Damien Galeone

I’m about to walk into my Tuesday evening class when I get a buzz in my pocket. I check it.

New Tinder Match!

Oh that’s nice. I take a quick look at the match. It’s a pretty-ish woman in her early 30s. A nurse. Traveler. Before I can put my phone back into my pocket, she sends me a message. It reads:

dtf?

I groan. An acronym. Oh goodie.

I guess I will be communicating with this person in letters and signs. I am 41, not young enough to be fluent in textspeak, netspeak, Tindercode or whatever the hell is going on here. Can’t she just write me in a language I understand, like English, Czech, or sarcasm? And what the hell does dtf mean?

Before I can put any thought into deciphering it, class begins.

It’s mid May, so my head is elsewhere. It’s everywhere. Or anywhere. It’s sort of like the Matrix if the Matrix was tired and desperately holding onto its sanity until summer holiday. This is not uncommon at this time of the summer semester. I am tired. They are tired. Everyone is tired.

While the students are on a task in the middle of class, I take the opportunity to look up one or two collocations on my tablet. I note them down and it comes to mind again. dtf? I look it up.

Down to Fuck?

Aha.

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The American Sector

Maria and I saunter up to the bar and take a seat. I don’t normally sit at the bar in pubs or restaurants anymore, as it’s very much against Czech custom. So this is a bit of a novelty; but it’s a novelty befitting the pub itself.

We are in a hamburger joint in Vinohrady, so in effect we’re in an American place in little America. Burger joints are a major American influence on Czech gastronomy and Vinohrady is a section of Prague jokingly referred to as the “American Sector” since it’s home to so many American expats.

The staff all speak fluent English and the menu features not only burgers, but a variety of cocktails not normally encountered in Czech pubs.

We might as well have stumbled into a burger place in Maple Point, New Jersey.

The American accent is ubiquitous here, flying around the room like flak. Maria gives me a flat look and instantly “does her American.”

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If Ringo could do it, so can you

I am sitting in front of two students and I am holding a pen above a class register and I am not moving. I am squinting into the recesses of my brain, past what I want for lunch, beyond the reason I was irritated with my boss this morning, through the frustrations of finding a plot hole in a book I’ve been writing for two years.

And then I find it: the date. “Oh yeah,” I say to the students. And then I write down May 4 on the sheet.

And then I say: “Oh my God! It’s May. How in the world did that happen?”

I have taken up lots of hobbies as I spiral into happy old age. One of those things is searching my brain for why I walked into a room or what I was about to say. I have now attached sounds and groans to simple acts like standing up and sitting down. Moreover, I can easily while away an afternoon talking about how much time flies.

Cause it does.

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I step into the bathroom at my local pub. I take my phone out. There’s a man at the urinal next to me and it takes me a second to realize he’s obviously snapping pictures of his pecker.

Obviously because he has no shame. In no way does he subterfuge his activity. His right hand holds the phone above his willy, which is pictured grandly (or as grandly as nature allows) in his viewfinder. The phone loudly clicks the shutter sound effects of a camera.

I peer over. There is nothing in his left hand worth taking a picture of, let alone sending to another person. It occurs to me that he might be sending it to his urologist.

He doesn’t react in any way to my crashing his photo shoot. He’s a normal enough looking guy who is sitting with a woman at a table nearby ours.

Boy, there is a bunch of talk these days about who should be using what bathroom. And it all fits perfectly in the good old American tradition of worrying a whole lot about other people’s genitals. Moreover, I really don’t know who’s going to police bathroom use. Sir, may I see your penis please? Who knows?

As long as you don’t talk politics to me while I’m holding my penis I could care less which bathroom you use.

But let’s talk about the real bathroom threat: idiots with phones.

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Guess which position I was in…

The woman in front of the class points to me and tells me to come up in front of the class. She tells me in Czech to stand a few feet from her and then explains to the class the technique she is about to demonstrate. On me.

She tells me to attack.

Aikido practice is two hours long. Twenty minutes of warm up, when we shake the day away and focus on readying the body and mind. Then a series of falling, rolling, or positioning techniques. And then an hour or so of practicing a particular fighting move or technique.

When that happens, the instructor demonstrates each step of the move on a helper student, one who has been around for a while and knows how to attack, move, and fall. The other students watch, take note, and then we break into pairs to practice as the instructor moves around the room helping out.

It’s extremely effective.

Those helper students are men or women that PJ and I recognize as veteran students. They know what they doing. But recently, the instructors have begun asking PJ and I to help in their demonstrations.

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Reunion: Me, Jen, Kristian, Collin, John.

I have trouble with Sundays in general. I can’t relax. I just think about the coming week. So it’s a glum day on which I avoid the real world by spending it alone in my flat watching bad TV and eating carbs.

I know. I know.

It’s still the weekend. Enjoy all of the moments of your life. Blah. Blah. And blah.

So the fact that I am on a train going to Germany is nothing short of a miracle. And if we’re talking about the miraculous, the fact that I am drinking at 11 a.m. is sort of the face of the Virgin Mary in the taco of my life.

But I am. We are. Lee, Collin, and I.

It’s all part of the plan.

John wrote to me a month ago. The basic story is that he and his wife Anja and son Emil live in Dresden, Kristian and Jen are visiting them from Lyon and John thought it would be a great idea if we surprised them by showing up from Prague. These four people were all in Prague in 2004, so we were expats and colleagues together. Life was a little wilder and freer then. Furthermore, we have similar experiences and lives and I have known them for 11 years. And like so many others who move overseas and teach, they moved on to another place.

So this is a great chance for a surprise reunion.

And it totally works.

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Before I can read this, I need to learn French. More procrastination. Yay!

Now that the bathroom, shower, sink, and toilet are all clean, I move on to the living room. Yes, those tabletops can be wiped down with disinfectant. I dig in my closet and come up with a bottle of cleaner whose purpose must be verified.

The windowsills are next, and then the doors are dusted, and the corners freed from cobwebs. And then, well, it would be rude not to vacuum. Once the floors have been vacuumed I can see how awful the linoleum in the kitchen looks, so I get the mop. And then I prep dinner – marinate the chicken, cut vegetables, gather spices.

Sounds like a damn productive Sunday afternoon, but I am doing this in the shorts and sneakers I work out in. It is my current procrastination strategy.

I am one of the billions of people who procrastinate. So I don’t need to tell you what it’s like. The number of things I can find to do before tackling a task is remarkable and a testament to the creative capabilities of the human mind. No doubt you have organized your desk, cleaned your room, gone shopping, masturbated (maybe twice), before doing something you don’t want to do. The thousands of websites whose continued existence is thanks to people avoiding doing shit would blow your mind.

I also don’t have to tell you how shitty procrastinating makes you feel. Like slowly pulling off a band-aid, it adds stress, anxiety, unpleasant anticipation, and an overall feeling of dread to a task that usually wouldn’t be so bad if we just up and got it done with.

Old story.

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You Gotta Love a Good Jam

It’s a rainy Saturday and the three of us (PJ, Collin, and I) are heading to a roller derby match in Žižkov between the Prague City roller Derby and the visiting Holy Wheels Menace.

None of us has seen a roller derby match in the last thirty or so years. The last time was probably when I fell asleep watching Saturday morning cartoons and woke up to helmeted women skating in circles and knocking each other over rails.

Nevertheless, we are excited. There will be beer and women in shorts bashing into each other on roller skates. Moreover, we get to watch a sport. A contact sport.

The neighborhood is quiet and residential, not the sort of place one would expect to stumble upon a roller derby. But as we near the arena, we hear the unmistakable echoes of stadium rock. They are the same tunes that we’ve heard before (American) football games and hockey matches. Our hairs bristle, we know what this means:

A sporting event is about to take place.

We get into the gym and make our way to a good standing spot along the sidelines. The music is booming, the crowd is chanting, some beating drums in a rhythm which suggests the prelude to a ritual sacrifice.

Then the women come out. And it’s better than we imagined.

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Me on National Look-alike Day (April 20)

As you may or may not have noticed, this past Sunday was National Sibling Day. The Facebook was flooded with heartwarming pictures of brothers and sisters. I did not post anything about my siblings, partially because I forgot, but mostly because I was stuck out in the world forced to deal with people face to face.

While none of my siblings gave a rat’s colon that I didn’t honor them on this auspicious Facebook holiday steeped in nearly 20 years of tradition (1998), a few people did mention it to me. And if you are one of them, you frankly need a hobby.

At first I felt guilty, but then my local pub and Becherovka entered the scenario and that guilt was replaced by a warm feeling coated in cinnamon and herbs that will likely kill me before medical science has a chance to harvest organs.

Still, as I sipped away on Christmas in a glass, a little sore from catching flak for my non-observance of a non-holiday, I resolved to not miss a non-holiday for the next week in penance. And then I was dangerous, because not only was I drinking Becherovka, I was drinking Becherovka while surfing the internet.

It was with great disappointment that I found that I’d already missed so many great non-holidays this month. I didn’t tell my neighbors I love them on Tell a Lie Day (April 4) or eat a breakfast of Gambrinus, sauerkraut, and chillli-con-carne on Big Wind Day (April 12).

But there are so many more non-holidays I’ll be observing over the next week.

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It’s in my afternoon class that I begin my campaign to annoy the Czechs today. It’s purely a retaliatory response, as I’ve recently been on the unhappy end of a lot of jokes involving Donald Trump and Republicans. Not to mention taking flak for a long list of Americana, including, but not limited to, morbid obesity, Walmart customers, guns, nipple obsession, and Santa Claus.

Today it’s their turn. And what they often forget is that after 11 years living in the epicenter of Czech everything, I know just how to flick their mouth ulcers for maximum aggravation.

And just to get things rolling, I mention in an offhanded way that Leonard Cohen sucks.

I don’t know what Leonard Cohen has to do with the Czech Republic, but he is adored in this country. So after the initial horror over my comment, I outline a list of adjectives and statements which convey the opinion that Mr. Cohen is one of the most overrated musicians in the history of purposeful sound.

The students glare at me, not daring me to continue. Which is smart, because I have an entirely fabricated story about the time I went to his concert and he forgot the words to “I’m Your Man.”

Moreover, it’s time for Phase 2.

I say that the Czech Republic is in Eastern Europe.

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