Damien Galeone

Way back in January, I called the gastroenterology department of the clinic next door to my home and in childish Czech managed arranged a colonoscopy. We settled on May 26. I hung up the phone satisfied with my linguistic victory and slapped the referral up on the fridge under a Guinness magnet and went about my day.

I then went about my day quite normally, as if I had not just arranged for a group of strangers to navigate a long scope up my ass. For three and a half months that referral and that word ‘colonoscopy’ was a theory, a procedure of the future, a word that evinced a solid level of responsibility for a man entering his fifties. Since I turned fifty, I haven’t felt much different, as if I was still in my forties but someone had accidentally let me into a club I didn’t belong to.

But now with the word ‘colonoscopy’ I felt that I had convincingly entered that demographic. I could drop it into conversations like the older folks I have known. ‘Nah, can’t do it that week, I’ve got my colonoscopy.’ It’s just what you say. It’s routine. You’re fifty. You have a medical responsibility. But in the subtitle of everyday language, you are telling someone ‘Sorry. On the morning of May 26, someone is going to lube me up and stick at least one medical instrument up my ass. And that is why I can’t play Laser Tag that day.’

What you leave out to everyone, except for your close friends, live-in partner, pets, and those who have been there before, is what you have to do on May 25.

On May 6, I arrive at the department for the procedure’s prep meeting. The nurse explains to me there is a diet for 5 days beforehand (I didn’t know this) and then she sends me a prescription for the laxatives which will give the doctors ‘the clearest possible image of my colon’. Surely you can do the math here. To get a clear image of a lower GI tract, you need to clean it out. Totally. And what better to do that job than Clensia?

On my way out of the clinic I pop into the pharmacy and get my laxatives. They come in a white box with black lettering. The biggest word by far on this box is Clensia. The name sort of says it all. Though it leaves out ‘Clensia out until you are a weeping puddle of sadness’. The box contains 8 sacks of laxative (4 big, 4 small), but feels as though it’s carrying a few hefty novellas. I’d write that the pharmacist gives me a sympathetic look, but that would be a boldfaced lie. She has given out far worse for far worse to far unhappier people. She cares very little about my rump and its future.

Much like my referral, the box of Clensia sits and waits on a shelf, watching me in its theoretical usefulness for around two weeks. The days inch closer and closer until I have to read the instructions.

Oh, I have some idea of what this entails. You drink a powerful laxative concoction, which works its magic, shocking your body into action and submission all at once, and everything that ever existed in your body that isn’t bolted down comes flying out at the speed of sound. I make a simple plan. Obviously, I’m not leaving home. I have a lot of work to do. Burke will be on dog-walking duty for the day. I plan to sit at my desk and work, and when the need ‘arises’ I will head the twenty or so feet to the bathroom – which I have outfitted with my spare set of reading glasses and the book I’m currently reading. It’s all set. It won’t be so bad.  

This sentence’s job should be a hyperbolic description of how wrong ‘it won’t be so bad’ was. My powers of exaggeration, however, fail me. The concoction doesn’t so much do ‘magic’ in my system as it becomes fed-after-midnight-gremlins who then go to town on my colon like it’s Randy Peltzer’s kitchen. Oh, medical professionals also leave out the part where all that stuff flying out of your body takes with it any remaining electrolytes, any residual optimism left over from your youth, and your will to live. By mid-afternoon, I have counted the steps from my desk to the bathroom – fifteen. An hour later, I trade in my pants for a big towel. There’s no point in putting pants back on when they’re just going to be removed in a panicked state. By late-afternoon, I stop sitting down to work. Instead, I opt to stand at the kitchen counter, which is ten steps from the bathroom. Trust me, those five steps matter. I stand and do my work. In no pants. Crying.

I should stop complaining. Medical advancements and technology have come a long way in making fifty-year-olds in 2025 as healthy and vital as thirty-five-year-olds in 1985. They can replace our old parts like knees and hips. They have found ways to make sure we live longer and with a much better quality of life. And one of the big reasons for that is the colonoscopy.

The word ‘colonoscopy’ has become such a part of our lexicon that it’s maybe surprising to realize that it’s only been part of our mainstream medical culture since 1997. It became more common practice only in the early-mid-2000s. And the effects are undeniable. Between 1970 and 2020 there was a 50% drop in colorectal cancer deaths – basically due to the colonoscopy as a screening process.

Surely there are untold millions among the previous generations who would have happily dealt with a day of aggressive pooping before getting a scope up their rear had it prevented what was to come. While this insight makes sense to me now, post-procedure, it lacks the intended impact late in my prep day, as I have become a moaning, pantless fool who is sitting on the toilet for the thirtieth or so time that day.  

My procedure is at 7 am. I am brought in quickly, given colonoscopy pants (they are light and have, as you may guess, an easy-access gap in the rear. By the time I am pulling my knees to my chest and the nurse is sedating me, I am ready for whatever comes. And as I slip off into a definitely-could-be-deeper state of unawareness, I wonder if that’s a subsidiary goal of the prep day: to create a misery so profound that the misery that comes later is not as miserable.      

Well, at least I’ll have something to bring up to my 50-year-old friends.

I’m amazed by people who watch new things on TV every day. Someone who has a full day of exhausting work, navigates the maelstroms of daily interactions with other humans and then goes home and plops on a movie they’ve never seen or a show that you just want to try out. Wow.

My particular brand of mental exhaustion demands a period of attentive-inattentiveness in the evening. I work hard all day, reading, writing, editing, teaching, dealing with all the minutia in between and the last thing I need at home is new. I want old news. I want a show I have seen 81,293 times. I want a show whose jokes I know so well, I can skip them with precision if I want and still not miss the call back that comes 30 seconds after it. What this old show is depends on whim and mood. I go through phases. Brooklyn 99. 30 Rock. Friends. Cheers. Frasier. Do I feel like the 1990s? How about a little 1980s?

This isn’t to say that I sit and watch these shows. They are normally on in the background like light versions of light pop songs in the elevator. I usually read or do the little bits of work that couldn’t get attended to during the day. Burke usually goes along with whatever as she usually winds down her night working or playing on her phone and finding massively depressing news items to tell me about right before bed. That, or who Cher is dating or why we don’t like Susan Sarandon anymore. Or why Madonna wears gloves. I know it all. It gets through.

I understand that this habit makes me smack dab in the middle of the road normal. Everyone does it (except for those psychos who watch new stuff). And I have read about why people do this and I tick every single solitary box. Craving familiarity, fulfilling my emotional needs, the Mister Rogers effect, the Conjuring effect, and nostalgia therapy. All there for me. I’m not special.

Mid-April. It was a nice, quiet Tuesday evening, or some day that’s innocuous like a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday, but not tranquil like a Thursday or a Friday. I was in my armchair and I was reading. The TV was on in the background. We had eaten, so there was nothing to look forward to for the rest of the day, except maybe a yogurt. My phone buzzed and, being a resident of the 21^st century, I dropped my book instantly to find out who was contacting me.

My sister. I staved off the disappointment. I mean, I love my sister, but there could always be more exciting correspondents. The message was this: Hey.

‘Hey’ can mean a lot of things. It already meant a lot of things back when we spoke to each other in person with our mouths. It could be a greeting, a warning, a threat, a complaint. Nowadays, removing intonation, facial cues, and the 71,292 emoticons that usually accompany one of my sister’s messages, and it could be anything from remonstration to greeting to precursor to ‘I have some bad news. Are you there?’

And I was there. But I wasn’t sure if I was going to be there. Answering a message can make or break your day. It can lead to good information, a fun chat, information you didn’t want on an innocuous Tuesday or, worst of all, tasks you didn’t want to undertake. I had a few moments and considered my options. I plopped my phone in my lap and vaguely hoped for another vibrating text from someone more exciting.

This sister and I had not had any recent fights. So, ‘Hey’ was unlikely to be a ‘Hey, we need to clear the air here.’ This sister lives at home. Were there a problem with one of my parents she would likely be the spreader of that news. This could potentially be, ‘Hey, I have to tell you something.’ And this sister will, on occasion, just say hello and she can be a drop tone deaf. So it was possible that ‘Hey’ was simply ‘Hey.’ But could she want something else? I wasn’t sure. In a moment of familial loyalty that I’d kick myself for two weeks later, I wrote back.

‘Hey.’

The floodgates opened.

The gist. My mother had decided – along with the higherups at her work – that it was time for her to retire. This was a big decision. My mom has been working at the same company for almost three decades and, to put it in patently understatement terms, she loves her job. She is, until this Friday, a beloved and loyal employee. Moreover, the love that she has for this job and her colleagues and bosses is returned in spades by those bosses and colleagues. At the age of around fifty, my mom got the job of her dreams (organizing things for other people) and never looked back.

The problem. My sister’s ‘Hey’ was followed by ‘…can I ask you to do something?’ My mom’s bosses were throwing her a retirement party. They thought a neato thing to do would be to get her beloved family members – aka, those who’d ruined her uterus and were thus guilted into doing pretty much whatever she asked for the rest of her life – to record congratulatory videos. These videos were to be watched during the retirement party. So, not only did we have to record videos – closeups of our faces while speaking – but we were going to be watched by a party full of people we didn’t know holding paper plates with half-eaten slices of pound cake with vanilla icing up to their lips and asking their neighbor through plastic forks ‘who’s this again?’

That was ‘Hey.’

It’s a few minutes before 8 am and I wake up in a slight haze. It’s the haze of waking up still tipsy in a different city and in a hotel room you don’t recognize. I sit up. Oh, right…we’re in Munich. I get up and get dressed.

Burke and I travel well together. This is mainly because we both have a good idea of when walking around and looking at old stuff should transition into sitting down and sampling local delicacies and whatever the local version of Becherovka happens to be. Being in tune with your travel partner in this way is incredibly important. If you disagree, then you have yet to be on a trip with a person whose ideas of fun on a weekend trip differ from yours. The sweet innocent weekend trip has ended more than one relationship. It’s almost certainly ended more than one friendship. And it’s probably led to a murder or two. So, we’re lucky we agree on most points.

We have traditions too. One of them is that in the morning, Burke sleeps the sleep of a fairytale princess who’s been cursed by a witch, while I haul my hungover ass around our neighborhood to find us baked goods and some coffee. And it is such a quest for which I am currently pulling on my pants. After purposely forgetting to brush my teeth, I step out the door to find out what morning wares our neighborhood in Munich pitches.

The evening before, we noticed a place called Boogie Donuts, which seems right in line with what I’d like to destroy my waistline with on this weekend trip. I make my way through quiet – too quiet streets to where the donut place is. I visited Austria a month or so ago with my brother and undertook the same morning task. The result couldn’t have been better. The Austrians called me forth to their bakeries, explained their strangely-just-out-of-reach-linguistically cakes and pastries, congratulated me on the Eagles’ Superbowl victory, gave me a cake for free, and sent me home. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping for something similar.

I first come across a local shop. There’s bread in the windows. It’s colorful inside and I see men inside working in yellow uniforms and the little hats of those ordered to keep their hair out of food. As I need toothpaste and maybe some juice, this will be perfect. I present myself at the entrance and step inside. One of the men lets off a string of (I suppose it was) German. He is wearing a smile of pure pleasure, as if he’s telling me I’ve just had a healthy child or that my mortgage application was just approved. I studied German in high school and hoped some of the old words and phrases (Das ist ein blauer Bleistift and Ich habe ein kleines Schlafzimmer) might come in handy. It doesn’t. To the chagrin of thousands of American second language students, language describing pencils and bedrooms rarely come into play while ordering breakfast.

Instead, I mutter that I don’t speak German. The man, no change to his face, switches instantly. He informs me, with the same genuine smile, that they open at 8 am. We both take that opportunity to look at the digital clock on the wall and watch 7:58 change to 7:59. I look back at him. With the (now creepy) smile, he tells me ‘just a few minutes.’ I take my leave for donuts. On the block and a half walk to the donut places it occurs to me that when a local shop isn’t open at 8, a donut shop isn’t going to open til 9.

One Christmas Eve many years ago, I stayed in Prague and cooked a big meal with friends. The food was subsidized by various bottles of wine, liquor, and clear stuff in bottles conspicuously void of label or descriptive promises. Late into the evening, as two of us watched Christmas Vacation as per Christmas ritual tradition 7761/24, I noticed that my cat seemed utterly fascinated with my wine glass. I watched. She was pressing her paw into the remnants of red wine at the bottom of the glass and licking her paws clean. Really clean. I noted this down for future reference and to tell my vet.  

Though we got a kick out of it, it shouldn’t have been so surprising. Animals have a long relationship with alcohol. Oh sure, there are cases throughout history of drinking animals. Like Wojtek the Syrian brown bear who became a soldier in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company in the Polish Army during World War II. He fought in the Battle of Monte Cassino and developed a taste for beers, given his military service. Likewise, beers and bears were often coupled at saloons in the old west. Because what better way to wile away your off-hours than to wrestle a bear who’s been drinking? I think it’s a Hemingway book.

But even today drinking – and even drunk – animals are an everyday reality. An evidently common sight in autumn in Sweden are drunken elk stuck in trees. They get into that fix because they are trying to reach the fermenting apples which made them drunk in the first place. Fruit bats also don’t mind a few pops of ethanol-rich fermenting fruit (hence their name). Scientists even believe that they have developed a stronger resistance to alcohol to keep from getting too tipsy. You know, being drunk is great when you can lie on your couch, eat pizza, and watch Netflix, but when you have to fly and you are surrounded by predators who want to eat you, you might want to keep your head a bit. Evolutionarily, it’s just smarter. In fact, one strategy used to catch invasive moths and flies is getting them drunk in beer. This way they stop eating crops and go to the McDonalds down the road or just pass out in front of the tube light.

The pen-tailed treeshrew seems to have one of the animal kingdom’s higher tolerances to booze. Which explains why the pen-tailed treeshrew is always the other animals’ designated driver. Hamsters too seem to be pretty good at warding off drunkenness. When researchers gave zebrafish alcohol (presumably through a straw?) they found they became more reckless, ignoring a robot version of their main predator – the heron. This is similar to when your mild-mannered accountant friend throws an elbow at a rugby player at the pub after a few beers. Neither are likely to survive long.   

It’s a Thursday, which means it’s my short day. I finish teaching at 10:30 and unless I have some pressing deadline of some pressing work that’s pressing my sinuses, I more or less have the rest of the day free. Sadly, it’s usually the former and I often come home to sit and work while my cat and dog surround me in an obsequiousness borne of sleepiness and too many treats.

Today, however, I seem to have the day free. Since I rarely take a full day off, I tend to take my days off in afternoons. My deadlines for the week were all earlier and as far as I know, nobody is expecting anything from me in the new few days. I decide to celebrate my liberation by attending to tasks, given that it’s too early to hole up in a bar. Besides, I’m on a mission.

A year ago, I bought a pair of light pants perfect for summer travel. But there’s a problem – cause when you’re 5’7 and built like a guy who swung a double-headed battle axe to save Middle Earth from Sauron – pants are never not a problem. These pants are larger around the waist than is totally comfortable. Perfect for sitting in a pub or a restaurant while on holiday and for providing extra space between waist and waistband in which to fit holiday food intake. However, these pants have no belt loop and, though they are comfortable while sitting, are just too large. The one time I used them I grew tired of taking pictures of the Janiculum while holding up my pants with my other hand. I need a solution.

That solution came to me in my sleep one night. I awoke with a vision. The vision made so much sense that I was near certain nobody here would do it. I would get another button hole put in the pants about 2–3 centimeters in from the original button hole. This would be the button hole used for walking when I need a tighter fit. The (original) button hole which made the pants looser would be for sitting and eating ice cream and his assortment of tasty siblings. I’m a genius. Now, let’s just see if I can a. explain it to a tailor and b. convince them to do it.

First, I need a tailor. Preferably one I won’t mind being rejected by. I read about a good one near my flat, but her shop is on the other side of the tracks. In this case, the tracks are those of the metro that separate us from the other side of the road. And, not to sound snobby, between their side and our side, there is a distinct difference in feel, mood, tone, and number of people mostly naked and under the influence of something that makes them think that being naked in public at noon on a Thursday is OK. Nevertheless, I get ready to go.

It’s Friday night. For the general populus, Friday has a different feel. This is true no matter what you do: Stay in, go to the pub, eat a bag of fries on a park bench. For example. When you do these things on a Friday night, you do so with a calmer mind, one setting at arm’s length the previous five days of work while looking forward to a day or so of rest.

Usually.

This Friday night has been dampened (for me and, by the transitive properties of grumpiness, the other inhabitants of the flat) by a working Saturday. So, as I make dinner, I think about the next day. As I tidy the kitchen, I think about the next day. As I read, I think about the next day. My brain can’t process and forget a week’s worth of the joys, stresses, minor humiliations, and personal epithets that come along with a life of teaching. I have been robbed not only of a Saturday, but of the calm contemplation of a Friday night mostly found through TV and a drooling that might suggest the recent removal of my frontal lobe. But, no, not this Friday. I show my displeasure for this by throwing several tiny mini-tantrums. These mostly involve colorful language regarding people and what they can do with their Saturday. 

Making matters worse are the facts. The facts that refuse to modify as I examine them under a microscope in the hopes of rendering them less invasive. That is, there ain’t enough lipstick in Europe to make this Saturday pig beautiful. This Saturday I work from 9–17:10. In other words: all frickin’ day. No matter how I put this into my spin factory, it all comes up that I will spend the 8 hours the next day in front of students and others online. People on their way to the chopping block have had brighter futures.  

What’s worse, the other inhabitants in the flat have become used to a cycle of sorts. The dog and cat understand that there are a few days, we’ll call them Monday through Wednesday, where we humans get up very early and there’s a subdued tone of misery and hopelessness in the flat along with the smell of coffee and soap. The dog wakes up each day in a state of absolute joy, as if she can’t believe she gets another day of being spoiled, walked, fed. She licks us like a happy white mop with dark eyes and then rolls onto her back waiting for the day’s inaugural belly scratch. She also knows intuitively that on a few days a week, the optimism that we return to her is a bit … forced. She knows that on a few of those days – we’ll call them Thursday through Sunday – the optimism is truer. The cat may also understand this, but does not alter from her routine of standing outside the bedroom door screaming at us until we feed her. 

I worked in a bar for a long time, which made my working hours other peoples’ leisure hours. I showed up to work on Friday and Saturday nights, right when people were in full unwind mode. This was the first time I explored my Other Self. You see, for me to not only work when others were relaxing, but to work to help them reach higher levels of that relaxation, it was necessary for me to put myself into a state of mind and I had to do this without pharmaceuticals. Enter Jimmie Kuhl. Perhaps the grandest of all bar gurus. I related this to him once – namely, that my jealousy was getting the better of me – and he said he fully understood. He had been at this bartending game for much longer and had come up with a system.

It’s a Monday night. I am walking, well walk-pulling, our easily distractable Shih tzu along a path. Our walks involve a few optimistic steps. Then there’s a hunt through grass and a satisfying pee (sometimes the dog pees too). After that, the dog will play along with this whole ‘sure, you own me’ thing and walk. But after a while, the small animal starts adding up the context clues and deduces that I’m probably not the one in charge. Surely, the fact that I follow her around, pick up her poop, and feed her blueberries can only logically add up to one conclusion.

When this conclusion is reached, the doggy decides it would rather not go on and lies in the dirt. Whether or not this is a power move is answered moments later when no amount of tugging or of picking up and placing on feet will result in anything more than the dog slipping back onto her rump and watching me try to explain with facial expressions to passersby with well-trained dogs that that I am in charge.  

When everyone’s gone, I take out a blueberry from my blueberry pocket. (Nota bene: I now have a blueberry pocket in most cardigans, as has been realized by my fascinated and somewhat disturbed students. I also have a poop bag pocket too. Usually unfulfilled). When the dog decides this mishigas is over, she emits a high-pitched offkey song reminiscent of Donald Sutherland’s terrifying scream at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s then that I give in and pick her up for the final leg of our walk. And a reckoning begins.  

Like many boys growing up in the 1980s, I took a lot of misguided life lessons from movies. From TV I learned that learning is half the battle (GI-Joe!), I learned that nobody put Baby in the corner, and I learned that action heroes had very little sense of humor. Action movies were the ones I wanted, as My Dinner with Andre was still out of reach for my fledgling gray matter. Action heroes didn’t smile. Why, who had time to smile when they were about to go fight the Russians or a terrorist cell at the local mall. Those men would be easily identifiable by the keffiyehs they were donning.

These action heroes also had a dog. If not overly large, then sturdy, and either dark brown or black. This dog could do math and save people from avalanches. This dog was loyal to the hero, he knew who the bad guys were, and he could take a shot if need be. He also looked really cool walking alongside the hero in the woods after his successful mission when he has some time to get back to nature and solitude.     

The movie antithesis of the rugged character with a rugged dog was a comic character with a comic dog. He was a harmless neighbor, an accountant, maybe, or a lawyer, some brand of overly-officious nerd who was there to present a bureaucratic issue for the hero to swat away as he has bigger fish to fry, and what could a defaulted loan mean to a man who just killed ten terrorists hiding in his yard? This guy in the 1980s movies wore light clothing – pink golf shirts, white shorts, white shoes. Perish the thought. And my 1980s-movie education told me that these officious-type guys had lapdogs and those lapdogs were meant to be an appendage of their urbanity and unmanliness.

You’ll be happy to know that the movies of the 1980s don’t rule supreme in my life view anymore. For example, my dreams of fighting bad guys with Arnie got sidelined when I realized just how great it was to read on my couch and not get shot. But would it be so bad to be the officious next-door neighbor? That officious guy was rather admirable when I think about it. At a time when boys were being told what boys should be, in that little fictional world, dressed in white and carrying around a poodle, he was being true to himself. It’s almost heroic.    

Heroics are part of the last leg of our walk journey. I have put the dog back down and she has agreed to walk for a little while. She is only a foot or so off the ground and can sleep sixteen hours a day, but even she has the killer instincts at times. I recognize the look of the hunt. So, I let her chase me. I run away and she comes after my ankles and growls and chews the bottom of my pantleg. Then I chase her back and she runs away, quickly dashing between my reaching hands. She would be able to avoid any 1980s-movie terrorist. Then I run away and let her catch me. I eventually surrender. I let her know she has won, she gloats and allows me to live another day.

We finish the walk feeling content, ready for inside. She’s tired, she’ll recline on her little bed and I’ll sit on the couch and we’ll watch TV. I’ll probably treat her to some blueberries or maybe even a piškoty. We’ll relax this evening mindfully safe in the comfort that the officious man’s house brings, not a terrorist nor a bureaucrat in sight.

After college, I moved back to Langhorne, PA in desperate search of a job. I wanted something I had trained for. Something on a newspaper or a local magazine. What I wanted was to start a career in writing and editing. What I got was Kahunaville.

Kahunaville was a themed bar & restaurant, done up to look as though you’d just walked into the exotic rainforest where they were filming Jurassic Park. It would have simply been a rainforest but for the droves of confused-looking white guys in khakis. Also it was in the Oxford Valley Mall, so the Sunglass Hut visible from the bar sort of smashed the effect. Attempting to immerse the clientele was the occasional and abrupt screech of a kookaburra and water fountain shows set to music – as if those things happen in the real rainforest all the time. If that wasn’t enough to make the diners choke on their burgers, then the hourly bar-top dance-party the staff were forced to endure surely did the trick. It definitely did it for me. I lasted two weeks before disappearing on Halloween night on a search for a wig that has yet to end.

For ages, people have been drinking in theme bars. People have sipped cocktails while mermaids swam around a tank behind the bar. Others have pounded mugs of mead while men in armor battled in an arena near a hotdog stand. Business lunches have been held at Hooters, Golden Oldies, and inside giant replicas of the human heart. For generations, kids have been searing their lips off with pizza cheese while animatronic hillbilly animals play a jamboree at Chuck E. Cheese, no doubt instigating at least three lifelong fears in one blast.

Anyone who has been handed a butter beer from a guy with a wand tucked into his pants has wondered where this whole theme bar thing started. Well, they can thank the good folks of the Belle Epoque.