Mondays always feel like an existential crisis, and even more so if your weekend didn’t go as planned. The truth is, I accomplished very little this weekend, unless you consider the ending of a relationship an accomplishment. In which case, I accomplished that. But even that accomplishment I can’t claim as my own, because the woman I was seeing ended it. Or, if she didn’t exactly end it, she opened that door and invited me through it, and then there I was, suddenly, on the other side of something that seemed to have been going fairly well.
But, as the saying goes, perspective is everything. And her perspective was that it was not going fairly well.
Her main issue was that she wasn’t feeling an evolving emotional connection, while my rebuttal was that these things take time and we’d only known each other for several months. I also would argue that there are a range of emotions humans are capable of, and I know for a fact I’d made her laugh. That’s an emotion and therefore a connection point in my column. I also cooked dinner a few times, and on at least two occasions dinner turned out really, really good, and that emotion is called happiness (chicken curry flavor).
Perhaps we should have kept such a score. A spreadsheet listing across the x-axis the emotions we were experiencing during various “together” time activities, and the y-axis grading the intensity of those emotions. We’d each keep our own spreadsheet, I think, but we’d also keep our impressions and perceived ratings of the other person’s emotional experience, so that we could then compare our realities and intuition.
But honestly, I am not a big fan of graphs and haven’t used them much since high school chemistry and math. And I suppose that once you start to get out the spreadsheets, the relationship has run its course. Unless you are both into that and the spreadsheets are consensual.
Anyway, my one task this weekend was to plant a garden, a task I’d normally enjoy. Instead, I barely left the house. Here was yet another failed relationship to add to the list.
But back to Mondays.
Typically, Sunday is the most existentially heavy day for me, signifying another week’s end and probably best memorialized in the song as sung by Johnny Cash, “Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.” But with Mondays usually come the workweek, and so while the other key parts of existence that make up our worlds may have broken down and left us searching yet again for meaning in the vast emptiness of the cold, bastard heart of the universe, the workweek at least provides us with that focus on another, more literal existential task: survival. Do job, get money, exchange money for food and shelter, perhaps a concert here and there, maybe some weed if it’s a good show, continue to live, repeat.
And so I think maybe it’s not Monday that is the existential crisis, but instead the idea of Monday. And the idea of Monday is really the fault of Sunday, a Sunday which as it proceeds through its 24-hour cycle can only upon contemplation lead one to the inevitability of Monday and the grinding on of life at its interminable steady 7-day pace toward obliteration. Although, on the bright side, this includes the obliteration of existential questions.
I think I’ll put that garden in on Wednesday.
On the Sunday morning sidewalks
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned
‘Cause there’s something in a Sunday
Makes a body feel alone
And there’s nothin’ short of dyin’
Half as lonesome as the sound
On the sleepin’ city sidewalks
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down
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