Damien Galeone

Like most people, I employ a whole set of skills that I was neither born with nor taught at any school. I’ve learned some of these as a teacher, some as a writer, and some as a guy desperately trying to pass myself off as normal. Other skills I developed just by screwing up enough times.

Some of these skills I learned in my time as a bartender.

Bartending is a great job. Anyone who hasn’t done it either envisions Tom Cruise flinging bottles around or some suave guy flirting with women and occasionally pouring a Manhattan.

The reality is that bartending may be a great job, but it’s a hell of a tough one. You have to move fast, think fast, remember a lot of information, and develop a load of other skills in order to cope and not run screaming into the night. Some of these skills stay with you forever. Here are five that help me cope on a daily basis and keep me from running screaming into the day.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s morning and I’m crying.

This is odd for a couple of reasons. In the first place, morning usually isn’t conducive to exhibiting a range of emotions. Morning is a time reserved for a mixture of depression and confusion that I imagine will only get worse as my age stampedes forward.

My tears are also odd because I’m on Facebook. The emotions I usually exhibit on Facebook are annoyance – people really need to figure out what constitutes a fucking meme, laughter – I don’t care what you say, cats make me laugh, and disgust – great, he’s procreated. Now if he could only differentiate your from you’re.

Read the rest of this entry »

Scenario

I spend Monday evening eating pizza and engaging in a delightful chat session – read: gossiping – with colleagues. I drink four dark beers and eat a meat-laden pizza that sends shivers down my GP’s spine. As usual, work is our most discussed and debated theme. By the time I get home it must be deeply implanted into my unconscious for later perusal on my mental YouTube.

And, what’s a man to do at 11:32 pm on a Monday night when he’s brushed his teeth, jammied up, and is drowsy with four dark beers and a pizza running around his digestive tract? Yes, he watches The Walking Dead.

Analysis: Ingredients taken separately = benign. Ingredients aggregated = disaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am walking out of Hlavní Nádraží (main train station) and eating, thus in the meditative state of a Yogi. The food in question is the finest Czech gastronomical tradition: a sausage baked in a buttered croissant. It is warm and delicious; the one in my jacket pocket warms my belly as it awaits the fate of its crusty, buttery brother.

I notice the homeless man as I pass him. He is staring at me, sitting at an odd angle on a bench surrounded by piles of ooze that surely used to inhabit his stomach. His skin is rusty and sort of off-yellow, like a late-stage hepatitis patient. I am eating pure ambrosia, so it takes me a minute to realize that he’s dead.

Unfortunately, seeing a dead homeless man is not out of the realm of possibility at Hlavní Nádraží,  known as Sherwood Forest to some of Prague’s residents. The cast of characters inhabiting this little park include meth-heads and junkies, who inject dope at all times and in plain sight. There are also drunks and squads of homeless people residing on the park benches. With so many homeless around and so many places to buy cheap booze – boxed wine, gut rot brandies, and cut-rate booze that sometimes ends up being methanol – seeing an occasional dead homeless person is a fact of life in Prague.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, OK, I know this title suggests a grumpy old yogi sitting in a lotus position on a porch and shouting barely acceptable epithets at passersby. I am no yogi, but, sometimes a guy just has to remember why he started his blog in the first place: to talk about people who piss him off.

The highlighted folks in today’s post are just rude. They don’t care that other people exist in the world with them. And as I see it, they have some karmic punishment coming to them. This post briefly touches on these social vermin and suggests appropriate karmic retribution.

Before you ask, my karmic balance has come in the form of the people who walk past my balcony playing Bjork and performing skateboarding tricks. Also, I have a cat who seems to know exactly where my bladder is.

Anyway, here are some people who don’t care that others exist and the universal balls of shit coming their way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Halloween is everywhere I look. My Facebook page is a running list of friends, cataloging costumes and brightly colored cocktails. There are ghouls, zombies, and Ghostbusters. There are slutty ghouls, slutty zombies, and slutty Ghostbusters.

There is arguably no better time to be a kid than at Halloween. The whole concept is mind-blowing – one night a year your job is to dress up as whatever you want, walk around with your friends and get candy. What a racket!

Furthermore, we also did lots of neat things in school around Halloween, like bobbing for apples and building ghetto costumes and decorations out of construction paper. There was probably also a haunted house and your forced enrollment in some school Halloween show that your parents unfortunately videotaped, but thankfully became obsolete with the death of Betamax.

Perhaps nothing was better than watching Halloween specials on TV. All of your favorite cartoon and television characters involved in mildly spooky Halloween fun. There was that rush of excitement as the word SPECIAL came rolling out of the screen towards you. When you saw this as a kid, the message was clear: It. Was. On.

Read the rest of this entry »

I watched this cool flick the other night. It was about zombies, so I was pretty happy. Anytime the undead feast on human flesh I will buy a ticket to watch it…or download it. It was a good film. There was lots of action, good acting, zombies eating people, Israel, everything you’d want in a film. But as I watched Brad Pitt run around the globe trying to solve a zombie crisis, I found myself saying:

I thought this was called World War Z.

If you’ve seen the movie and read the book, then you have surely noticed the major differences between them. ‘Major differences’ being a euphemism for ‘didn’t have shit in common.’ Rambo is a more closely related interpretation of Webster’s Dictionary than the film World War Z is to its literary namesake.

If you have only seen the movie, then I’m betting you have heard all the hoopla concerning the differences and shrugged off the controversy. Since the film has been out a while, the rest of you have probably heard this all before, and are thinking ‘Wow, he really does come late to the show.’ And if you are, I’d like to remind you that at my (deeply disturbed) blog, the motto is: come for the stale pop culture references, stay for the Hobbit jokes.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am talking to my dad; it’s the Sunday call. As usual, we talk books and he talks movies. I have little to add since I’ve spent my weekend watching reruns of Goosebumps episodes. So the most I could tell him is “viewer beware, you’re in for a scare,” which I decide against.

My dad’s taste in films includes films with subtitles, romantic comedies, and films that were made before 1940. And anything about, dealing with, or involving Italy or Italians in any way. The one thing they have in common is that they can all be viewed at home. My dad has furnished the home of the dude who owns Netflix and bought him a unicorn.

So I am confused when he says, “We went to the movies…”

“Dad, you went to the movies?”

“Yes.”

“In a movie theater?”

“Yes.”

“Near other people?”

“What are you getting at?”

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always considered The Czech Republic a primarily atheist country. The Pope – the last one – called the Czechs “too worldly,” meaning they drink beer, fuck each other, and don’t seem to care much about what lies ahead.

So when I saw that in a countrywide census over 1,000,000 Czechs consider themselves Roman Catholics, and over 700,000 say they believe in God, I was a little surprised.

Oh yeah, and 15,000 of them are Jedi.

Yes, that kind of Jedi.

At first, I am surprised at the knowledge that I live among so many monastic knights. But then, after some rumination, it all begins to make sense. Here’s why.

Read the rest of this entry »

At this moment, I am the living embodiment of a man who is 39, drinks like he’s 29, and recovers like he’s 49. There’s a thing existing in my head called pain. I am doing that morning after shuffle around my flat. I am in pajamas because putting on pants would hurt my head too much. I squint at things and grumble and moan.

I have thought ahead. In anticipation of this exact situation, I bought a frozen pizza. My plan was to suffer, watch mindless TV, and eat pizza. Aka: A perfect hangover day. Enter Mr. Murphy and his shitty ironic laws that are the instruction manual to my life.

My oven is broken.

Read the rest of this entry »