The last Saturday in February – which this year happens to be February 28 – is Open That Bottle Night. This is a relatively young tradition in which people are encouraged to ‘open that bottle’ of whatever it is they’ve been saving. You know, that fancy schmancy bottle that no occasion ever seems to be quite special enough for.

Occasionally bottles are unearthed that fly in the face of this tradition. The still-intact bottles pulled out of tombs and mausoleums of the ancient world might serve to give us an eerie contrast to such a tradition. What could be stranger than holding a more than 1,700-year-old bottle of wine found in a Roman tomb in Speyer? I suppose it might be the more than 2,000-year-old bottle of wine found in a Roman mausoleum in Caroma, Spain. How about the jugs of beer and wine found in Ancient Egyptian tombs? On the bright side, these were meant to provide the respective tombs’ occupants with sustenance on the trip to the afterlife. But still, spooky.       

But if the motivation of OTBN is to remind us that we are gone all too soon and should have fun while we can, then an entombed bottle in a tomb next to an entombed person should help urge that forward. Though far creepier, blending into Twilight Zone territory, would be an unearthed tomb wherein the occupant had drunk the wine. Lots of questions there.

Perhaps making a stronger case for OTBN are the bottles found that were not intended for the dead on their journey. There are those intended for the journeys of the living. The bottles found on the Titanic should no doubt tell us that we have no idea what each day will bring – happiness, trouble, Leonardo DiCaprio, a badly placed iceberg. Then there’s the Heidsieck 1907 champagne bottles, which were on their way to the Russian Tsar in 1916 when they went down with the ship. They were recovered in 1998 and tasted, with 90 years in the cold sea providing a perfect aging environment. (Turns out 80–90 years at the bottom of the Baltic Sea’s constant temperature, total darkness, stable pressure, and minimal oxygen exposure made the environment perfect. When another wine was found ten or so years later in roughly the same pristine condition, it sparked a niche aging process among wine makers). No matter how you cut it, history is chock full of ‘open that bottle’ warnings to enjoy your life and to carpe your diem.

I don’t need these lessons at the moment. This is our first week back teaching after the testing period. My dog is in one of her charmingly random periods of constipation which finds her ready (then not ready) to poop at 2 am. And 3 am. And 5 am. Like someone out of an In Living Color skit in the 1990s, I have five to seventeen jobs depending on the month. It has been dark for four months. Yesterday, when I brought the dog out at 2 am, freezing rain was coming at us sideways – great for a constipated animal. Donald Trump exists.

This Saturday will not be ‘open that bottle night’ in my house. It will be ‘open any bottle night’ in my house.    

Facebook has stopped being a place where I see the faces of my friends and instead where I go if I want to view and be hocked my own peculiar range of interests. For me, evidently, this is notebooks, camping gear, violent history facts, anything anti-Trump, cable-knit sweaters, and shirts with animals on them.

I’m not saying they’re wrong. I mean, I haven’t been camping in 7 years and before that it was another 10. But still, I like looking at the gear from my armchair.

Anyone online knows how disturbingly well Facebook seems to ‘know’ us these days. Making this more Twilight Zoney is the fact that they do it so blatantly and so unabashedly. Yes, we’re stealing your personal information and no, we don’t care if you know it. We all know that there’s a huge price to pay for simply slowing down over an item. Pause and look at a history meme and you all but guarantee that your feed will consist of ten more about Marcus Aurelius and Ivan the Terrible down the pike.

What gives this unease its ‘the cell has always been unlocked’ flavor is that it works. Facebook gives me a history fact being acted out by AI characters dangling over the uncanny valley, and I go ‘huh.’ And then I go to Wikipedia. In the last months I have looked up the last battle in WWII, the German soldier who claims to have killed 2,000 Allied troops on D-Day, who invented the Margarita, and the horrific fate of a captured unit of the first Bulgarian Empire. This is not to mention things I already knew – like how Cicero died, the Malmedy Massacre, and who made the first pizza.   

Things that become apparent – besides the fact that diplomacy has come a long way since 1014. Perhaps slightly more upsetting is the fact that my world evidently revolves about food, booze, and violence throughout history. But the facts. They’re so much fun.

So. We grin, we bear it. The little dopamine hits help.

I am walking through Karlin. Karlin is a charming little corner of Prague that spent a good deal of its past underwater. When the waters went away, they decided to make it a charming little corner of Prague that is always looking over its shoulder for waves or seagulls.

Normally, I would be thoroughly enjoying my walk through Karlin. This is true for two reasons: Every other place in Karlin sells beer and the places in between those places sell pastries. But I have a destination. Also, I am carrying around a futon that looks like a coffin for a baby elephant. I gawk at the pastry shops and pubs, people gawk at me.

Christmas was the time of ordering things online. It just was. And we did. I ordered a wall desk (a desk that attaches to a wall) and a futon. We decided to stay domestic for our ordering needs, a thing which made sense in early December. ‘Let’s keep it in the country,’ we said. The logic: if we choose domestic shops, we will A. be giving our money locally and B. get our things more quickly. We were probably drinking at the time these decisions were made.

Nevertheless, I felt the pride the adoptive son feels when he can do something for the adopter he loves. That is, until it came to the actual logistics of getting our things to us.

The desk came before Christmas. But – and this is sort of key – it came with the wrong parts. You see, it’s hard to hang a piece of functional furniture on the wall when they send you the wrong hinges, parts, and screws. We went to the Obi (the Czech Home Depot if you’re American), but it was to no avail and now I own a new drill bit and a few screws and a tube of strong glue. I considered using the glue to try and hang myself by the end of the day. I didn’t. I complained and sent pictures and, I guess after realizing their mistake, they said they would send out another desk. This desk has yet to reach me; it’s existence it completely theoretical to me.