Damien Galeone

It’s Saturday morning around 8 am – a fact evident on the five clocks on various devices in the living room. Otherwise, there’s nothing to suggest it’s morning. The sky is just now going from a pitch-black midnight to a dark, impenetrable, the-rapture-came-and-went-and-you-weren’t-chosen gray. I walked the dog in the middle of the night, or, in technical terms, 7:40 am.

It’s been gray and foggy since mid-November, so this is nothing new. It comes and goes each year like this, though this year does seem particularly glum. There’s the period between early November and mid-January when the daylight allotted the citizens of the Czech Republic does not survive the workday. I have been here before, but it is disconcerting to hear traffic when it seems that everyone should be in bed. It’s as though something has happened and we won’t find out until Dave Bautista and Ron weaselly knock on my door.

Nevertheless, it’s Saturday morning and even though it’s in December we try to do our normal things. The coffee boils. We put something on the TV and chat about the day ahead and the week behind. Today’s plan: do nothing. I have just crawled out of two weeks of extreme busyness, a perfect storm of writing, editing, planning, teaching, and making ESL materials. Everyone needs something in December. It seems to be a rule. Next weekend I have to teach an intensive course all day Saturday, so this weekend I will spend it doing nothing.  

By 11ish, the light has gone from dark gray to neutral gray. It’s quiet. Out of the 7 zillion options on our various streaming sites, I settle on a movie that’s an adapted Roald Dahl story starring Benedict Cumberbatch. I love all of those elements and put it on. However, I soon realize that the film was directed by Wes Anderson, who no longer make movies featuring human people speaking how humans speak. So, in a very short while, I am overcome with the deeply confusing anxiety that can only come from watching a Wes Anderson movie made after 2014. Nowadays, it’s timeless pastels and dialogue which sounds like nobody on the planet earth has ever spoken aloud. This causes something like a reverse epilepsy wrapped in a deep dread.

I give up in twelve and hand the remote over to Burke, who goes for a true crime show that gives me the shivers. I retreat to bed with my book. The book is about a brutal murder in France, but there’s a lot of cheese, so I can deal with the evisceration which starts the book. The dog and the cat follow quickly and embed themselves in the nooks my body parts create. They get cozy. I pretend my bladder doesn’t exist and isn’t fifty years old. It’s around 1 pm, the lightest it’s going to be today and I try to soak it all in.      

I have learned something about myself in my old age: I hate going out and doing things. Fortunately, I live in a time and day in which people can bring me groceries, booze, and medicine. Others bring me just about anything I want to order Ye Olde Frontier Amazon Shoppe.

To entertain myself, my TV carries, in one way or another, just about every movie or show ever made in history. I can hear music from the heretofore unreachable and grimy catacombs of music’s past. Nobody is safe: not Bob Dylan, not Bob Dylan’s son, not Bob Dylan’s friends. I can hear them all. Moreover, anyone I want to talk to (who also wishes to speak to me) is available on my computer box. I call them and up they pop on my computer. We talk and while we talk, I drink some of my home-delivered booze while a movie from 1967 plays quietly on my TV. It’s a good setup.

I recently became aware of the importance of glasses to my overall health and ability to see things like whiteboards, computer screens, and charging trucks. I fretted, for this all but guaranteed a visit to some place where someone would touch my face and watch me look stupid with different shapes decorating my eyeballs. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

“It’s OK,” Burke said. “You can order them online now.”

“Ooh,” I added gracefully to the conversation. “Whoops, be right back – that’s Rolik with our groceries.”

September 8 1974, Snake River Canyon, Idaho. A battered dude named Evel Knievel straddles a Skycycle X-2 at the base of a ramp. 1600 feet away across the canyon is the ramp’s twin. No motorcycle can make that jump, so the Skycycle is a skyrocket rigged to blast him across. He revs and starts up the ramp. His red-white-and-blue starred white jumpsuit and cape make him look like Captain America after some questionable life choices. 3.5 million spectators watch at home and another 15,000 people have crowded the canyon area to see the spectacle. What everyone is about to see is as American as apple pie and unaffordable healthcare.  

We humans have long enjoyed spectacle. Droves gathered in the Colosseum to watch humans maul and brain each other. In the UK, families would pack a lunch and go watch the public executions or public punishments. Nothing complements a fruit cup and a ham sandwich like the sound of someone’s spine snapping on the rack. In Elizabethan London, dog and bear baiting were rabidly enjoyed by a drooling audience. Sometimes the bear would break loose of their chains and turn on the audience. All in the price of the ticket.   

So, when Europeans showed up in the New World, they brought their inherent want of spectacle. And this was fortuitous because America was filled with things of size and grandeur. Canyons, waterfalls, cliffs, rivers, animals, party subs. So it was only a matter of time before someone recognized the opportunities within this grandeur to entertain people and make money. After all, there’s little point in having a grand canyon unless we can pay to watch someone jump off of it. Thus arose a profession aimed at entertaining spectators at the doer’s peril. The dare devil.

The dare devil specialized in climbing up, walking over, or jumping off high things in front of a crowd. In 1859, Charles Blondin became the first person to visit Niagara Falls and pointed out that what was missing from this natural wonder was a man walking above it on a very narrow rope. A mistake he corrected. In 1901, a schoolteacher named Annie Taylor celebrated her 63^rd birthday by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel she designed – but not before testing out the barrel on her cat. Both survived. Taylor was a widower and her barrel stunt was to lead to financial security for the remainder of her life. Unfortunately, her manager stole her barrel and ran off to Chicago (the traditional destination for barrel thieves). She spent the money she’d made trying to track it down. In the end, she had nothing and had made an enemy for life in her cat. She should have just moonlighted as an Uber driver like all the other teachers.  

At the forefront of America’s early dare devil craze was Jersey Sam Patch. Dubbed the Jersey Jumper, in the early 1820s Patch had made a name for himself jumping from a mill into a reservoir. Noting his rise in popularly, he moved up to jumping off waterfalls. At Niagara Falls, he jumped from Goat Island into the roiling waters below. People came from far and paid to watch him jump. But Patch was more than a jumper; he was the forerunner of Knievel in his swagger and personality. He was witty and vocal. A wit evidently lost in his most famous and blindingly bland aphorism ‘Some things can be done as well as others’. He walked around towns in all white clothing (in the early 1820s, this was like going to a bar wearing a solar system diorama on your head). He had a pet black bear. According to the flyers for his jumps, sometimes the black bear jumped too. Like Annie Taylor’s cat, the black bear probably wondered where it had all gone wrong for him.

I’m walking into my doctor’s office. It’s 7:45 am. I am carrying a vial of my own mountain-sourced, mineral-rich, pristine, untouched urine. The nurse greets me warmly. She eyes up my arm and accepts my warm bottle of urine. She points me to a chair.

My arm is tied off at the bicep and I am told to exercise to work up a vein. In any other time or place this wouldn’t be hard. I learned the trick as a kid: let your arm dangle, squeeze fist rapidly, and suddenly you look like Stallone in Rocky. But in the early morning, my veins seem to have a sixth sense about being tapped and they are shy. They have descended into the sunken place and watch in quiet as the nurse probes. The nurse has none of it. She prods until a little blue earthworm appears. She goes in with her needle and hooks in her venom vials. I become interested in the clock.  

She takes my blood pressure and nods at the numbers.

‘It’s a little high.’

‘Um.’ I am fairly sure that 145 is never a good number unless it’s the score of a basketball team you have bet for.

‘You are nervous, you just gave blood,’ she says. I finished off her list of excuses ‘and I walked here [pause for effect] from IP!’

‘Oh, pbbt,’ she scoffs our concern. ‘The doctor will be here at 8.’

Despite our nerve-quelling dialogue, the hot second my ass hits the chair in the waiting room I consult Dr. Google to find out about blood pressures. According to Dr. Google, 145 is not a number you want anywhere near a blood pressure unless it belongs to your arch-nemesis and he lives next to Dennis the Menace.

On Saturday afternoon I go out with the doggy. We step out and we are instantly engulfed in a thick, soupy mist. I can’t see the metro station – which is enormous and only about 100 yards away. After a few more steps the dog looks back at me with a ‘really?’ look on her face. I shrug at her and we move forth.

After a few more yards still we cannot see either the metro or the building – both too large to lose while being immediately nearby and not drunk on absinthe. Though I don’t put much direct thought into it, something about the scenario seems familiar. Something scary is lingering at the edges of my thought process.

But I shake away these misgivings. We’re in our front park, for Pete’s sake. And it’s Saturday at around 2 pm – Cheat Day! What could go wrong on Cheat Day? Only a monster would kill a man on the day he can eat whatever he wants. Only a monster.

And that’s when I realize what I’m reminded about – just about every horror movie I have ever seen. The one that particularly concerns me is Stephen King’s The Mist. If you haven’t seen this feelgood charmer, it’s about a group of strangers that get caught inside a grocery store together when a mist swallows their town and moves them into an alternate dimension (or moves an alternate dimension’s residents to this one). Anyone who goes into the mist dies – badly, and at the hands of other-dimensional spiders.   

I am now in the mist. Like, well into the mist. I begin looking at the ground and its environs. I mistook a plastic bag for a giant spider. When I bump into a trashcan I nearly had a heart attack. My shih tzu is not the kind of dog known to fight off other-dimensional poisonous spiders. And neither am I. Since it’s 2 pm and November in Prague, it’s going to get dark soon. I pick the dog up and we run home. Once inside, I breathe a sigh.       

Like most of you, I am relatively susceptible to horror movies. When I was a kid, we watched Friday the 13^th at a neighbor’s house. To get home from this neighbor’s home, we had to walk through a forest. I came very close to gripping a tree and sending for my mother. This terror made itself known to me a few years later when I saw Nightmare on Elm Street with a buddy. I was underage and so was he, but his parents got us in the Eric 4 Feasterville and we felt like such big boys. That is, of course, until I went home later with a glazed mustache of movie theater popcorn and realized that I had to fall asleep. See, the catch 22 of dealing with one Mr. Frederick Kreuger is that he gets you in your dreams when you are asleep. You can’t win. I hope the guy who came up with that one has a beach house. But I also hope it’s infested with Stephen King’s spiders.

This is the fun of horror movies – the tension it creates. What could be better than being one abrupt sound – a phone-ring, a sneeze, a door-knock – away from screeching at the top of your lungs? In the movie, this tension is released by the scare, the jump, the graphic visual of a hockey-masked psychopath slicing a bikini-clad teen open with a machete. You know, the norm.

But when you get home and the girl from The Ring lurks behind each door, there’s nothing there to release the tension. Sure, you could argue that there is no real tension there because, well, you know, the girl from The Ring isn’t behind my door (right? Right?!!), but still. Horror movies are the gift that keep on giving. And so I have come to terms with the facts that every camping trip reminds me that The Hills Have Eyes. Every stay at a hotel reminds me that every boy’s best friend is his mother. Every fun afternoon at a warm beach in summertime reminds me that I thought it was safe to go back into the water. Then I look for fins. Every jaunt to an arctic research station is marred by some Thing.

Later on in the evening, I subtly try to barter doing dishes for bringing out the dog. I’ll give anything to avoid the outside, the mist isn’t gone – it’s just dark now. However, Burke has designs to hold onto the dish job. I finally relent. As I am getting on my shoes, she puts out a peace offering.   

“Here, look at this shih tzu. It looks like Maisy, but a little wonkier.”

The picture is a shih tzu who has the same white and gray markings my dog has, but this one has matted fur and a tail that has seen better days. My shih tzu’s crooked teeth look a little like a graveyard. This shih tzu’s teeth are so crooked it could pick its nose with its bottom canines. And while my pup has a wonky shih tzu eye, this one is so cross-eyed it could read two different newspapers on opposite walls. Basically, it looks like a cute shih tzu who’s seen some shit.  

“Cute!”

I leave with the dog.

Downstairs, I text Burke: It’s like Maisy’s ‘Us’ dog.

PJ and I sat huddled over my ballot in early October. We were at his kitchen table. His daughter came close, a melting chocolate bar painting her fingers.

“No!” we both shrieked, setting off a lifelong and terribly specific phobia.

“Nothing can go wrong with this one.” We were one second away from slipping on rubber gloves and using tweezers and a glue pad to lick the stamp. We both wanted a beer, but would not dare compromise sobriety before this ballot was in the hands of a postal engineer. When we had completed the surgical application of ballot to secret envelope, secret envelope to envelope, and envelope to my bag, we let out a breath. I went to the post office and prayed for an accidentally good day from the Czech Post Office.

I know it’s cliched at this point, but this is the most important election of my lifetime. And it doesn’t really have anything to do with Republican vs. Democrat. It’s the fact that Donald Trump is a walking bag of feces from any animal you’d care to name. He is the most miserable person who has ever walked the planet.

He’s a billionaire – he was born into a billionaire family – and he never stops complaining. Everyone is against him. He’s marauded by all. Dems. Crooked Hillary. Sleepy Joe. Little Marco. Lyin’ Ted. Low Energy Jeb. (Also Dems and their voters are thieves, scum, and garbage, but Dog forbid if someone on our side calls his people that.) He’s a charlatan, stupid, allergic to reason and intelligence, and in the last decade he hasn’t made one successfully coherent thought out loud. His ‘speeches’ sound like Captain Beefheart lyrics read backwards underwater in ancient Babylonian. When Donald talks, he sounds how a snake regurgitating another snake looks. On top of this, he is human herpes. He does not stop and he will not go away. He is an unrelenting source – day in, day out – of grievances, hate, anger, and attacks. I have never cast eyes on a Tweet in which he simply wishes someone a happy birthday, congratulates a team on a victory, sends out a positive message to the world. Everything has a carve, a swirl, an attack. Merry Christmas, even to the CROOKED Dems, who are trying to LIE THEIR WAY TO A VICTORY WHEN IT’S CLEAR IT WAS RIGGED! Also, happy New Year. But not to Shifty Schiff and Crazy Bernie!

Ten years of this. The exhaustion is overwhelming.

It’s a Friday on a long weekend. Joy is ebullient within the flat. Even the dog and cat are getting along (i.e. not shrieking at each other). Lurking in the back of my head are my evening plans. Hiding behind that is the joy of knowing that for the rest of the weekend I have no plans at all.

I am not sure when it happens as you age or, as my pretend mental therapist Julio calls it, ‘careening towards your final just desserts’. But I view plans as a direct, almost personal insult. It should be nice to get invited places. But I just can’t see it like that. My Friday plans were all pleasant and involved nothing more taxing than getting together for dinner and drinks with a couple of friends. I didn’t even need to wear underwear. And yet, at the appointed time I slogged out of my house and limped towards the metro. I cursed my primate ancestors that decided social behavior was a developmental imperative. I had just taken off my pjs.

Burke always says ‘you’ll have fun when you’re there’ or ‘you’ll be happy when you get there’ and she’s always, infuriatingly right about that. I had a wonderful time and sure enough my Friday plans even enhanced the rest of the weekend’s inaction. But still. I never knew that aging meant making plans and then praying for a natural disaster to force them to cancel. For the three hours before I go out to meet friends (again, friends, not colleagues I don’t like, not my boss – friends) I look at my phone with thumbs held and fingers crossed. ‘Come on, come on, a call from the governor’. Nothing. Drat.

Sometimes I accidentally reflect of myself as a young person. After I recover from the three-minutes’ worth of shuddering and wincing this elicits, I sit in awe. I used to work as a bartender – at night. Not only at night, but until like 3 a.m. And then I would go somewhere with my bartender buddies and have drinks until around 5 a.m. Here’s the kicker: On the nights I didn’t bartend, I still went to a bar and I stayed there all night (or until one of my eyes gave up the ghost and crossed the other’s line of vision like a broken desk lamp). It’s almost impossible for me to comprehend my young actions now. I had a flat full of books, a DVD collection (yes, I’m that old. Even some VHS cassettes!). And yet, instead of stay in that house and read and recline on a couch in a body that didn’t yet creak and bones that didn’t yet ache just because it’s October, I went out. The FOMO was strong in me.  

When I started college in the early 1990s, drinking was part of the deal. We lived in the Pitt freshman dorms – the Towers, which had rooms shaped like Trivial Pursuit game pieces. For this reason the six pieces of furniture we were given between two people just couldn’t quite fit. This in itself made drinking a way of coping.

So when I was busted for drinking the night before my freshman year began, I wish I had had that excuse in my back pocket – as opposed to my student ID. But we get over this.

What I didn’t know at the time, of course, was that this problem had existed since universities in America were a thing. Edgar Allan Poe ran up debts at the University of Virginia because of his relationship with booze. While trying to get thrown out of West Point later on, he found that booze gave him the license to help purvey that goal and helped him show up to formation drunk and naked and since the army doesn’t love individualism, you know. Thomas Jefferson left the responsibility of drinking up to the students and then burst into tears months later in front of them when he realized just how bad of an idea this was. According to one student’s diary, it was not unusual to see students so drunk that they couldn’t walk to class. It was probably best for all involved that they didn’t get there.

Young people experiencing freedom for the first time often experiment with booze and realized that these things go together like peanut butter and jelly – gin mixed with tonic. The fact that they aren’t allowed to do it makes it all the more fun and all the more mythical. Smuggling cans of beer under a resident assistant’s nose was a wee thrill. Getting into a bar at nineteen was like being entered into a new world. These feelings don’t change, no matter when they happened. 

Enter Prohibition. 1920. America. Now, drinking isn’t a thing young students can’t do, it’s a thing Americans can’t do.

Just as the rules of not drinking bring out the ingenuity of young wannabe drinkers, Prohibition brought out the ingenuity of American wannabe drinkers. In New England this was especially true given its proximity to Canada, a country which – say what you want about it – never lost its mind enough to prohibit drinking. And so towns and cities in Canada became the T-Town of 1920s America. They would cross at the border, get drunk, and come back. Others used connecting mountain roads and lake passes to smuggle booze into the US. Divers in the early 2000s have found huge caches of booze in Vermont’s Lake Memphremagog that had been ditched nearly ninety years before. Lighthouses were used as distribution points. Boats and fishing vessels used fake compartments to bring alcohol to the New England’s harbors. Shopkeepers used baby bottles (nipples and all) to sell covert flasks of whiskey.

New England itself (has) had an age-old relationship with do-it-yourself booze. Since the Mayflower showed up and spooked local residents, New Englanders have been making booze from things they found nearby their homes. Apples. Pumpkins. Turnips. So, for the US government in 1920 to suddenly up and tell them to stop brewing beer and cider was nonsense.

The only gifts I remember getting as a kid were of the GI Joe realm or Castle Grayskull. What I remember more clearly is that my gifts were always wrapped in the Sunday comics, a thing which made the inside spoils all the more enjoyable to dig towards. There was a birthday at Angelo’s Italian Restaurant I seem to recall, maybe my eleventh or so. I remember thinking when I noticed the stained-glass lamps over the tables I have clearly made it.

When I was thirteen birthdays began to get a little more complicated. This was because I didn’t know what I wanted. When I was a child, it was much simpler. I wanted to go outside with my Gi Joes and play like the kids in the commercials. Then a bunch of birthdays after that were connected to trying to drink, drinking, and then wondering I drank.

Twenty-one was fine. But even that night – along with what Jagermeister tastes like on the way out – I knew it was all downhill after that.

Thirty? Pbbt. Forty? Who cares.

People kept claiming knowledge of some inspiration I would get. At thirty I’d be just so confident. At forty I would no longer care what other people think about me.

I have worn sweatpants to a bar unironically – before it was the cool thing to do. So I imaging that at some point, when I don’t know, I attained the gift of who gives a crap and have maintained a rather hands-off concern with what people thought of me.

I doubled down on this in my late forties when I became a lapdog guy and began carrying around a Shih tzu in a little bag. If I don’t have a little bag, I carry her across my chest and I talk to her – to be clear these are full-on, concrete, information-based conversations. I do not think she answers me, but I don’t seem like that if you see me.

So by the time fifty rolled around, I was more or less ready for the change in tone regarding birthdays. ‘You’ll be free, man!’ changed into ‘You’re in the old man club now, boy!’ and ‘You’re not gonna have a care in the world’ morphed into ‘Have you been to the doctor recently?’

There’s a great debate in my house at the moment. It centers around October and its rank among the months.

Burke is a summer girl (birthday in late June). She likes light at 4:30 am. She loves the green and the sun and the long, long days. She likes having the option of swimming outdoors. A beer is made 30 to 40 times better when it is guzzled outside while the dog lounges in the grass nearby.

These things, I can totally get.

But I am an autumn boy (birthday in mid-October). I like slightly shorter days that involve deep blue afternoons. I like chilly days that don’t go below 50ish and don’t go above 70ish. I like wearing a sweater and knowing all will be well. I don’t swim much, but I do love a walk on a cool day with wind and the bark of rain that never really bites. A beer is made 30 to 40 times better when had in a warm pub after a brisk walk in the cool afternoon air.

These things, she doesn’t get at all.

But I say October is the best month. The shock of summer’s end hits you in September. By October, you have accepted the inevitable horror of reality and are ready to sally forth into the autumn and (gasp) the winter. So you just enjoy what’s happening. The leaves changing, the cooling weather. The whole world gets quieter (as long as you aren’t reading political news or listening to the unrelenting stream of shit that comes out of the wrong end of Donald Trump). Whiskey tastes better in October. So does dark beer. I am a closet pumpkin fan in that I don’t order pumpkin-spiced anything, but will nod a cheers of support to anyone in my vicinity doing so. Same goes for apples. Another point in October’s favor is the associated holidays. I mean, who doesn’t love the Fourth of July, but there’s no competition against the triumvirate of holidays that October purveys.