Damien Galeone

We are all the heroes of our own story. And in our fantasies, news headlines reveal just that about us. Man Saves Family from Fire; Penguin Publishes Manuscript Found in Garbage, Becomes Instant Classic; Man, Though not Classically Attractive, Rated on Personality and Immediately Named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year and Sexiest Man Alive.

In our faceless way, we rock! And we want the world to know it.

But if there’s one horrifying reality, it’s that we are mostly mundane little creatures. And while our oddities, day to day struggles, and epiphanies mean a great deal to us, they wouldn’t amount to much when headlined on the New York Times.

Man Sends Colleague Irritated Text in Meeting that could have been (short) Email

Man Horrified to Learn that his Cat Posts aren’t Seen as Ironic by Bulk of Friends

Man Constantly Worries about Accidentally Sending Dick Pic to Entire Contacts List

Man Flays Boss in Mock Argument in Shower

Man Constantly Thanks Deity he Doesn’t Believe in that Nobody can Read his Mind

Man Occasionally Mentions Passing Interest in Birds to Make Himself More Sophisticated

Man Breathes Deeply when Burrito Loco is out of Wraps: Pretends Zen Attitude, but Really Afraid of Ending up in Viral Video

Man Thinks Joking about Practicing Casual Conversation Makes it Less Insane

Man Almost Loses Eye after Biting Cat’s Tail

Man Goes Berserk in Toilet after Boss Asks about Email she’d Sent Twenty Minutes Before

Man Realizes he Doesn’t Hate Taylor Swift after Hearing One of her Songs

Study Shows Man Understands Significance of Cultural Sayings Seven Years after Significant: True Story

Man Hums to Warn Urinators that He’s Pooping in Stall

Man Dreams of Bludgeoning Czech Clerk to Death with her Own Stamp

Man, 43, Stunned that Airplane Lifts off

Incensed Man Writes Blog after Realizing he only Gets about Thirty Facebook Friends in Feed: Facebook Does Not React

Man Suffers Nervous Breakdown after Students Refuse to use Target Language

Man Disillusioned after Mark Hamill Doesn’t Send him a Birthday Tweet

November 8^th: Man Shaves Mustache after Nobody Realizes he’s Being Ironic

Man Feels Satisfied after Doing Laundry and Food Shopping on one Saturday; Will Reward Self with Reading and Maybe a Beer Later

What would be your life’s headlines?

I cooked spaghetti and meatballs for a friend on Saturday. I never feel more like my grandmom than when I am adding pinches of salt to tomato sauce that I made from scratch. Or when I am kneading balls of meat and spices. Of course, the apron helps.

I am never going to appear on a television show for my cooking skills. Or for any reason, I guess. (well, not unless those Queer Eye gents ever respond to my emails.) But for the last five or so years I have developed my cooking skills so that I can not only state that I am a competent cook, but I can mean it.

But it has been a long road.

Like many of those who were raised by my mother, I didn’t grow up learning to cook. There was no need; my mom spoiled us. She cooked every day (sometimes after working eight to ten hours). At times, she relied on quick and easy standards to quell the voluble hunger pangs of the four kids and the dentist banging their forks on her kitchen table. There was mac and cheese, hotdogs, grilled cheese, and tomato soup. But more often than not, there was homemade pasta dishes, meatloaf, vegetables, or potatoes.

Besides occasionally reheating dinner or putting meat in between two pieces of bread, I didn’t raise a finger to feed myself from the age of 0:001 to17.8.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like many teachers, I would like to address a recent proposal to add a particular piece of hardware to the classroom. It’s useful and, once loaded, does all manners of good if it’s in the right hands. I have spent my entire pedagogical career wishing and hoping that a social movement would carry us to this pivotal development. Teachers everywhere are ready for this implementation to their classroom arsenal.

People, it is time to give working staplers to every teacher. The benefits and advantages of having a working stapler in the classroom are unmatched. They keep things in line, they’re there in an emergency, and an entire office’s paper joining needs can be dealt with by one good guy with a working stapler.

That all said, I have never had a working stapler. Well, they work for an hour or two and then mystically jam. One of my colleagues says he wrote a paper on a middle school in Guam which had a working stapler that lasted for years without botching one staple attempt. But I don’t believe it. I’ll see Saint Francis’ likeness in a burrito before I see a permanent working stapler.

You know how school bureaucracy is, and bringing staplers into things just stirred up the maelstrom. We brought it up at the meeting and asked for a working stapler. (And by we, I mean I. A meeting made up of Czechs and Brits means that none of the Czechs will ever complain and if the British guy does, nobody who’s not British realizes they’re actually complaining, and instead think he’s just complimenting the cheese platter. So they always leave it to the bloody American, who’s too dull for nuance.)

Upon the request, the department head informed us that he was not a miracle worker. “What would we want next,” he asked, “livable wages?!” We all laughed at that one for a good while. Tears. Our disappointment was slightly ameliorated by the promise of a better printer to replace the printer we then had, which worked fine. As for the working stapler, he suggested that we get some of those plastic folios, because there wasn’t any money in the budget for a working stapler, or, as it turned out, those plastic folios. If we wanted a working stapler, we’d have to bring our own from home.

Read the rest of this entry »

February 14^th was the day Phillies pitchers and catchers reported for spring training this year. It should be a national holiday. Valentine’s Day can go fuck itself, people should buy cards and candies celebrating the fact that baseball season is around the corner.

Pitchers and catchers is start of the holiday season.

To the non-sports fan, the outside observer, a baseball game is just a football game that doesn’t stop every eight seconds for a commercial. Just another three hour period during which the fan in their lives looks at a TV and drinks beer and yells profanities. But to anyone who celebrates both, baseball is a whole different experience. It’s played at night. There’s no clock. It’s slower and longer. It’s filled with contemplation, discussion, humor. The drama builds and sometimes the excitement comes out of nowhere. The coaches aren’t complete assholes (I know. I know). And there’s no John Madden. Violence and injuries are unusual.

Baseball season is just as different. It’s played during the spring and the summer, when the days are longer and the mood is more optimistic and warm. The games often start in daylight and end in the wee hours. The season is a marathon, it’s long and it’s played almost every day of the week. A day without a Phillies game leaves you scrambling for another game. Fortunately, there’s always a game to watch somewhere.

Baseball evokes a whole set of images, sensations, and memories. The snap of the first pitch hitting the catcher’s mitt. Starting with a one-two-three inning. Realizing in the fourth inning that the opposition hasn’t had a hit yet, and knowing that everyone else in the room knows it too. And eternal damnation to anyone who brings it up. Baseball is a game filled with stories and anecdotes. Names like Dutch, Chase, and Schmitty. Brad Lidge on his knees on the mound. Rose assisting Boone near the first base dugout. Watching a day game during a barbecue, eating too many hotdogs and drinking a freezing cold beer. Sitting in the living room watching a night game in June or July, the crickets and chatter of summer outside the window. Catching highlights in the morning over a bowl of cereal. A scrub player stroking a double down the line and forgiving him all of his previous transgressions. Baseball is the closest I come to prayer.

In any event. Play ball!

Stanley doing what Stanley liked to do most

About three months ago, a friend from the Old Country wrote me:

Hey, Kid B is doing this thing called Flat Stanley. Could you help out?

Me: Sure. What does it entail?

FFOC: You take him around to places of interests and you take some pictures. Then you write a little story and send that along some pictures about his “adventures.”

Me: Yeah, sure! Sounds interesting. (I’d been drinking a little) Send him along.

Stanley arrived two weeks later in an envelope. A letter stowed with Stanley informed me of his traumatic past. Stanley was crushed during a horrendous industrial accidental and has henceforth been known as Flat Stanley. I thought it cruel to openly mock a person for his physical impairments; I endeavored to be as hospitable as possible.

My hospitality for some weeks entailed keeping Stanley in his envelope on my bookshelf and periodically casting a guilty glance in his direction and saying: “Aw fucker. I gotta get to that.”

My procrastination was such that I was forced to face the music at one point and write a message to my friend (from the old country).

Me: Hey man, I’ve been busy. Do you mind if I keep Flat Stanley for a few more weeks?

FFOC: No rush and no problem! Take your time!

I breathed a sigh of relief and, like most people who have been granted amnesty after intense procrastination, I procrastinated some more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Date: February 22, 2017 18

Time: 6:21 a.m.

Emotional & Mental Stability (1-10 scale)

4.6

3 Positive Affirmations

1. Most people consistently compliment your hair
2. Nobody can read your mind
3. You are not a Republican

3 MITs (most important tasks)

• Go to meeting
• Pretend to listen at meeting
• Don’t kill yourself in/after meeting

3 Daily Goals  

1. Be nice to people
2. Show an interest in others (for realz)
3. Don’t accidentally poke out eyes

Rewards for Goals attained and Tasks Fulfilled

A hotdog

Crib Notes for Navigating Today’s Shit Storm of Human Interaction

Read the rest of this entry »

If you are traveling home after midnight on trams, there’s a 97% chance you’ll be at Lazarská at some point. On the night tram schedule, Lazarská seems to be the center of the tram universe. It is also home to a pub that is hidden in plain sight. It’s right on the main road, it even has a sign. And though I have been there a few hundred times, my eyes still scroll past it a couple of times before locking in on it. It’s like trying to see the hidden image in one of those hologram paintings. We call it the Lazarská Joint.

I find myself at the Lazarská Joint in the same situation. It’s always late (often after midnight), so all of the other pubs in the city of Prague have been shut down under the time-obsessive tyranny of dictatorial waiters. I am usually with my buddy L. And despite the fact that the pub I’d been at has closed, we have decided that instead of going home, we just need one more. The Lazarská Joint is the “one more” place.

It’s Tuesday. Heading to the Lazarská Joint ensures that the next day will be awful. I know it. L knows it. But we are too engaged in conversation or having too much fun, or we are simply not willing to give up the ghost of the night to turn it in quite yet. This is around the time L comes out with proverbs like “in for a penny in for a pound” or “might as well be hanged as a sheep for a lamb.” And this is all it takes to talk me into one more, thus rendering my next day an achy period of vast confusion.

But at about 12ish a.m. when we find a table at the Lazarská Joint none of that matters yet.

Read the rest of this entry »

My little part of Prague is like a hidden gem. It’s out of the center but close to it, it’s quiet, green, and dotted with places which offer beer to weary travelers. What might be considered drawbacks of my location is that I am in between two hills. One that goes up and one that goes down. Also I have to walk to get anywhere. While some of my friends live (literally) upstairs from a market or a(n again, literal) stone’s throw to a tram stop, I have to walk at least six or seven minutes to get anywhere. I have learned to spin this into a positive direction and look at it as something that has helped me stay fit, heart healthy, and out of motorized scooters and Walmart memes.

The walk to the metro is about twelve minutes. It was during this walk that about a month ago, along a little row of houses across from a nearby cemetery, that I first met the dog. It is a large German shepherd. I also know that he is bad-tempered and that his bark is terrifying. And, while I can’t be certain, I would say that his goal in life is to one day literally scare the shit out of me.

The fence sits on the edge of the sidewalk and because the yard is raised, the dog barked at me the first time from inches away from my face and at a terrible consistency and volume. I made a sound that I will never relate to another human and jumped and reacted in a way that isn’t getting me into war dispatches anytime soon.

The second time he got me I was coming the other direction a few days later. This time he erupted into the left side of my face. I jumped and my heart went into worrying palpitations. I then, admittedly, ran away.

Read the rest of this entry »