreos and they are a solid part of his immediate future plans. And then, somewhere in between buying the Oreos and devouring the Oreos, he decides that what would really make the Oreos enjoyable would be knowing exactly how many calories eating them would transmute to him. He can then open this app on his phone, aim the phone at the Oreo barcode, scan it, and then instantly learn that by eating the Oreos, he will be fulfilling his caloric intake for the next 27 days.

Over the following week, Burke used it for everything. Everything. She became a font of information, all of it bad. The very number of calories in anything will make you recoil in terror, an action whose only benefit is that it burns about 4 calories. Everything became tainted with numerical information. I stopped seeing food and started seeing calories. A whole wheat wrap no longer was a tasty way to bring chicken to my mouth, it was now 320 calories. Hummus was no longer a salty part of my lunch, it was 180 calories. A beer was no longer a tasty way to forget my week, it was now 280 calories that I might as well tape to my ass.

There are some of you out there who will argue that before I ever knew about this secret world of ‘calories’ they still existed. You might say with annoyance that I just didn’t realize exactly how much everything I put in my mouth was uploading fat into my system. You might then put your hand on my padded knee and say words of encouragement to the effect of ‘knowledge is power’ and ‘being armed with information is a huge help.’ To you people, I say go eat a few spoonfuls of Nutella and then look at the calorie count. If you don’t shriek in horror, I’ll be impressed.