Got to the Metra station this morning just as the train doors were opening–I ran through the masses of people that were pouring out and got to the doors just as they were closing. I banged on the window, but the conductor was just turning away. Waited–in the rain and the thunder and the lightning–for fifteen minutes for the next train to come. Realized I had forgotten my lunch on the kitchen counter.
When I got on the train, I opened my book. The next chapter was called “Lousy Wednesday” and began like this:
Some days are born ugly. From the very first light they are no damn good whatever the weather, and everybody knows it. No one knows what causes this, but on such a day people resist getting out of bed and set their heels against the day. When they are finally forced out by hunger or job they find that the day is just as lousy as they knew it would be.
On such a day it is impossible to make a good cup of coffee, shoestrings break, cups leap from the shelf by themselves and on the floor, children ordinarily honest tell lies, and children ordinarily good unscrew the taop handles of the gas range and lose the screws and have to be spanked. This is the day the cat chooses to have kittens and housebroken dogs wet on the parlor rug.
Oh, it’s awful on such a day! The postman brings overdue bills. If it’s a sunny day it is too damn sunny, and if it is dark who can stand it?
* * *
I just had four–or maybe five?–Miller High Lifes, so I’m not feeling especially articulate right now. But I did find out that this led to 800 hits on the Canasta website today. I’m “Dawntread from the University of Chicago.” (Dawntread is the username under which I made the comment recommending Canasta. Please do not judge me for it.)
Goodnight.
[...] Today was one of those days, a Lousy Wednesday indeed. It was the kind of day in which there’s bad news waiting in your e-mail inbox, the train is too crowded, the woman next to you is drowning in drugstore perfume, your expensive walking shoes start to rub against your heel. I tried working out this evening thinking that the endorphins might kick in and improve my mood, but I succeeded only in tripping on the treadmill no less than four times (shaddup, Miles: it was the treadmill, not me). It was the kind of day that only one thing could make better: when I got home, I had to look up and read the entire text of Judith Viorst’s brilliant Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Viorst doesn’t gloss over Alexander’s day. It plain sucks: his brothers get all the cereal box prizes, his teacher favors his friend’s drawing over his, he goes to the dentist, who discovers a cavity, and he has to eat lima beans, for fuck’s sake. The best part is that the moral of the story is that yeah, sometimes days do suck. Viorst doesn’t try to explain away Alexander’s bad day with his youth, and she doesn’t try to banish the rain cloud that follows him around. The day is just allowed to suck. And when Alexander proposes to run away from his bad day by moving to Australia, where things might be so upside down that his bad day could turn to a good one, he’s informed, in somewhat more kid-friendly language, that people have shitty days everywhere. Even in Australia. [...]