A petition for the abolishment of Monday

It was a sun-bleeding Monday when I died. And as Mondays can be expected to be, it was as ultimately gruesome and tedious as every start of a new week. But on this day, there was one teeny-weeny occurrence that stuck out of the ordinary sleep-deprived, caffeine-infused zombie trot. Oh, had only one of my few awake brain cells paid more attention to what happened, to the premonition I was told, I might still be alive, might have even gotten a whiff of Tuesday, of better times. But well, as life goes, nothing good can every come out of a Monday. So, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that I never stood a chance on that doomed weekday preconditioned to bring along evil. But let me start at the beginning.

It so happened that on a hot and humid morning of said unmentionable weekday in front of a poster-cluttered kiosk right before the train station I met my destiny. Only, unfortunately, at that time I wasn’t privy to that snippet of information. So, I didn’t think much when I heard a squeal from behind my back as I unassumingly bulldozed my way through the living obstacles in my path towards the grand entrance of the station. Did I stop because I felt a twinge of guilt somewhere deep down in the dark, moldy folds of my shriveled lump of a heart? Well, maybe. However, to be completely honest for once, it might also have been the smear of ice cream on my freshly dry-cleaned suit. My left eye twitched as I slowly turned around to face the perpetrator. But little idea did I have what I would be up against.

Satan herself gazed up at me through the pit holes of her bottomless pupils, sucking me into the iron-melding flames raging in her gaze, threatening to incinerate my very existence. “You!” My breath stopped in my throat at the venom dripping from the little girl’s voice, her bobbing pigtails only deducting slightly from the overall scariness factor. “You destroyed my ice cream! “, she screeched.

I was taken aback only for a second before I gained back my composure, bent down and said in the teeth-grinding, slightly condescending tone that I liked to call my ‘still moderate voice’: “Well, kid, ‘destroy’ is quite a strong word. But your ice cream did stain my jacket. How will you reimburse me for that, huh?”

But, of course, as it was a Monday and things never play out my way on that day, she was one of the few kids that couldn’t be intimidated by an angry adult. Instead, she came up to me on her tiptoes and whispered in an ominous voice: “I’ve seen you die in my dreams. This afternoon. It won’t be pretty.” A cold chill crept up my spine as her words caught me off guard. Ok, admittedly, this kid knew how to play the game, respect where it was due. But before I could answer, she was pulled away by her mother who smiled apologizingly at her daughter’s words.

And this is all the premonition I got about my impending death. et’s be honest, who would believe a little pissed-off girl with half-dried ice-cream sticking to her hands? As you might have guessed correctly, I didn’t. However, that didn’t keep me from bemoaning my bad luck, my now not-so-clean-anymore jacket and Mondays in general for the rest of the day.

Now, you might wonder how all of that connects to the petition this whole text is about. And there is one important piece of information you should know to understand the connection.

Do you know how a poltergeist comes into being?  All you need is two ingredients. One, a human being about to die, and two, a heavy resentment. Mix that together and – ta-dah! – here you have your poltergeist.

Unfortunately, for me I ticked both check boxes that Monday afternoon as I left my office for an idyllic walk along the overflowing, horn-squeaking main road during lunch break. The obvious advantage of such a setting is that heavy-worded curses about the futility of certain weekdays are drowned out by equally angry drivers working their car horns. The disadvantage on the other hand, is that the risk of dying might be slightly higher there than in an air-conditioned real estate agent office.

I was just fueling my Monday aversion, when it hit me.  ‘It’ being an oversized blue truck with a printed ad for vanilla ice-cream on its sides, careening towards me with blinding speed. One moment I was there on the sidewalk, the next I watched from somewhere above a limp marionet with my face being slammed into a wall in a fountain of red. What an ironic way to go, ice-cream of all things. Could you have imagined things of this sort happening on a Tuesday, a Wednesday, or - God forbid - on a Friday? No, of course not! It just had to be a Monday.   

Here I am now, a mere poltergeist, not there, but still not quite dead. Able to move things, touch things, but never to be touched again, never to be seen. Cursed to carry on my bitterness, to relive this very day of my demise over and over again, until I can resolve my deep resentment towards the weekday that ruined me, that took away my future.

But you can help, you can gift me peace. I can’t be the only one that has been tantalized by the existence of this very unnecessary day. Who hasn’t at least felt an uneasy twinge in the stomach when getting up on Monday morning or a pressing headache when the clock seemed to be stuck in the all-too-well-known Monday time freeze? Let’s end this era of suffering, let’s rise together against the oppression and the needlessness, let’s fight for freedom, for a Monday-free world!

Grab that pen and sign the petition, thank you very much!

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Petition for the abolishment of Monday

Date:              Monday, 14 June 2021

Organizer:     Herbert Nickles

We, the undersigned, are concerned citizens who urge our leaders to act now and eliminate Monday from the weekly schedule.

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