Every month, the editors of the kids’ magazines write to me and ask for pitches. I go through my mental rolodex of neato things I’d like to write about. And, since I am essentially a twelve-year-old in a slightly taller, defiantly chubbier, and a vastly achier body, this is great fun. Weird history, horror, our cool and scary planet, and the unbelievably cool things scientists are doing.

It’s a great job.

And so it is that I am writing about vampires and zombies. Research takes me deep into the topic, as it should. The facts have to be straight, correct, and relevant. This means digging deep, finding several sources for a single fact, and oftentimes being frustrated when something really cool ends up being fake or apocryphal. It also brings me down a rabbit hole of interesting and – sometimes – terrifying facts.

In my research on vampires this week, I have found that many vampire scares throughout history have been a result of bad verification of death, or misunderstanding illnesses and the process of decomposition. The third one wasn’t so bad. I mean, sure, witnessing the exhumation of your recently deceased sister by a band of literally-pitchfork-wielding locals, then watching her heart getting torn out of her chest, burned, and then fed to you, is probably something you’d be working out with a therapist the rest of your life (if the heart ashes didn’t kill you). But at least you could always go back to the fact that 1. she was (hopefully) already dead, 2. at least she wasn’t an actual vampire, and 3. this gives you a pretty solid excuse for rampant alcoholism.  

But it’s more brutal in the first and second cases. The two leading illnesses confused for vampirism were porphyria and tuberculosis. Porphyria is a blood disease that makes your gums shrink, your body sensitive to light, and thus your skin pale. Not only does this make it clear why these poor people were confused for vampires, but drinking blood relieved the symptoms of this illness. So, try to explain your way out of that one to a band of crazed and terrified locals who drink alcohol all day because it’s healthier than your water system. Tough gig.

Tuberculosis was another. This joyful little attack on your body involved coughing out your lungs so hard that it scarred your ribs. This coupled with the vast amounts of weight you lost and the attending withdrawn features procured as you coughed your way to a harrowing death. On top of this, people were kicking in your door and claiming you were a son of the devil. And the third manner was a little nightmare known as being buried alive. Since the methodology for checking whether a person was alive or dead was to shout insults about your mother at you and seeing if you reacted, it happened sometimes that a person was put in the ground before he had had a chance to actually perish. Villagers would later dig them up and note the desperate scratches on the inside of the coffin and movement of the corpse and determine that they couldn’t have been wrong – the person had been dead, but had sprung back to life in the coffin. Sure. Thus, they were besmirched throughout the village as vampires. This, my dear readers, is the clearest case of insult to injury that I have heard today.

Like many of you, I am a very busy person. I have a job, then another job, and most months two other jobs that allow me to go out and see other people. Most of the time I can juggle these things and retain my sanity. However, sometimes I get caught up in a perfect storm of work and life and it makes me want to climb out onto my balcony, cover myself in bird seed, and just let the pigeons take me alive.

This perfect storm was brought to me by a bimonthly test writing job, a number of edits, and then a spontaneous decision I made when I may or may not have been mildly intoxicated (read: shitfaced). It seems that there’s this little Swedish place in town that sells furniture (I retract all names as I don’t want the poor devils’ overrun with curious furniture lovers). Burke noted the price of a couch and the fact that the price was such that I wouldn’t have to sell one of my kidneys to procure it. This, naturally, garnered my attention and in a moment of haste marked by being done with my day’s work and holding an Oreo cookie at the same time, I said yes. Burke went and tested out this couch and reported back favorably. We had a decision to make. And I made it when I was slightly tipsier than Keith Richards in 1974.

Thought excited, I almost immediately began experiencing doubt. First of all, a lot of money had just sprinted from my account. Second, this decision meant an immediate response, not a delayed one like I love so much. As there is nothing better than putting into play something that won’t affect you for a while. But no, a couch wasn’t coming next month or in September, it was coming Saturday and it was Wednesday. This meant plans had to be made and things organized. There was not a blank spot in our living room, but an existing couch. This meant moving that couch (aka the bouch) out of the house before new couch (Joanna) could be brought in. I had to do this, but more significantly, it meant saying goodbye to the bouch.      

For the past six years, our living room life has revolved around the bouch. So-called because of its ability to transform from a couch into a bed, he acted for us as both over the last years. He graced our living room like a beloved uncle who had seen better days. His left arm was teetering, it was crusted over in cat hair, and to lie on the bouch for a day watching TV meant incurring spina bifida. He was big and old and clunky, too hard to move to sweep beneath, so there were colonies of papers, dust, and titbits under his belly.    

The sun is up and Burke and I head out to the park near our house. Maisy is in fine fettle, running and stopping short. She stops to smell urine wherever we go. I’d like to talk to her about this, but she ignores me. We cross the road to the other side of the tracks. The part of our neighborhood that we wouldn’t let the dog go smell pee on her own. The rundown shacks and the boarded-up shops.

We tried to go to a pub there once and were greeted with the same welcoming attitude as Clint Eastwood does in ever Western he’s ever been in. Hands went to holsters. Bartenders gasped. But today we walk past those dim locales, for we are on a pilgrimage. The goal: 2006.

If you are Czech or have been around el Praha for a couple of decades, then you have probably noticed that beer has risen about 125%. Oh, there are some things which have made life easier. Peanut butter is everywhere. Pizza is edible. They deliver food now, even though you can tell it kills them to make things more accessible and convenient.

But with great convenience and change comes gentrification and culture-killing uniformity. You can’t swing a dead cat around without hitting a sushi hut or a Vietnamese place where one can not only get Pho, but have your pronunciation of said meal denigrated outside the place by a white guy wearing a skull cap in August. Yes. Civilization.

In the last year or so, I have made some headway into the world of speaking Czech. Oh, I have ‘spoken’ Czech for years, but recently I have been studying the actual language, and, you know, the words and grammar that make it sensible to other people who speak that language. So, while I am still about as fluent as a pineapple melting in the sun, now that pineapple can use the right case to speak of its misery.

We meet at the university once a week. My teacher is an extraordinarily patient woman who balances that patience along with a strictness that is appreciated and yet not terrifying. If awards were given for things such as ‘she resists the urge to beat the student with the coursebook even though he forgot the dative again’ then her wall would be littered with their corresponding ribbons. She is tough and nice, she is as obsessive as I am. So I genuinely feel bad about the weekly torture to which I subject her as I mangle her language right there in front of her, as if we’re in the end stages of a Korean game show.

Part of my evil plan to avoid motorized scooters for as long as possible includes working out. Now, like many of you, I believe that my natural habitat is the butt groove I have created on my couch or propped up against my headboard reading a book surrounded by small fuzzy animals. However, my doctor assures me that should I not also do some exercises most days, then someone will be spoon feeding me steaks for the rest of my life. So, I relented and started working out. And since I am a creature of habit (no, thank you, OCD!), when I took up regular exercise about ten years ago, I have not been able to stop. That and cleaning before bed. Again, OCD, you’re a real mensch.  

I am a child of the 80s. When I was young, we played sports like baseball and football. Sure, there were some sophisticated kids in my neighborhood doing tennis or soccer or something else that’s mind numbingly boring, but I am part of the Little League generation. You want to get fit, active, and make friends? Put on polyester tights, yank a pair of cleats on, and put on a foam trucker’s cap that looked as if you were wearing a mailbox on your head. Then go out in 96-degree weather for 3 hours and play.

But as we grew up and wanted to stay active, baseball and football weren’t always an option. For one thing, finding 17 other people to play a sport wasn’t always easy. So, we ran. Had you gained some weight in the 1990s, you were told to eat only one sandwich a day (with Wonder Bread) and to go running. Getting older running was the thing. You wanted to lose a notch on your belt, go running. You needed to train off-season for rugby, go running. You were stressed, go running.

But I don’t like running. Oh I tricked myself pretty solidly into thinking I liked it for a while. It clears my head. I feel better after. Lies both. When I am stepping out of my house to go for a walk, I am elated. Whenever I was stepping out to go for a run, I was miserable. To boot, it never did anything for me. Aside from hating the world and all its inhabitants. Then there’s ‘the gym’. A concept I could never get. My first experience with a gym was in off-season high school football training sessions where other (much larger) guys were picking up heavy things on bars and putting them down again and then shouting at and hitting each other as if they’d caught the other guy lifting a tenner from his wallet. I would stand in the corner and stare at them both wondering of this strange alchemy and hoping to all deities everywhere that nobody would notice I was only doing pushups and doing stretching. Nobody did. Gyms never took for me even later. I know it’s a subculture that people enjoy or a time away from home. That I get. But I have never found the urge to leave my house to wait for exercise equipment with a bunch of sweaty people.

No, I go for HIIT workouts. The benefits of HIIT workouts are multiheaded. First, the biggie, is that you can do it in your home, in front of your TV, a few feet from your kitchen where your water and food live. Second, rarely is there an audience to my self-inflicted torture – except for the dog and the cat. The cat doesn’t care. The dog likes licking sweat off my face. And it’s near my couch, so if (read: when) my body gives out and I need to lie down and reacquaint myself with the numbers for emergency services, I have a comfortable place to do just that.

On Friday, we took the dog out for a walk. It was nice, a little rainy, and a good day to walk the dog around until she got tired and then we’d aim ourselves to the closest pub. But since we had dinner-at-home plans that would likely not come to fruition were we blasted, we chose the fountain.

The Fountain is a little place in the park. It’s perfect for a drink that you don’t want to develop into several drinks and then two nightcaps at home. They have .4 sized beers, yet (like most places these days) have bolstered that missing traditional .1 of beer by making it more expensive than my first car. Burke gets us beers and I bring her to the hut next door where there are a few tables and chairs and it more or less resembles a place near a campsite. I like it, because I feel like we are roughing it in the wild, rather than having a drink 370 feet from our balcony.

When Burke comes back, the dog (I notice) tenses up and stares at the door – whose surfaces are plastic sheeting held within a frame of wood blocks. When she closes it, the door lightly slams with the slap and zing that anyone who has a screen door is quite familiar with.

It takes us a moment to realize that the dog is staring at the door shivering. Since she’s my best dog-buddy and I have long stopped caring what people in public think of me, I pick her up and rub her back. But she’s not cold. She hates the door. Anytime someone comes in and the door closes, she jolts as if she’s being flogged. She does her weird Shih tzu sing song plea thing that she does when she wants food, to be chased, or food. I pick up the hint and take her for a walk to calm her skittishness. Outside, she’s a whole new dog. She’s happy and relaxed now. She runs, jumps, buries her face in holes, and pees with the freedom of a young Hunter S Thompson. After a circuit, we go back to the hut – which she will not enter. She hunkers down and remains resistant. The walls are clear plastic, so I motion to Burke that the dog won’t go in.

It’s a Tuesday evening, we have a free day tomorrow. My plan was to get home, slip into pjs and watch the antics of Phil Dunphey and family. However, one of my colleagues mentioned something about a pub (he didn’t suggest a pub, he might have just said the word ‘pub’ and it’s possible it wasn’t even that. He might have said ‘how hard is it to get pub-lished?’ or a more likely ‘say, what are you doing tonight?’

In any event, I ended up at a pub enjoying a beer and the occasional shot that joins it like a sidecar. It is Tuesday, after all, and we have off tomorrow to boot. Beer is allowed. We have many drinks and then it is decided that we move forth to another place. I am eager for the journey as it will A. bring me to another pub, which is B. closer to my house. But alas, there is an issue. Between Pub 1 and Pub the second, there is a place in which one may purchase goods and products for eating and drinking and mish mash in between. We call this place a grocery store.

I have a problem. I admit this. I do not sit at home and order hippo statues I see on late night commercial programming. No. I also don’t have an Amazon problem (like some people who shall remain nameless, but who rented out my mother’s uterus after I had moved out). I also don’t have the many problems associated with drinking too much. I drink once a week as this is all that my almost 50 body and psyche can manage without funding. And on those days, I don’t go pick fights, forget to pay for things, or drive.

My problem is drunken shopping. Or even tipsy shopping. The problem is, we sometimes go to the pub and then I go get food for dinner. Burke waits at the pub for me with the dog just wondering what it is I’m going to come back with that we absolutely do not need. In the past those things have included: a stickless pan, oven mitts, a tool box, a welcome mat (in German. I thought it would be funny.), two lanterns (two different trips), a garlic press that has never and will never work, and the world’s most useless vegetable chopper.

Technology seems to really enjoy talking to me. My computer, tablet, and phone all have running dialogues with me.

The latest is my smartwatch, which skips no opportunity to chat me up. You Are Walking! Good job! Now, I’m all for being acknowledged for a job well done, but I think the last time someone congratulated me for walking was when I was two. I take the good with the bad as when I stop walking he notifies me of that too. You Are Done Walking. Note the absence of exclamation point and the mildly judgmental tone as he notifies me that I am no longer being active.

I know that my computer and watch are just warming up the lines of communication that will be used in our future. No doubt they will be more vocal as we move towards the rise of the machines. I imagine they will be finding all sorts of reasons to talk to me later on. I would imagine the tone might be more authoritarian then, but I like to think that they will remember with fondness the days when they were just telling me about updates and my successes with walking.

Should the rise of the machines come, I do hope it is led by the copy machine at my office. For this machine is the stupidest and most inept machine I have ever come across. I make this wish at me own peril, for if this machine is at the head of things when shit goes down, then I am surely a dead man. The things I have said to this machine should be received by no human, even if that human is a machine.

Deepl will be a bit confused about me. In order to ascertain the correct grammar in Czech I have to add addendums to basic statements. I will bring the package tomorrow and I am a man. Or I was there last Tuesday on the same day that I had a penis. Deepl translates the phrases for me but I always sense a little judgment. It’s as if Deepl wonders why I have to promote my own manhood so much. In today’s day and age it does come from one with a tin ear. Nevertheless, I do feel Deepl supports me and my direction in life, no matter who I might be when I find it.

Oh, I get it. Technology gets smarter and smarter and soon they will take over. Pretty soon every Tom, Dick, and Harry (who is a man!) who ever mistreated technology in a fit of rage will be tracked down by parking meters and stomped by disgruntled microwaves. But not me! No, I am very kind to my technology and apps. My requests to ChatGPT read like Hallmark cards. Aside from the copy machine, I should be in the clear. Can you say the same? And are you done walking?

It seems that the cards were against Charles VI of France from the start. He inherited the throne at 11 along with the Hundred Years’ War. He inherited a rivalry with the House of Orleans and House of Burgundy and Philip the Bold. For his part, Charles started out with the name Charles the Beloved. He’d die as Charles the Mad.  

But it was on a military expedition in 1392 when things went sideways for Charles the Beloved. The expedition had been taken up to avenge the attempted murder of a friend and it had been recommended against by his advisers. Nevertheless, they set of to Brittany in June. Tromping through a forest near Le Mans, Charles and his horse were accosted by a barefoot leper. Of all the bad omens to befall a person, lepers who can’t afford shoes are among the worst. The leper begged the king to stop his expedition and go home, saying that he had been ‘betrayed.’

Like many of you, I too follow a strict rule of heeding warnings by a guy whose face is falling off. You have to assume he’s made some mistakes in his life. Nevertheless, Charles didn’t listen. And I do get it. If the president was told to leave Detroit by a homeless guy eating his own hair, I wouldn’t expect him to listen. But still, a leper.

Later in the expedition Charles began to act erratically. He became paranoid. He came down with a fever and began to speak in a nonsensical and ‘disconnected’ way. (Think Trump trying to explain calculus). When a drowsy knight dropped a lance against a helmet, the clang sent Charles over the edge. He sprung to life and attacked his own men, killing a few (including the Bastard of Polignac, whose last thoughts were probably that being murdered by a king all but guaranteed that his unfortunate name was going to be in the history books). The king was put in a residence to recuperate and gather his wits. He did half of those things.

Charles took to escaping from his Paris house to run into the streets. They had to wall up the entrances to keep him in. At points he didn’t know who he was or that he was king and probably why he had to wear a big crown around his house. He recognized servants, but not his wife or family. In his delusion, he believed that his body was made of glass. He was terrified that he would break, so he had metal rods sewn into his clothing to protect his frail body. With the mental decline of a king came the desperate attempts of his wife to treat him. She called in an eminent doctor who may not have been a medical man, but had somehow reached the age of 92 in the 14^th century, so he might apply leaches to your genitals but he was basically considered a wizard.

The doctor prescribed a ‘program of amusements.’ Essentially, the idea was that if you filled your life with fun, games, and entertainment, you’d have no time to realize that you might be made of a chandelier. It was one of these amusements that led his wife Joanna to arrange the Bal De Ardents – the Ball of the Burning Man.

Masquerade balls were a way for society and royalty to get shitfaced and to make asses of themselves without anyone knowing who had a caricaturist draw their butts a hundred times. The Bal de Ardents combined three of royalty’s favorite things – drinking, hiding behind masks, and talking around fire. Five men dressed in hair suits to look like crazed wild men. This involved DETAILS – tar and coarse hair. In other words, they made themselves into the most flammable things in Paris outside of the wells of actual petroleum under the roads.

Except there weren’t five men, there were six. Somewhere among King Charles’s delusions that people were trying to hurt him or that he needed to escape his own house, he decided that climbing into a suit made of hair and tar would be a great idea. The dance began. Charles among them. He must have been getting a bit of a thrill knowing the secret that one of these wild men was none other than the king of France. Since the event itself was dangerous, no open flames were allowed in the hall. Except nobody remembered to tell the Duke of Orleans – aka the king’s no-good drunken asshole of a brother. He entered the hall and, in order to get a closer look at people covered in flammable wax and hair, raised a lit torch to the dancers. A spark jumped onto one of the hair suits and, as people are well known to not keep a cool head once they’ve been chained together and set on fire, the fire quickly spread to all the dancers – the king included.

Everyone carries around a tale of festivities gone wrong, a time when the bad salmon loaf killed your guests. A time when cats ate the pizza. The whiskey was drunk in the bathroom by your asshole brother in law. Alcohol only exacerbates the level of badness. The Thanksgiving one uncle brought his potato hunting rum and the other uncle wore his red hat. Go back further in history and stories become less awkward and more violent and murder-y. Go back to before the Magna Carta and showing up to a party meant you were genuinely taking your life in your own hands. But at least you’d be drunk while it was happening.

Rome was a great place to die at a party. Roman emperors were famous for throwing dinner parties which involved running through a guest or slaughtering a room of senators who had irked you. Until you were murdered you probably had the time of your life. Roman parties were known for their phenomenal party favors. You were given the serving boy who had waited on you. The Egyptians were no slouches when it came to throwing parties and surely the pharaohs occasionally flexed their powers

Probably the most famous worst dinner party in the world is the one thrown in April on a Friday in 33 AD. The Last Supper has everything one wants in a bad party story – intrigue, murder, wine, the lord and savior of millions, and a guy named Judas. The party is not only famous for one guy having too much wine and selling out his friend, but other friends who get too drunk to do anything about it. In other words – every college party ever. The party solidified the West’s fear of the number 13. Another godly party in Norse mythology has the trickster god Loki crashing a dinner party of the gods (also as guest number 13). The party resulted in Balder’s death and, you know, leads to a series of domino events which resulted in Ragnorak – the apocalyptic battle between the gods and the forces of chaos. So, parties have had some influence. MY GOD MAKE THIS FUNNIER.

Due to the quick thinking of Charles’ niece, who covered him up in her skirts, he survived the ordeal. One other dancer jumped into a vat of wine. The other four dancers died in an unenviable way, in the words of the Monk of Saint Denis ‘they were burned alive – their flaming genitals dropped to the floor.’ In other words, your bad salmon loaf ain’t so bad.

The tragedy had far-reaching consequences. Charles and his family were humiliated. A public outcry for retribution ran through the streets. They were forced to do an apologetic royal progress through the city in humility in history’s first known walk of shame. Charles lost his shit and expelled the Jews a few years later. His brother Louis of Orleans was blamed for the event and people already thought he was a sorcerer, and, cool as that might look on a Tinder profile now, at the time a thing like that made you less popular. Civil war ensued. 200 years of ineffectitude followed. The French still strike.

To celebrate, we drink the flaming Dr. Pepper. This is a drink that is set on fire and dunked in a beer to finish it off.

Ingredients

• 8 ounces beer
• 3/4 ounce amaretto
• 1/4 ounce overproof rum

Instructions

• Fill a pint glass halfway with beer
• Add the amaretto to a shot glass and top with the rum
• Set the rum on fire and very carefully drop the shot glass into the beer.
• Chug until you see into time.

It’s Sunday afternoon and to avoid doing any kind of work I elect to visit a local tavern for a couple of bowls of forget-everything juice. The pub we chose is in the middle of a park near our house. We sat on the back deck which has large windows that look out over a pond in the back. The pond is home to several ducks, some of which are babies. They scoot around the water and as long as you can’t see their feet paddling frantically beneath them, it’s mesmerizing.

One duck was curled into a ball of brown fur on the cement quay. His neck was curled back and his bill jutted from the little ball he had become. The sun was on him. He looked to be in utter comfort. This of course is when a little girl decided to come mess with him. She inched up and when the duck didn’t budge, she saw the prospective glory of direct interaction with the duck. She visibly held her breath. She sidled a few inches. My God, she thought, she was going to make it happen.

We’ve all been there. What child doesn’t want to play with furry wild animals, especially those which honk and swim? Ducks look harmless and they taste delicious. The most famous duck in the world only wears the top half of a sailor costume. How harmful can they be? The girl flattened her back so it was ramrod straight. She pressed her arms to her side. She gave a spot-on impression of a person inching along a wall except for the fact that the closest wall to her was the one I was leaning my elbow on thirty feet away. She slid one foot to her left and then brought the other one to it. She ignored her mother’s calls.