Damien Galeone

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

I was leaving my home office this Saturday afternoon when Burke said it me: “You work pretty much every day, don’t you?”

“Work? Well it’s writing. Writing work.”

“So, work?”

“I guess.”

I won’t pretend to be one of those people who claim that writing isn’t work. It is. It is something I immensely enjoy and an activity to which I am fully addicted. And there are certainly times when putting a new story down on paper gives me an immeasurable childlike joy.

But to write with the aim of publishing becomes to a large degree a job. It involves story and character development, editing, fulfilling public need, and working on narrative technique. And, yes, to improve and become a better writer in these areas requires a lot of hard work.

Work. Huh.

I thought about it, too. I never walk back into my office saying “I’m going to gleefully write a story for the simple joy that it brings my soul.” I may go on and do exactly that, but when I walk back into my office and there’s a person in my house (or a cat) I always say, “I’m going to go get some work done.”

Work. Hm.

When I was young, writing was my hobby. I could sit at a desk and write stories all day about ghosts or adventures in the woods. I remember in particular an alternate look at the battle of Gettysburg and one about a monster who had a million arms. It was all for fun. And that certainly changed as I got older and other points had to be included in writing that was going to be taken seriously.

Roger Kahn writes in The Boys of Summer, a book about his experiences with the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers, that to watch professional baseball players practice was to realize that they were no longer playing a game, they were professionals honing and perfecting the skills of their profession, just as a dentist or a carpenter might.

So my childhood hobby had now become a job. I wrote my blog, a book, for some humor websites. And while I loved it, it had someone become work, not a hobby.

And then it occurred to me: I don’t have a hobby.

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Beam us up, Thorin

This Saturday was International Hobbit Day. I celebrated by having a breakfast that would make a hobbit proud. It was the first day which resembled autumn, chilly, a bit blue and a bit gray, like the American Civil War in the sky. I snuggled up on my warm couch in my warm hobbit hole, ate, read, looked out the window, and didn’t expect much of anything to happen.

And nothing really did. At one point Burke asked if I wanted to celebrate International Hobbit Day by watching The Hobbit films or Lord of the Rings, but by then it was almost 11 a.m. and we wouldn’t have time to watch all 11 hours of either film series. It was, however, time for elevenses. So I made something to eat.

Up until I read The Hobbit when I was about ten, books mostly involved brothers who solved crimes with alliterative titles, trees that were very, sadly, maybe too generous. There were the normal kiddo picture books, the ones that taught me words, and the ones that taught me lessons like that if I thought I could, I could.

But The Hobbit was an adventure. Even the subtitle, There and Back Again, held some mystery. Where and back again? I was hooked, scared at times, and mystified. It was the first of many times that I chose a character in a book to “be,” so that I could take some small part in the adventure as well. (Dwalin. Totally lived, too.)

Sometime in the mid-afternoon, as we were enjoying cheese, crackers, and olives as our twoses treat, we went on a video search. And what we found was The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.

If you’re not familiar with this particular gem of interpretative art, it features Leonard Nimoy all but dressed as Dr. Spock (it was 1968), singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins. It gets better. Assisting him in his, I guess, goal of retelling the story of Bilbo’s adventures, are several girls with pixie haircuts and pointy ears (whether they’re Vulcan or Hobbit we’ll never know), who dance spasmodically as if they had, in fact, taste-tested the brown acid that would appear at Woodstock a year later.

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Pittsburgh International Airport. When I asked for a coffee a moment ago, the man must have misunderstood that for “unmanageable cup of molten lava.” I am now trying to push the integrity of the cardboard sleeve meant to protect my hands from 3^rd degree burns. Problem: my hands are shaking. I put the coffee on a table and remove the lid.

A moment ago I was finally able to speak without actively pursuing advanced lexicon like “and” or “also.” “Please kill me” took five whole minutes, and I was fortunate enough that my friend had driven off before I could get it out.

I am in a confused daze, as if the world has suddenly upgraded to include a new dimension that my inner-technology has not prepared for. They call my flight. I give up on the coffee.

This is day one of the three day hangover.

Pittsburgh visits are always a bacchanalian visit to the good old days. Three days of beers, shots, sandwiches, and very little water; sensible choices were treated like the monsters of fairytale lore. And I knew what I was doing. Each shot was another nail in my coffin. Each beer would be answered for in the future.

The flight from Pittsburgh to Newark involves about 45 minutes in the air. If it were longer, I would be requesting a parachute from the drink cart.

Half of the jokes made by people over 40 is that things get harder/easier/harsher/ after that age. Heading that list is the hangover. People who could drink their weight in tequila at 21 and run a marathon the next morning marvel at how their 43 year old body barely deals with four light beers. I am in that camp. This is probably why I don’t overdo it that often. Oh, I still go out for beers with my friends and I’m never the one to turn down a shot. (Read: I am the one who suggests the shot). But in my day to day life, I can have drinks once a week and remain a reasonable member of society. Unlike my 21 year old self, it now takes a day or two to fully recover. A Friday night session means a Saturday of bad movies and overhydration. A really big Friday might means a Sunday of ibuprofen and poking at my liver.

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It’s Friday. We’re in the mood for a light movie. We opt for a lighthearted rom-com with Steve Carell. Dan in Real Life. He’s a widower with a big goofy family. Dane Cook’s in there. How can you go wrong with all that?

Long story short, we go wrong with that.

Rule number one of storytelling is that you are true. True means that you have to make the actions of your characters believable. We suspend our disbelief every day to allow ourselves to settle into a good story and to let a good story settle into us. Flying crocodile-zebra hybrids attack earth? Sure. Julia Roberts’ character falls in love with Hugh Grant’s character? Why not. Twelve convicts drop behind enemy lines on June 5, 1944 to gunk up the Nazis? I shall get the popcorn. These two extraordinarily beautiful women are going to have their way with the pizza guy? They ordered a sausage pie, after all. Aaaaaalright…for the next 2 minutes and forty-three seconds.

And we will do this as long as what your characters are doing resonate with real life (you know, except for the porn because our genitals have different rules when it comes to real life). But if you break this rule, your audience is unforgiving. Last month I turned off the movie The Nice Guys because of the insanely implausible action of a character. Up until then the movie had been extremely fun to watch and I’d been giggling rather than shaking my head at its ridiculo-hilarious plot. But I just couldn’t get over that one unbelievable action.

While some of the interactions and actions of the characters do ring true, where Dan in Real Life fails on the (ahem) real life-o-meter is in its depiction of family. It has to be the corniest, most rigged family since The Waltons was on the air. Evidently, this family gets together once a year to play nine thousand competitive games, from guys against ladies crossword puzzle-offs to charades to sing-offs to scrabble to a mind-numbing-un-fucking-real talent show to top off all of the crap. There’s the obligatory family football game in the yard. A thing which I can stomach as long as it’s the only family oriented game, but when it comes at the end of this feel-too-fucking-good-a-thon it was just another nail in its unbelievable coffin. By the time Dane Cook (whose job it is, I guess, to run an aerobics class) leads the entire family in a synchronized aerobics class, I have had enough.

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Autumn Sprinkles: I never stood a chance

I’m standing in line at the supermarket in Langhorne and I am wondering exactly how it is that my cart is filled with the items it’s filled with. I am already marveling at the array of goods. The line is relatively long and some genius has made it so that we stand in a tunnel of goods that A. I do not need and B. I am slowly rationalizing a need for.

The Impulse Buy Trait has long run in my family. My mom goes shopping sixteen times a week and has a talent for the most random of gifts, with a particular fondness for things which illuminate, golf shirts, and tech gadgets. And so I have an abundance of flashlights and dehumidifiers. On a trip to Naples, my dad bought roughly thirty items of clothing. We’d be walking on the street and we’d turn to address him only to find that he was no longer with us. Moments later he’d come out of a tailor with a shirt, a pair of pants. Once he bought a suit and a hat. Haberdashers all over Naples must have hung his picture up for the others to prey upon. He could have clothed Hobbiton with his purchases over those three days. For sixty years, he has made the fatal mistake of only shopping when he’s hungry, so when he returns from a supermarket the strata of baked sweets and bags of candy resemble what would happen if a stoned fifteen year old found $100 in a supermarket.

My sister and I both got the gene. My sister Amanda’s impulse G-spot is Amazon and she will often order something on her phone seconds after it’s brought up in conversation. During my month at home the front porch resembled Stonehenge with the daily delivery of boxes and packages. Books, DVDs, knickknacks, appliances, workout equipment. Her bedroom looks like the aftermath of an explosion at a mail order catalog distributor.

Stonehenge by Amazon (delivery in 2-3 business days)

I have the gene as well. I can’t be trusted to go into a store by myself. This is primarily concerning supermarkets, but I have been known to walk into a clothing shop and walk out with a shirt and some shoes. I walk into a supermarket for avocados and walk out with a nonstick pan and four lightbulbs (and no avocados). The Czech genius who started putting individual shots of booze in the checkout line is my Lex Luther.

My impulse tendency is magnified when I visit the states, mostly because I can’t help but be overwhelmed by the supermarkets. Yes, we can shake our heads and groan at wasteful, mindless American consumerism, but to step into an American supermarket is to walk into a gastronomical heaven. The cracker aisle alone makes a Czech shop look like a homeless man’s garage sale.

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I’m on my way back from the shore when I make a mistake. I turn from 95 North, the road that will bring me easily home with my eyes closed, onto an exit, which brings me into the city of Philadelphia. The city I was smoothly bypassing I’m now driving directly into.

When you make a driving mistake, you react. How badly you have screwed up depends on the severity of the reaction. If you make a simple wrong turn in your town, you might do a good-natured forehead slap. Something that takes a few minutes to correct might warrant a “shit” or a “fuuuuck.” What I have done now, leaving the road that was conveniently bringing me home, as in it could have had a sign on it that said Damien’s Way Home, and turning into the city of Philadelphia, a city I am not familiar driving in, a city whose bowl of cooked spaghetti throng of highways would have made Patton turn around and go home and accept German occupation, a city where one wrong decision brings you to New Jersey, makes my gut to fall out and with it a series of seething remarks that question my abilities and intelligence.

Not only have I gone out of my way to up my level of stress and aggravation, but part of the upset is due to a bruise growing on my tender male ego. Men are supposed to be good at directions based on an internal navigation system. We’re supposed to know things about cars and know what all the things in our truck is for. We’re supposed to be able to open the hood and understand what we’re looking at.

But I don’t. I suppose my internal navigational system was left out of the congenital male gift basket I was supposed to get at birth. I also know nothing about electronics, could give less than a shit about expensive cars (like. Zero), and though I like putting things together here and there, I could go the rest of my life without touching a drill and die a happy man. These things I have come to accept about myself, but it doesn’t mean there isn’t frustration when one of these evident shortcomings is thrust in my face and causes me aggravation. Whether you are a man or a woman you can probably commiserate in some way.

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Pictured: The Green Front Inn. Not Pictured: The Ghost of the Cook.

It’s a Saturday on East Carson Street on the Southside of Pittsburgh. It’s hot and I am wearing a captain’s hat, a gift from my friend L. He was one on too. We are in a convertible that I couldn’t afford if I had a decade to save up for it and an extra kidney to sell on the black market. It’s then that we pass a place I know too well. The Green Front Inn.

“Oh my God,” I say. “I haven’t been there in more than a decade.”

“Well we’re going in now.” He pulls in front and parks, where the shiny red convertible is a sore thumb.

Pittsburgh is a city of neighborhoods. This was typically the only reference people would give when going out. “Where you going tonight?” “Southside” or “Shadyside” or “The Strip” was all that was said. This is also because a night out in Pittsburgh rarely included only one bar, but rather a mini-bar crawl often occurred, so a neighborhood was used as a blanket location.

The Green Front Inn was a job taken out of necessity. I was working an unpaid internship at a local magazine and I needed a paid job, if only because I had grown accustomed to eating food and sleeping indoors. And so four nights a week I stood behind the bar in this dive and wondered where everything had gone wrong. I’d loved bartending up to that point, but probably because I worked in a campus bar before that. It was filled with young, good looking people who wanted to have fun and often did so right there on the bar. The place before was positive and much of my time there was spent laughing and surrounded by people I really liked.

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When a key breaks off in your door, the universe closes its ears and forgives the torrent of vulgarities that vomit forth. It’s the same when you are confronted by a dangerous animal and when you spill anything hot in your crotch.

I only hope that my neighbors were as understanding yesterday when Burke informed me that she had broken a key in the downstairs lock. The word du moment was shit with a deluge of other phraseology whose creativity and complexity actually sort of developed a narrative of vulgarity.

I knelt down to look at the little teeth in the lock, and I moaned. I consulted Google and went for needle-nosed pliers, and then a pair of tweezers. I found that pushing my key into the other side of the lock made the chunk of the broken key jump forth a little. So I pushed my key in and then grappled with the little bit of metal, all the while reviewing the little speech in Czech that I would give any of my neighbors who happened to come by. It was 6 o’clock, people would still be coming in from work.

Even though the key was moving a drop, I wasn’t able to get any traction on it and therefore I made a series of frantic trips between my flat and the door. Bobby pin, needles, a drawing compass, a box cutter, a barrette. Ultimately nothing was working. My vulgarities subsided as I worked, though, and I was at least pleased that my brain had settled me down to deal with the task at hand. It seemed that I was equal parts my parents, my dad who despairs in the face of unexpected difficulty and my mom who’s evicted four children from her uterus and for whom unexpected difficulty is all expected.

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