Damien Galeone

About two years ago, I gave up the word hate. Similar to its cousin love, I found that I was using hate too often and inaccurately. I don’t hate mushrooms, I just don’t eat them. I further found that using hate too often, made me feel negative. To instantly use it as my go-to reaction was too easy and just made things more unpleasant than they needed to be.

So for two years, I have lived hate free.

After long and careful consideration, I have decided to take the word hate out of retirement to say this:

I Hate Donald Trump.

And you do too.

Even if you are voting for him, you hate him. Just think about it.

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One of the benefits of being in my forties is that I find I am a much smarter person. This is not wisdom, so much as it’s just the result of forty years worth of accumulated observations.

Here are some of them.

If someone has to tell you they’re good at something, they are not.

Everyone will like you more if you dance like an idiot.

Nobody on Earth will ever be able to fully justify why I was forced to study trigonometry in the 11^th grade.

Everyone has directly engaged their genitals in a conversation at least once in their lives.

I have been to roughly 1,390 meetings in the last twenty-six years. Eight of them have been useful.

The only person who can ruin a harmless joke by taking it too seriously than a staunch conservative is a staunch liberal.

There is no correct answer to these questions: Does this make me look fat? or Who are you voting for?

Nobody cares about your dreams. Nobody. Not even your psychotherapist.

If there is a God, I am fucked.

Before you send a naughty message to a crush, jerk off.

Everyone turns into their parents; then they go “aha.”

I’ve learned more of a second language in stressful situations than I ever have in a classroom.

As astoundingly bad, stupid, ignorant, and downright insane you think Donald Trump is, someone worse than him is going to show up in 8 years.

If George Carlin and Bill Hicks were alive Donald Trump would have committed suicide by now.

Cats are vindictive.

Pigeons are dicks.

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When an adult hears some variation of the phrases: killer clowns terrorizing children sweeping nation, and he is not watching a B Horror Movie or an episode of The Simpsons, then something is afoot.

There is no way this is actually a thing, I thought. It must be an internet rumor. Something like this can’t be sweeping the nation.

But then it turned out to be true, in fact, that people dressed as killer clowns are following children around and scaring them. Not with balloons or seemingly endless links of hankies, but with honest to goodness threatening scare tactics. One knife-wielding clown jumped out from behind a bush to scare a bunch of children walking to school. Other clowns carrying around small knives have been reported by children all over English and the U.S.

Children

Another pair of clowns pulled up in a van and invited a few young girls to a birthday party before speeding away.

Um. What?

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It happened on a Tuesday. “I’m in a bad mood,” I wrote to a friend.

“Well,” she said, “if it makes you feel any better, I just came across a friend’s husband on Tinder.”

Not entirely sure why someone else’s misfortune in the form of a cheating husband would brighten my mood, I didn’t answer. Rather, I sought solace in mindless sitcoms and the adding of cheese to ground beef. I literally grumbled around my flat until it was time to sleep.

The Tinder thing kept coming back to me, though. Undoubtedly it is a tempting resource for those looking for play on the side. It is, after all, a Rolodex of single, pretty people within 10 miles of you. However, your understanding of reality has to be a bit lacking if you don’t think you’re going to get caught trolling for a rendezvous partner.

There are fail safes. I think one can hide their profile from a specific variety of possible swipers. I think it’s also possible to block your profile from being viewed at all, so that you can essentially window shop for a mistress with a mask on.

But overall, it just seems like a thing that’s going to blow up in your face. One of your partner’s friends or loved ones is bound to see you on there and if you are married or in a long-term relationship and polygamy or Tinder aren’t part of the deal, you are going to have a lot of explaining to do.

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I was a Libra up until a month ago. It was then that I saw a list of the “New Astrological Signs,” which that hussy sign Ophiuchus caused by showing up on our astrological doorstep.

While I have never been a devotee of our astrological guidance systems, I felt unsure about the news that I was no longer a Libra. It was as if I’d found that I was really from Dallas and not Philadelphia. In astrological terms, I spent 41.9 years as a Libra and 1 month as a Virgo.

I’d gotten used to being a Libra. It was comfortable being the only inanimate sign. I was the scales, just, balanced, diplomatic, and social.

To be frank, it never made a difference. It’s not as if I ever explained my dislike of loudmouths or my enjoyment of the outdoors by saying “Well, you know, I’m a Libra.” I never once offered my Libran tendencies as an excuse for why I’m indecisive or why I avoid confrontations.

But still, I was a fraud.

Now I have to be a Virgo. Worse still, I have to learn how to be a Virgo.

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Can I get a shot?

I am sitting in my local pub. No surprise there, they have a table dedicated to me. We are at a table near an open window which looks out from below ground level onto a walking path. The weather is still almost summer-like, so the Czechs don’t mind a draft of warm air invading their drinking environment. In four days, this will not be the case.

The first kid peers in from the window with curiosity. He stares wide-eyed at us as we sip our beers. I try to say the things you say to a kid who is openly staring at you: Hey buddy. Hello. How are you? I run out of things pretty quick and the kid bursts into tears. Fortunately the mother comes to take him away moments after the kid’s screeching wails interrupted her phone call.

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Not Pictured: Weeping Photographer

“I want to see some Japanese tourists cry,” says my sister.

We’re in Paris. Now, like most grown adults, I yearn to see Japanese people weep, but this is just one of those utterances you are completely unprepared for.

What would you like for dinner? The head of a human boy stuffed in a gopher’s kidney. Will you be home tomorrow? No I’m going to the moon tomorrow. What do you want to do in Paris? I want to see some Japanese tourists cry.

We’re walking towards the Eiffel Tower along Avenue Marceau when my sister relates this goal. We have just enjoyed a baguette on a bench across from the Arc de Triomphe, which I suppose was pretty Triomphe but for the traffic, the fender bender, and subsequent shouting match in French, which is just hilarious to behold.

The baguette was stale.

In the moment before I ask what the hell she’s talking about, I recall that she also expressed an intense desire to punt a pigeon across Trafalgar Square. And the day before, she bet me how many times the American girl at the table next to us would use the word “like” as a comma.

It was 29.

I won.

So there’s a precedent for her odd choice in holiday leisure activities.

Kick a pigeon.

Wager on an American’s discourse marker ineptitude.

See Japanese tourists cry.

“OK,” I say, “Why…exactly?”

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As I walk up the steps in front of the few hundred guests and students, I am giving myself two orders over and over again:

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Look austere. Don’t fall down.

Graduation robes are not made for short people. They are long and awkward. So while my hands are folded in front of me in a pose of academic integrity, they are really holding the robe up above my shoes. I am wearing a huge beret-like cap that belongs on Venetian merchant travelers who have water sports named after them.

Looking austere is not difficult. To look austere, one must appear to be unaffected, unimpressed, and intensely meditating a crime against humanity. Or math. Whatever the face, smiles don’t seem to be accepted academic fashion, and so I consider the plight of the Hopi Indians and step slowly.

It’s graduation day. I have been asked to represent the foreign languages department. It’s raining. I would bite the head off a live block of tofu to be in bed reading, but instead I dress as Dumbledore and tell myself not to fall down and to look austere.

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“Dinner!” my mother shouts upstairs to me.

“I’ll be down in 7 and a half minutes.”

“OK.”

When my mom asks about the seemingly random time, I explain that I was finishing a Pomodoro. She nods and hands me a bowl of asparagus. She doesn’t want to hear about this again, and is suggesting that I fill my mouth with food.

I have been quoting time in Pomodoros the last few days to the point where I may sound like the Count from Sesame Street.

“I have done three, three Pomodoros! Mwahahahaha!”

But you see, it’s necessary.

I have been in the U.S, or as I like to call it, Utopia, for two weeks now. I have spent some hectic days lounging on a rocking chair, reading, and greeting my dad’s patients as they arrive for teeth cleaning and root canals. When my mom gets home, she makes dinner and I bother her with questions about her day as she huffs around the kitchen cooking me things. Tis a grand life.

When I am visiting home my schedule is that of a retired beach bum. I am on vacation, I am treated like royalty by my parents, and it is as hot as hell’s space heater. Ideally, my mornings involve a good workout and writing, leaving my afternoons free to read and watch the Phillies get killed. However, I am sometimes carried away on the wings of lackadaisical slovenliness inherent to the summer vacation.

It’s on those lackadaisical days I speak in vague, lazy terms. I did a little writing. I did some work. I tried to get a bit done. It’s also these days whose events I can’t remember or whether they involved a shower.

Something needed to change. And it was on one lucky day in the middle of August that I stumbled upon Pomodoro, which is a time management system that entails focusing on one task for specific periods of time.

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