I realized at an early age my general incapacity towards taking care of other living beings. Growing up, I was unable to keep a hamster alive. Not one particular hamster who dined on roast beef and smoked Marlboro Reds. Any hamster who ended up in the cage in my room met his end in under a few days. I didn’t do anything bad to them, I was no goon or budding sociopath, It was evidently the sight of me that keeled them over. Hamsters everywhere were sent to me to die. I was the Florida of hamsters.

Not that this stopped me from trying to own animals. There was a pond near our house, where I would try to collect fish and frogs for my homemade terrarium or aquarium. Not possessing the first idea how to take care of a pond animal – we didn’t have the internet then, so researching things like this took more than 3 seconds – these animals would go on to their great chum block in the sky very quickly. I soon stopped trying to collect these animals as I wanted nothing to do with hurting them. Not that it mattered, as it became clear that the clarion call was out on me at the pond, and upon my arrival it would go dead silent as all the pond life would go deep, dummy up, or play dead to avoid interacting with me. I took the hint and stuck to feeding bread to the ducks, who kept one eye on the bread and the other eye on me.

Later on, we got a golden retriever. His time with us was very brief. He was too big and too wild and my dad had (i.e. has) the patience of an SS guard with a bad hangover and a hemorrhoid the size of a table lamp. There were four kids in our house, and not a day went by that one of us wasn’t bleeding, lost in the woods somewhere, or bashing his or a sibling’s face into a wall in the name of cartoon scientific research. If Tom and Jerry can do it … Neither ADHD medication nor medical marijuana had yet to reach the mass market, so my mother spent a lot of time in the middle of the Battle of Little Big Horn wondering what exactly she had done to deserve this. Yet, for some reason, my dad decided that what my mother needed was a large, energetic dog who needed to be walked and entertained roughly 140 hours a day. This dog’s time with us was brief. I believe we gave him to a man who had 16 kids and hunted turkeys for a living.

As part of my family’s plan to keep my blood pressure at the near-explode level, one of them visits me from time to time. Now, I love my family and it’s always a great visit. But when family visits, I find that I end up doing things I wouldn’t normally do. And since I have a relationship with my comfort zone that doesn’t veer far from uterine it can be mildly trying. I knew this before my brother came to visit, and yet, like when one beer descends into two and then three and then six, I just let it happen.

And thus, it came to pass that on a Saturday morning in the earliest part of March I was standing at the base of a cable car on the outskirts of Salzburg looking up into an Alp. This is almost totally true. I was in Salzburg and at the basecamp of a cable car ride, but while I was looking up into an Alp, extreme fog meant I was looking at two cables disappearing into a cloud. I could nor for the life of me understand why they would run telephone wires in the same area as a cable car. I noted this aloud.  

“Look at those telephone wires. What are they doing there?” Subtext: what are they doing there in the place where a vast mechanism to carry a two-ton cable car and its inhabitants should be?

My brother was lost in his own curious horrification. So when he said “they just don’t look like enough to carry a cable car” he wasn’t answering me, he was saying the same thing in a different, equally horrific, way. Our realization was simultaneous and tumultuous. Those cables are carrying us up a mountain. Correction: not up a mountain, above a mountain.

My brother was adamant. He wanted to take a cable car into the Alps. He said, “We’re in the Alps, we have to do this.” My feelings on the subject were far less certain or rather, were certain, but in the opposite direction. I figured I had time to talk some sense to him, but had forgotten, and the next thing I knew I was in line for the cable car at 9:58 am and the cable car’s departure up was at 10:00 am. And then we left. Just like that.

We are with 10 other people – I counted people and calculated weight. They were all Asian and had smaller builds and it became radically clear very quickly that if anyone’s weight was going to disrupt this journey, it was going to by mine and my companions. Nevertheless, our travel partners didn’t seem in the slightest perturbed by events. Neither did the cable car operator.

He got on the cable car, sat in a little slot and pushed a button. The doors slid closed. Everything seemed professional. Once we were moving, he took out a book and started reading. I marvelled at this man’s opportunities for humor each day of his life. After he locks the door and we take off, what’s to stop him from taking out his phone and having a loud one-sided conversation about his colon cancer diagnosis or the stocks and shares that have rendered him broke as a joke, or the wife who is leaving him for the neighbor and taking the kids. What’s to stop him from making like how whole world just crashed around him and he has nothing to live for? I guess, integrity. But still.

It takes ten seconds for us to realize this was a mistake. This is pointed out by my brother (adamant about this trip) and it is seconded and then mentioned almost constantly by me. The trip takes 13 minutes. During this thirteen-minute-period we disappear into a cloud. When we come out of the cloud, we are charging towards a mountain.

When Howard Carter opened up King Tut’s tomb, he found board games, a trumpet, a wardrobe, and underwear with his name embroidered into it (word has it that thugs in the afterlife will steal your undies). He also found jars of, well, Tut, food, and booze. Wine, both red and white. All of these things were meant to accompany and assist Tut on his long journey into the afterlife. I only hope they left him a few Advil and a tube of Pringles.

An old Polka song explains, ‘In Heaven there is no beer, that’s why we drink it here.’ Aside from being a brilliant argument to one’s soberer family members for sipping on earthly nectars, this sentiment does seem to brush up against the thinking of ancient cultures.

Alcohol is commonplace at ancient tombs and death rites. The Sumerians believed that their dead went to a dark and dusty cave called Kur, where they wallowed in terrible thirst for eternity. To quench this thirst, Sumerians poured libations into the ground. Akin to how we ‘pour one out for a homie’ the Sumerians took it more literally and put clay tubes into the ground and poured beer through to their ancestors. This tradition carried over to the Greeks and Romans. Everyone in Hades was confused, thirsty, and irritable. They passed the time playing games that their relatives had put in their tombs. The Greeks would thus pour drinks into the dirt to refresh their friends and loved ones in the afterlife. This was no doubt appreciated by the Greeks whose relatives had left them with Monopoly.    

In ancient China, people were buried with beer so they could still have a drink in the afterlife. These days, on Tomb Sweeping Day, a communal day of cemetery upkeep that takes place more often than I clean my kitchen, custom states that people bring their relatives beer. That is, of course, unless they went to Diyu, a hellish maze of death and torture that bad people go to (like our hell or the DMV). They don’t get beer. In fact, they get eviscerated, decapitated, mauled by tigers, and set afire until their bodies dissipate. But don’t worry, they regenerate in to their original physical form so they can go through the maze again. Sort of like the worst video game ever.

The Chinese are not the only to juxtapose alcohol in the afterlife to death. Vikings who die gloriously in battle went to Valhalla, an eternal beerhall where the honorable dead drink mead for eternity from the golden udders of a goat named Heiðrún. Hopefully part of the entrance fee isn’t pronouncing the golden-uddered goat’s name correctly. Those who don’t die gloriously in battle – not bad people, mind you, but just didn’t die in battle – go to a place called Hel. Yeah. You might know this one. It’s a dark, cold, miserable place where there is exactly, yep, no beer and no mead. No word on whether Valhalla revelers get a night in Hel now and again just for a quiet place to sleep it off. I have a feeling these questions weren’t asked much in Viking culture.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but the world’s in a pretty ugly place at the moment. Yes, I know that 1000 years ago you could die from a hangnail. Yes, I know that 600 years ago you could get strung up in France for having red hair. Yes, I know that if you were a woman 400 years ago in New England who had an eerie skill like the ability to do math, you would be accused of being a witch and crushed under some rocks. And yes, I realize that fifty years ago people had to listen to disco music on a daily basis.

I get it, the world has always been a bad place.

Disco music.

Shudder.

But if you’re a normal Schmoe it’s hard to feel optimistic these days. See, much of the decisions made on the planet are being made by assholes. Assholes. And, further, it seems that a great deal of the motivation for making the decisions they’re making is to be an asshole. This doesn’t really jibe with my whole life philosophy of ‘please don’t be an asshole’. Or, at least, don’t be an asshole to others.

Oh, I’ve been an asshole. Epically. And I’ve even been an asshole just to be an asshole. But when I was finished being an asshole, thousands of people weren’t out of a job because I was an asshole, whole countries weren’t less safe because I was an asshole, the sovereignty of peaceful neighbors wasn’t in question because I felt the unquenchable need to assert my assholeitude. My gay friends weren’t in physical danger because I felt like being an asshole. And if you say anything, the assholes that support the assholes say things like ‘Well, if you don’t like it, why don’t you just leave!?’

But I have experience being an asshole. See, was an asshole. Then I stopped being an asshole. Then I felt bad about being an asshole. Really bad. And in the end, I vowed to be an asshole less often because being an asshole is no way to go through life – it eats away at the asshole and those in the proximity of the asshole. If you keep being an asshole, then at the end you are nothing but an asshole. And nobody wants to sit on the bus next to an asshole. Nobody.

I don’t sleep well anymore. I get overheated easily and I now share my bed with a dog who has found the most comfortable bed in the whole house is between my legs. What physical discomfort can’t do to keep me awake is taken up by my brain. Right when it’s time to shut off for the night, I list the next day’s work, think about someone I wronged in the third grade, or wonder how many frogs are in North America.

Sunday night, along with making mental notes to email Kate Breslin and look up frog census numbers on Wikipedia, there’s also a football game. In fact, it’s the Superbowl. Now I’m not going to pretend to be a diehard football fan, but I do love my Eagles in a lateral I-live-across-the-world kind of way.

I’d gladly watch football every Sunday, a thing I did more or less religiously when I lived in the U.S. if for no other reason than that’s what all my friends were doing. But football for me is now on at 8 o’clock or 10 o’clock. Nevertheless, when I get a chance, I watch the Eagles play just like I sometimes rouse at 1 am during the spring and watch the Phillies play.

However, I noted an interesting detail this last year – when I did not watch the Philadelphia Eagles play football, they won. When I watched them, they lost. This clear case of post hoc ergo propter hoc is unavoidable to any Philly sport fan. Like many sports fans, Philly sports fans are absurdly superstitious. If the Eagles win when you shave and lose when you don’t, you shave. If the Flyers win when you popo twice in the morning and lose when you poop once, you take an extra one for the team. And you keep doing these things until the experiment proves incorrect. Now, science, the laws of probability, enough academic study to fill a stadium, and the logic of the universe tells us all that we – as fans – do not in any way influence professional sporting games. Except we Philly fans totally influence games. So, because I love my hometown, I stopped watching the Eagles in October and would only follow along on ESPN’s live game updates. It is very clear to me that this Superbowl victory is due to my heroic self-neglect.    

My personal damage to Philly sports aside, one thing I do miss living abroad is watching sports. Sure, I can tune in to a Phillies game or an Eagles game. And as long as I can get the game, who cares about the environment I watch it in. I more or less recreate an American living room in my house, after all.

But it’s not the same. What, after all, can make up for a Sunday afternoon football game with bad seasonal commercials to take up the space during a half’s 26 timeouts. Hoagies and beers, the community shouts coming from the houses on your street. The pizza guy asking if the kicker shanked the field goal and getting a full descriptive playback. Same with baseball. I can listen to or watch a game in July. But if the neighbors don’t understand why I’m shouting ‘swing the fucking bat’, then it’s just not the same. Nor is the same as when your city’s team is in the Superbowl and the whole city wordlessly agrees to give each other a hall pass the next day.   

As I awoke this morning, the first thing I noted was the profound lack of messages. Nothing from Facebook. Not a slurred congrats from my brother, not a message from my mom followed by roughly 700 emoticons and 400 exclamation points. Nothing. My heart lurched. Surely this meant that things had gone south. Last I checked we were up by 17. And either coming back and winning from a 17-point deficit was almost as peculiarly Philadelphia as blowing a 17-point lead. I gritted my teeth.

My fears were alleviated moments later. We had won it. Amazingly, we had blown them out. My brother sent me a picture of him and our friends wearing boozy red faces. I am sad to have not been involved, but enormously happy. So happy, in fact, that I have given myself a hall pass for tomorrow. I’ll go to a bar tonight and cheers them on: Fly Eagles Fly!    

King Charles I had been found guilty of high treason, tyranny, and defeat and betrayal. He was sentenced to death, his execution to take place on January 30 1649. He spent most of that day with his kids and his most trusted companion, William Juxon. Juxon convinced the king to have a piece of bread and drink a glass of claret before the big event.

Charles asked for an extra shirt and, according to some, had a posset (a hot milk-based drink mixed with wine, ale, or spices). This was to avoid shivering from the cold – a reaction that he didn’t want mistaken with quaking in fear. At 2 pm, he walked the gauntlet through masses of belligerent people who had been drinking since morning. Beer and alcohol vendors had kept them well-lubed. The King was almost certainly pelted a few times with rubbish or bad fruit as he made his final walk. He laid his head on the block and the executioner took his head off with one clean blow. He then raised it up and bypassed the words ‘behold the head of a traitor’ because he didn’t want to be recognized. He was wearing a hood and a mask.

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Executioners in early Europe existed as outcasts and often lived outside of town, consorting with lepers and prostitutes. They often doubled as torturers in their off-time, so they were feared and reviled. And the methods of execution they carried out were not for the weak-stomached – literally. Most of the condemned were hanged, nobles and royalty were granted beheadings, but if you were particularly disagreeable, you were drawn, hanged, and quartered. This consisted of being dragged to the site on a hurdle, then hanged – but not until death. You were cut down, disemboweled, castrated, and cut into four pieces. Your head was put up on a spike.

So you can say that executioners had some job-related tension. And that’s before they actually had to do it. Separating a head from a body with one blow with a heavy axe is not exactly easy. Let’s take into account the person isn’t sleeping, there are 150 drunk people watching, oh, and you were probably really drunk. Because executioners drank. They had bad jobs, they were outcasts, and, if they screwed up, a very drunken crowd would boo them, throw trash at them, or, if it really went off the rails, demand that your head get snipped off. So yeah, they drank.

Every month I write texts for a few different companies. I send them out, they send feedback that requires rewrites – e.g. about level too-high/low, too long, too short, vague wording.

I read these emails and feedback, send a string of violent curses into my ceiling, bemoan my terrible writing skills, cry a little, and then, when I come back down to the form and blood pressure of a human adult, I realize that the feedback is fully warranted and I set out rewriting. Then I have a drink, the size of which would include the word ‘Blaster’ or ‘Gulp’ had I bought it at a 7-11.

But a few months ago, I received an email regarding feedback that hit different. As I scanned the email, I caught words that confused me. Unacceptable. Unsuitable content. Need to be changed.

This was new. Yikes.

The materials are for late teen kids and I went into a panic that somehow an alter-ego form of me had taken over and sent in a text about the Kama Sutra or a bio and technique guide of the Marquis de Sade. I slumped back into a gathering pool of flop sweat and foresaw my name in emails to HR and then ending up on the internet. Dear God. This is where it starts. Before that, I looked back at the email: . . . about war . . . about death . . .

My Dog, what had I done? With adrenalin-shaky fingers, I opened the accursed files.

Poe. As in, Edgar Allen. I had written a bio of him and a paragraph dealt with his suspicious death. Another text was about the Emu War of Australia. This was a good old romp in the 1930s when the Aussies brought in the army to kill emus who were damaging farmland and fences. They were 100% unsuccessful. Try though they did to kill the emus, since the emus were so fast and had a preternatural tactical talent for avoidance, the army trucks zigzagged, crashed into each other, and looked like the Keystone cops wearing gillies. It was a humiliating experience for them globally. Humor, I thought. War, they said.

It’s a mid-afternoon class on Tuesday. After ten minutes, students are trickling in and I am marking off their names on the attendance list while imagining them being eaten by a giant aardvark named Ted who punishes late students in my brain.

And then I make a mistake. I make a joke.

See, I’m a relatively funny chap. People spend an awful lot of time either laughing with or at me, a distinction whose blurred lines I’ve grown increasingly unconcerned with. In class, if there’s a good laugh every 20 minutes or so, it goes a long way to release any tension or stress and the room’s stock of will to live and lack of interest in stabbing me is replenished.

The students in this class are very high level. That means my jokes can be linguistically complex and sophisticated. Phrasal verbs, metaphors, implied subtleties are all on the table. In fact, these students never cease to amaze me with the depth of their knowledge. I made a tramp stamp joke a week ago and saw a roomful of smirks.

The problem is, I sometimes forget that the students are 20-years-old and a lot has changed in the last 30 years. And, you see, the joke I made was about Led Zeppelin. Complicating matters is the fact that I included the word ‘album’. After my joke, 18 heads titled slightly to the right as they tried to understand what I was saying, the way my dog does when I say ‘do you want a hotdog?’ She knows it’s something she should know, but she just can’t pin it together.

Like the students. Album is a word they are familiar with. It’s used in an online context too, but less so for music. A music album to them is a mixed-up collocation, like if I told you I had bought a nosebrush instead of a tooth brush. Somewhere in the haze built of TikTok and watching other people play video games, they can imagine the concept, but they just can’t nail it down.

I explain that an album was a cohesive work of musical art. They say they know this, for they are not stupid. I relent a little. But I point out that with almost all the music in the world available at their fingertip, they surely can’t understand the joy of buying one album at a time. To this, they squint and scoff, but after that, they lean forward in a muted interest.

“One at a time, you say?”

“Yeah.”

I go on to explain that all these albums they have I had to buy one at a time. The White Album. Wildflowers. Born to Run. They counter with something called ‘curating a vibe’ on Spotify. They basically sequester all of their emotional needs into one playlist. Titles include: Monday Sad, Side Quest (a side quest is now anything that isn’t evidently a main quest, such as going to the pharmacy for band aids, but I don’t think you carry a sword), Bumping (I didn’t ask), Travelling Home.

Getting old is fun. Sure, there are days when parts of your body decide not to work. Your intestines are willy nilly about their ability to digest certain foods and products. And the new game in your life becomes ‘let’s see if I can remember that guy’s name before I have to look on Wikipedia’.

Spoiler alert: I can’t.

But one thing that comes around is your knowledge of yourself. Does this sound cliché? It most certainly does. It’s right up there on the cliché Hit Parade with ‘be true to yourself’ or some other mishigas about success.

If there’s one thing I love it’s a good notebook. My visit to Japan was almost cut short because I was ready and willing to hand over my entire bank account at a Kyoto stationary store. I would have saved enough just for an extra piece of luggage to carry home all of my new notebooks. My friend Mark is the only reason this eventuality didn’t come to pass. We went on to another week of exhilarating travel marred only by the fact that I was in possession of only two notebooks and I had brought them from Europe.

When I was forced to leave behind that shop, I convinced myself that there would be other stationary shops with those notebooks. But there were not. No matter how hard or where I looked or what I googled, there were no more notebooks like those. Those notebooks are being used by someone else – probably a Japanese guy, whose lifetime spent enjoying boundless and sleek efficiency won’t allow him to fully appreciate the notebooks. I hate him.   

It was that sad state of affairs, the cliché that came before it, and about six tumblers of Irish whiskey that propelled me last Friday night as I careened towards the end of an online purchase. Seems the powers that be have made stationary rather accessible on the internet. It’s all right there and you can buy it too with virtually no supervision and no governmental regulatory policy.

But I had come across the motherlode. Slick paperback notebooks, size B6.5 – just perfect for a jacket pocket. They have a flap. A flap! With magnetics! A magnetic flap that locks the notebook shut and keeps all your secrets and laundry lists. I mean, I’m only human. A human whose intestines don’t like pods anymore. A human whose slippery memory requires the use of a notebook. And not just a notebook, 46 euros-worth of that notebook.

I had to justify it in the end. 46 euros after all is 36 euros more than 10 euros. And it’s on notebooks. I began justifying – I would use them, they would bring me joy, I wouldn’t go out for a week or so. But then I had another Irish whiskey and that jolted out a reminder: I am old. I can do what I want. So I hit click and today I received a box that contained 46 euros of notebooks and I have almost literally never been happier than at the moment I opened the box and gazed in at 46 euros of notebooks and realized they were all mine. And I was reminded of something that was said by someone in some movie and I tried to remember who it was but in the end I looked at Wikipedia and then I cracked open my first of the 46 euro stash of notebooks and I wrote down that name and now I won’t ever forget it and the notebooks have done their job. And that is what we call full circle, my friends.

Josh Brolin.