Sunday, Scary Sunday

When a rubber band is pulled far from a fixed point (let’s say on one’s wrist) and then released, it snaps back (and snakebites the wrist). The work week is like this rubber band action. The pulling and releasing of tension through politicking, emailing, phone calling, Zooming, and digital pixel-modifications (.pptx, Excel, code, etc.) makes one like the rubber band – sometimes pulled and released on one’s own initiative, other times (more often in my experience) pulled and released by others (and one’s own initiative is ultimately on behalf of others, unless you own all the equity in your workplace and you’re also your only customer). The way work weeks work (for many): Monday morning through Friday evening are dedicated to the pull and release of work. Whether or not the pulling and releasing creates effects that matter (or even effects that exist), rubber bands become more and more slack (and more quickly if your workplace uses a certain Salesforce-acquired collaboration tool). When the tension of the work week releases, Friday night and Saturday are spun like a top by the last few rubber band cycles of the week. Spurious, furious activity commences. Dancing, drinking, bacchanalian eating. The stuff of urban dreams. When the body wakes up on Sunday from the urban dreamscape, the body is fully slack. The rubber band has a moment to look itself in the mirror and see how much less potential energy this latex tourniquet loop contains, after completing the latest tensile cycle. Having already gotten what juice can be squeezed from the fact of a paycheck on Friday morning (after the 11:59pm Thursday night money gargoyles made the deposit, it it happened to have been that time of the month), a torpor sets in. If one does not get one’s rubber band into use, taking actions of some kind (yoga, washing dishes, meticulously cleaning one’s teeth after making morning popcorn), the existential dread of every rubber band rolls in like a cloud over the subconscious. As the sense that one’s days of action are running thin, not to mention being wasted, one slips into an inactive state of pure anxiety (Sunday scaries). As the situation-feeling-doing cycle breaks down at the feeling step, laying in bed, scrolling as if one’s life depended on it, sucking down coffee, becoming a calcified lethargiraffe becomes inevitable. The symptom response remedy is fairly simple. Get the fuck out of bed and go for a walk. Done. However, all you’ve done is found a healthy-ish response to a compounding negative-interesting cycle that has computed your half life to just-a-little-more-optimistic-than-a-life-insurer number. And it’s taught you to fear both numbers, but also to feel too afraid of your powerlessness against them to do anything but hoard money and certainty and wonder whether you could buy an annuity large enough to cover the crazy expensive kinds of necessary healthcare that will be available when you get 80% of the way to the smaller number. And you’re already 45% of the way there! Back to bed to scroll and scroll and scroll, before you fall asleep at 2:45am Monday morning and can’t wait to get pulled out and snapped around again for five days. Is there a way out? I don’t know yet. I’m not sure if I’m ready to move to Bhutan or Ecuador and see if a high happiness index can resolve itself to low levels of expatriate anxiety and an actual sense of belonging. My guess is probably not for very long. The real answer, then? Write and write and write. Write the way out. Write the way in. Write the way it is. Write the way it ought to be. Write all the ways it could be. Write the way it was. Write it in prose and poetry. And don’t use too much repetition. It’s Sunday and too cold outside to go for a walk. So here I am, writing.