Damien Galeone

We go into the evening like wild jackals hunting down furry prey. OK, not prey so much as wheat beers and ribs. But today we must welcome our youngest member, Collin, into the Thirty Club.

Welcoming someone into a club is one of the major perks of being in a club. There is usually a festive atmosphere and some variance of hazing, camaraderie and old war stories. When membership in said club is imminent, either because you can’t choose against joining (age) or have already ‘signed the papers’ (your wife is pregnant) then the veteran members of that club like to exaggerate the difficulties which come with membership in the club.

Why?

Two reasons: It’s fun to watch the new guy sweat and misery loves company.

It’s no fun to tell newcomers how easy and smooth things will be. Mothers never tell pregnant women that labor’s a breeze; they always talk about 61 hour back labor with no anesthetic and a ska-loving doctor. Veteran expatriates always – myself included – regale newcomers with stories of 17 hour waits at the foreign police office, shoving matches with Russian Mafián and bureaucrats who were obviously kicked out of the SS for not being cuddly enough.

As we welcome our youngest brother into the Thirty Club this evening, I find that we are doing very much the same initiation. His eyes are growing wide with terror, though that could be the whiskey. Here’s the gist of what is said.

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I was sitting on a tram when I heard it. A man’s voice in clear, American English to his female companion:

“Have you gained weight?”

In a country where the inhabitants keep to themselves so much so that you could beat a screeching hyena to death with another screeching hyena and not garner a response, it is telling that this garnered a reaction from the passengers. Everyone on the tram did one of two things: Wince or look at the man wearing some expression conveying awe. I did both.

There was no reaction from the woman, who simply sat in quiet and plotted his grisly death. Had the man enjoyed one or more brain cells (which he obviously didn’t) he’d have understood that he was in the deepest shit of his life. He didn’t, so he continued.

“I mean, it’s OK, you’re just a little big—chunkier than when you first got here.”

Wince.

Awe.

Fortunately for the man, a car drove into the tram, thus providing a distraction grand enough to help him elude murder.

I decided then and there that I would dedicate today’s blog to keeping stupid people alive. So, I have scraped my memory and scoured my journals and notebooks and compiled this list of things that actual people have actually said to other people. Some of those people have been me, on both sides of the conversation.

If you are stupid, then your only job is to read (if you can) this list and NEVER repeat any of it. If you are smart then add to this list, for we must help the dummies!

Sh*t you just don’t say:

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It’s Neděle (Sunday), which is taken from two words: Ne and Dělat (No and Do). Together they mean the Do Nothing Day.

And on most Sundays I follow this linguistic combo like it’s a direct order from Rip Taylor himself. I lounge, loaf, recline, read, scratch, snore, stretch, surf, stream, download and view in an impressive impersonation of a 16-year-old nihilist.

But not today.

This Sunday, I am preparing for a Monday morning visit to a governmental office. There are problems. First, everything will be in Czech. And not just Czech, but the light-speed Czech that is taught to Czech BITS (bureaucrats in training) at the Grumpy McMisery’s School of Bureaucracy.

Secondly, all bureaucrats (especially Czech bureaucrats) share a deep, intense love of telling a person ‘No’. To tell a person after taking a half a day off work, sitting in an endless line on a chair roughly as comfortable as doing jumping jacks with a toaster in your rectum, that they cannot accomplish what they have come to do is the one thing that keeps a bureaucrat from stabbing his coworkers to death with a staple remover.

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May 1^st is a special day in the good ole CR.

 On the eve of this lovely day, Czechs all over this land build a teepee of twigs, leaves and branches they have raked up in their backyards and burn it, which is called ‘burning a witch.’ This tradition comes from an old belief that burning a witch warded off the witches who were en route on April 30^th to the witch’s assembly, at which they played Mahjong, drank brandy stingers and talked about their ligament pains.

 The only witches’ assemblies these days are on midday trams and on balconies amid a hanging assortment of massive panties and bloomers.

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There is no better way to enjoy a Sunday morning than to drink coffee while you read a story featuring a ghost, a werewolf or a German dictator. And if you can’t get any of those, you can look at Wikipedia’s page on people who have recently become dead.

Though grisly in some – all – people’s eyes, my interest in the Recent Deaths page is that it’s usually a springboard for interesting and totally random reading. Today is no different.

It all starts with Yuri Yudin, who was an unfortunate addition to Wiki Deaths and whose claim to fame was that he was the sole survivor of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Now, if you’re a nerd and a doom and gloom loving fool, you know that no phrase in the English language arouses your morbid side like ‘Sole Survivor.’

Click

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Boss: “Can you work overtime tonight?”

Her: “Only if you get down on your knees and please me.”

Him: “Yes Ma’am!”

The beginning of 83% of the porn you’ve ever seen? Nope, it’s the mixture of English and Czech that makes one glorious, confusing language: Czenglish!

The main culprit of Czenglish is when a Czech speaker uses a direct translation of a Czech word or phrase in English. The above is a perfect example. In Czech, the word prosím idiomatically means please, but it comes from the verb prosit which means to beg. Our girl is using the word literally in English and thus instead of telling her boss to beg, she offered him the single greatest recompense on Earth.

Her: “I think Paris is the most beautiful city in the world.”

Him “You have true!”

OK, she has true and may now pass into the valley of the Elves, right? And dialogue for this blog has been brought to you by J.R.R Tolkien? No! It’s Czenglish again! In this case, he is directly translating the Czech phrase Máš pravdu, which means you are right but is literally translated into English as you have true.

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Phase 1

It all starts with a light tapping at the bedroom door and a peepish mewing that is meant to draw me out of bed with its cuteness. It never works, so the tapping progresses to a scratching and the mewing goes to a deranged sound, sort of the way the Swamp Thing might moan if he were hungry and tripping on acid. She’s giving me the opportunity to let her in before she lets herself in.

I stuff my face back into my pillow, and hope that she’ll find a tiny animal to torture – maybe that bee that flew in the flat last night or a spider. Perhaps I’ll start importing mice.

In my dreams, Benedict Cumberbatch and I are having a picnic on a red and white blanket. We are both wearing suspenders and he’s telling me about the new season of Sherlock. I hear a click. In the dream, and in reality, I pull the blanket over my toes; she always goes for the toes first.

I look at the clock: 6:12 a.m.

Since she has learned to open doors I haven’t slept past 7 a.m.

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The first book I ever wrote wasn’t called Senseless. It was called Harry and the Fairy. I came across it about a year ago as I scoured my parents’ attic for proof of a high school sweetheart that is still, sadly, pending.

The book was well-received in my close-knit literary circle (mom said ‘nice job’), the public (teacher gave me a gold star, and one to my sister Amanda, age 10, for illustration) and critics (I was invited to the Young Writers of America festival at the Bucks County Library). Everyone was, I think.  

But how can you miss with such a plot line? A troublesome young boy named Harry goes into his closet and finds a fairyland (Yes, a fairyland. Yes, in his closet). Once there, he meets some helpful fairies who have a hell of a chat with him and show him that being a bad kid is no way to go through life. Harry comes out of the closet a changed boy.

Um, what?

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I was throwing rocks into an empty paint can in the middle of a dried out field. The sun was baking everything, including me and my pile of rocks, which were becoming hotter by the second and therefore more difficult to curve. Mark was huddling under the seventeen inches of shade being provided by the oddly shaped ferry building. In the window of the building there was a handwritten note in Arabic, which gave us indecipherable bad news from right to left. A drawn clock with the hands on the 3 was more succinct.

Right now, both the little and the big hands were on the 1 and we were baking in the sun waiting for ferry officials that we needed to see today and who would not return for at least two hours. There was no place to go in the meantime, so we hid under the brims of our hats and threw rocks. This was our low point and it had come as a result of bad decisions.

We had one rule in Egypt: No being outside in the afternoon hours.

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