Like on Sunday (a Quasi-Repost)

[from my proto-weblog, 5 January 1998]

W

ell, I missed another day in reality, but it's still the fifth, and I’m still able to make this thing sort of work. I feel like garbage, and that St. Johns Wort stuff doesn’t seem to be doing anything for me. I need to get out of this somehow.

Let’s see … last night I was thinking of doing a piece about Like-On-Sunday—that bleak feeling I get when everything good seems to be shutting down and all looks hopeless. I had that again last night, and it really was Sunday night—or early Monday morning, which is the same thing as far as this feeling is con­cerned.

It all started, I suppose, with school. The weekly rhythm that is going to rule the rest of our lives first manifests it­self as the school week. At least that’s how it was for me. It may run even deeper than that for many people. If your parents work a Monday-to-Friday schedule then even before school Friday nights may be kind of special, and Saturdays and Sundays are more likely to be times for family excursions than say Tuesdays or Thursdays.

But it’s school that really makes this bastard rhythm per­sonal, that brings it home to you. There’s the grim moment when classes start on a Monday and you know damn good and well that there will be no respite, no peace at all, for five whole days. There’s that horrible feeling that goes with Wednesdays, when you have lost what little energy and enthusiasm you carried over from the weekend, and yet the end is still all too far off. And then finally, when all seems lost, there comes Friday afternoon with all its joy and bliss, when the weekend stretches out ahead of you in all its glory and time hangs suspended for a moment.

But for me—I always anticipate I guess—the most dismal part of the entire week came with sunset on Sunday. The weekend is over, all that is left is homework and getting ready for school, and then comes the final insult. The radio stations go off the air one by one, leaving me to the mercy of Christian broadcasting or random static. There is no moment so bleak as a decaying Sunday evening, when silence settles on the airwaves.

It’s a horrible end-of-everything feeling; there’s no reason to go on, no hope of a better future, nothing but empty babbling and static. Oh, there’s sleep—that’s the best thing about it—but even so, at the end of sleep come, yes, that’s right, Monday morning.

The actual arrival of Monday was never as bad as the antici­pation of Sunday night, in that at least you could keep busy and zip around without getting lost in contemplation. And once it came, you were actually counting down the hours to another week­end, however far off it seemed. Progress was happening. Of a sort. But it was progress.

But there was nothing to be said for Sunday night. Nothing positive at all. It was the pit of doom, the depths of nothing­ness, the end of time. And sometimes, now, that feeling comes back to haunt me, not on Sunday night necessarily, but whenever. In my journals years ago used to refer to it as LoS; an acronym for “Like on Sunday”.