Why I like Monday

In the silence of Monday morning I move through an abandoned world accompanied by just a few other hard-working ghost people. The lake shore is open and empty while the sand itself seems to heave sighs of relief. Evidence of two hot days of abuse - piles of broken bottles, soda cups, napkins and food wrappings, bags of junk left from cookouts - make mountains at her edges. The cyan light of morning opens its eye over Chicago to illuminate an exhausted relief. Thank god, the people are gone!

In the empty locker room I open a makeup case and my chosen weapons make clattering plastic sounds across the counter. In this antiseptic and air-conditioned world I erase the evidence of a weekend. Cover-up liquid will conceal dark circles under the eyes and some zits which grew from sweating out in the hot sun while working in the dirt. The little pot labeled "paint" will do the trick to hide the tiny purple dots which appeared all around my face when, disgusted with my own eating, I decided to purge up Saturday's dinner. The blood vessels that burst in my right eye during that process still leak brilliant red. It can't be fixed, so I change the part in my hair, snap the hairdryer out of the wall holster and re-style the coif. Now long bangs fall in front of the right side of my face and conceal the bloody evidence. I tell people I threw up because of heat exhaustion. I hide any traces leading to a different truth. I don't really care if there's anything wrong - any thing wrong with me or any injury. I only care that there be no appearance of my having slipped.

I open my blush compact carefully. The cake inside is shattered and sits in jagged, cracked piles that threaten to dump out of the container and make a mess at any second. It looks as broken up as I feel. I gently poke some color out with my brush and snap the little compact shut to hide the evidence within a smooth, black case.

I slip on the dress I toted along. It's a light, linen thing bought during a trip to Finland. That's the place to shop, for sure. For me, I have to go where all the women are built like linebackers to find clothing that won't yell "her shoulders are too big! Her legs are too stocky!" The more I bike to work the lighter the clothes I wear are becoming. Linen dress makes a neat line and as there's less on my hips to hold it up, it floats down below the knees. I review the evidence of yesterday's fast in the mirror. It made a good start in fighting back this disgusting mass of self. I step back to review the results of my efforts.

The weekend, with its terrifying stretches of unstructured time, is over. Back to Monday, I wake up extra early to the comfort of a schedule, times to work and times to eat, clear times to exercise and times to rest. Wrapped in paint and cloth, I'm ready.

sick of it

The river pauses, completely frozen over. It's just a chalky line separating the north and south banks, now, unable to rush anywhere. Every building sits in the pink late afternoon light exhaling puffs of purple steam as if exhausted by the effort of keeping all inhabitants warm. I put my hand up to the glass, feeling the tingling chill of that smooth surface. Birds, rodents, raccoons and squirrels must find ways of protecting themselves from the bitter drop in temperatures. But, not us. From Home to bus to pedway to office and back, I really don't have to be confronted by these elements if I don't care to be. How ancestors survived in such temperatures, how I might survive were life suddenly to be stripped of all modern convenience, that's not something I really have to think about much. My hand rests on the glass, less than an inch from the bitterest of temperatures, in warm safety.

The bus I ride to and from downtown everyday has plenty of windows to view the passing scene. But while they are wonderful for leaking out heat, lately they let in no clue of the world outside. A thick, grey crust of dried on road spray and puge has turned these windows into walls. Passengers ride along, listening to ipods, reading, chatting on phones, collectively ignoring each other. Confined into this space for up to an hour out of our day, we try not to stare. This is what life in the city has become - a self contained echo chamber of humanity staring at itself while all bouncing down the road of time. Our egos bump and grate and get in each other's way such that I must wonder if, in fact, humans were truly meant to live in such massive, tight proximity to one another. Outside temperatures drop below zero and such cold makes snapping, snarling sounds in tree branches. Outside is a diminishing nature where species die off unnoticed.

I think I'm sick of living in the city. I'm sick of living in a people-scape rather than a landscape. I'm sick of the collective attitude which pushes nature to the perimeter of life. The earth is not seen as something which sustains us at all. I see how she's framed as a backdrop to busyness and doing-ness. She's ignored, beaten down, indentifiable only as a pigeon, park squirrel, or something in the produce section.

And now, people are so MAD at nature. They're quite annoyed with winter's interruption to routine and human flow. How dare the snow. Below zero? How dare the cold! But in the piles of snow, encumbering body wrappings, slippery surfaces and crunching cold I hear what she's trying to say.

"Slow down, you go to fast. Stop and look, you never regard each step enough. Ask for help, it's too cold for you to think this can be marched through alone. Go within, you're always running out. It's ok to have a season of stopping. All creatures and creation take this time to rest. They live off stored wealth and prepare for another chance to grow. You are such a creation. Stop. Wait. Be still and know that 'I am'."

But we don't have that anymore. We neither listen nor entertain the proposal that life has a cycle to be honored. Our routine is conveniently shortened to a daily treadmill of tasks. Sick of it.

And I feel fine...

It swings back and forth. They command from their heights and it's us, the masses, the "little people" who get the good squeezing every 20-30 years or so. A generation spends their way out of pain. Then for the next, the limits come flying off and the spending dries up. Each one reaches for utopia with the words "never again" on their lips. Each tactic is chased through history by ever grislier monsters of our own creation. The government gets off our backs and tears the scab off with it. How many years of this next contraction do we put up with? The marketplace is a harsh disciplinarian. Not sure I deserve this spanking at the hands of some economic theorist with bad hair.

And now? This week? The paddles are out, trying to shock this thing we call an economy back to life. Bailouts, paper, credit, nothing works. It wiggles and twists, up one hour and down the next as if in jovial laughter at our efforts. Perhaps, finally, after centuries of abuse, the economy as we know it, money as ever we have loved it, is dead.

We'll be asked to redefine our lives and lifestyle. Not just to get through 3 or 4 possible years of "this sucks" but to retool what we think & do for whatever new thing is in the agony of being born. Will I have some sense f nimbleness about me to make the reinvention that my parents, faced with a squeeze at much my same age, failed to make? I feel like one of those mice I hated so much that I moved into this bigger, fancier, more expensive apartment to get away from. I scurry toward supply and hope to avoid the traps. I must have been made for more than this.

Maybe Ghandi was right and we really simply need smaller economies to better value where our goods come from. Maybe then...hm.

It's enough to just make me want to shop.