By Myles Ludwig
They call it stormy Monday, but Sunday’s just as bad. That’s not exactly how T-Bone Burnett’s song goes, but for many people, Sundays, particularly Sunday nights are frightening.
I was struck by something Jacques Torres, chocolatier nonpareil, said in The New York Times’ Sunday-routine breezy, which is about as close as the venerable Gray Lady gets to a reality show. Torres has five shops around the city and I can vouch for the fact that his chili hot chocolate is the perfect antidote to any shivering winter afternoon on the Upper West Side when the wind comes whistling off the East River and blows the whole neighborhood and all its flotsam and jetsam into Central Park.
“It’s actually sad when you end the day on Sunday because you do just what you want. And then, at the end of the day, that’s it. Sundays over,” Torres said.
My sentiments exactly. Sunday is a lonely day, even if you spend it with family or friends. That’s when we feel our “aloneness” most. There’s barely enough time for mourning the loss of self-indulgence before the heebie-jeebies take over. I’m not talking about the heebie-jeebie dance of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five, the first known recording of that Boyd Atkins-penned precursor to the Harlem Shake on Okeh Records in 1926, or Little Richard’s voodoo love curse (“Bad luck baby put the jinx on me/I got the heeby jeebies and I can’t get well” ) or the 2005 straight-to video slasher.
I’m talking about the free-floating fear of Monday.
Call it mondayphobia. The Heebie-Jeebie Syndrome. I suppose if I were working for The Times I’d call up a few biology professors, credentialed psychologists, pop culture pundits, maybe a humorous horologist or two, to get a few fair and balanced explanatory quotes on what part of the complex neurobiochemical system governs the heebie-jeebie nanocule and how it shoots a zip-line across the Grand Canyons of synapses. What, I would ask, is the etiology of the heebie-jeebies? And can it have a deeper, pathological meaning? What about the entomology? Is it dangerous? Heart-healthy?
But instead, I asked a few friends, regular people with regular jobs, or at least, like Yahoo staffers, people who have to fight their way out of sequestration. People who’d put their casual Friday armor of button-down blue shirts and chinos and hoodies in the closet, and girded up their loins to go into the office on Monday and face the consequences. Much to my surprise, I found nearly all of them admitted to suffering severe heebie-jeebies in secret, not knowing why and wondering if anyone else felt the same way.
They were ashamed to admit it, but then comforted when they learned of the ubiquity of this hidden hyphenated disease. I could hear the relief in the voices: you mean it’s not only me? Certainly, I used to feel that way. In fact, that’s how I first learned the term as an unenviable gift from a former girlfriend who was first puzzled, then annoyed by my sudden change of behavior on Sunday evenings.
A lawyer friend of mine described the basics of the condition: “Am I prepared enough? Am I ready?”
So, is having the heebie-jeebies an existential condition? A necessary part of being human? Did Peking Man or the pharoahs of antiquity have the heebie-jeebies? The pope? Certainly, there is an historical element if Louis Armstrong could call it a dance (Supersmooth Bobby Short did, too) and no less a formidable throwback minstrel than Little Richard could be vexed by it. Somebody back there in time knew about it. I suppose, if it weren’t Sunday, I could spend some time researching the condition and trace its roots in our reptilian minds and beyond. I could probably write a scholarly treatise about it, if it weren’t Sunday.
But, a few years ago, much to my surprise, I noticed it started to fade from my psyche. And I began to harbor a love of Mondays.
Maybe, Monday is stormy, but that’s why it’s the day of the week I like best. Monday is the starting line, the moment when the world wakes up, the Western world anyway, and starts turning again. If I were on a spaceship, I think I could literally see it happen, the muse of Monday, throwing open the shutters on somnolent Sunday to let the light of the universe back in. I don’t care for Friday because it signifies the end of activity. Puts a period to it. In the U.S. nobody wants to work on Friday. It takes second place at best on the weekly podium to Saturday and every day is Saturday to a dog.
There’s a reason the Mamas and the Papas sang about Monday. It’s so good, they named it twice. Give me a good Monday, even a rainy one, and, like Archimedes, I’ll use it to lever my world.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.