The Gospel of the Weekend
Tuesday leaves no mark. Thursday is a rumor. Monday is just Sunday evening’s slow dread convincing you it matters more than it does. The only days with any actual weight are the ones where you get to decide: press yourself against your favorite people until everyone is warm and ridiculous and slightly too close, or sit alone in the dark running through all the Saw films in sequence with no apology. That’s the whole deal. Everything between Friday evening and Monday morning is the real thing. The rest is administration.
So here, in that spirit, is a protocol for the coming days. Order snails from wherever delivers them, because you’ve convinced yourself it’ll be adventurous—vaguely exotic, something you’d normally never do. They will arrive, and you will sit with them, and register how profoundly boring they taste. Slightly rubbery. Vaguely oceanic. Nothing. Order them anyway. The ritual matters more than the result.
Bake hash cookies to a good mix and wait for the moment when something you haven’t heard in years does what only music at the right altitude can do—collapse time without warning and drop you into a room that no longer exists, full of people you haven’t thought about in months. The best two hours of the whole week.
Start humming the theme from a cartoon you watched as a child and don’t stop. Then the next one. Then the next. Pokémon, DuckTales, Gummy Bears, the full hall of fame, one after another without pause—until someone in the room reaches their absolute limit. The moment that snap cracks open into laughter is one of the few reliable social phenomena still available to us.
Stay awake an entire night doing nothing at all. No eating, no music, no screen, nothing chemical. Just sit and wait until the first light comes. It hollows something out of you that sleep can’t reach—and then the morning fills the hollow back up with something quieter than usual. Worth doing at least once. Alone, preferably.
Watch the new season of Two and a Half Men and make your peace with the fact that Charlie Sheen is gone and Ashton Kutcher is somehow supposed to fill that void. Let yourself grieve a little. In 2011 Scarlett Johansson’s phone got hacked and the internet had very strong, very sustained feelings about the results. There is something almost admirable about that level of collective commitment, in retrospect.
Stop dancing eventually. The aliens have been watching for years and they’ve already drawn their conclusions. Vote when given the chance, for whoever is least actively lying. Throw the remaining hours at whatever makes the weekdays feel slightly less inevitable. That’s the protocol. That’s all there ever is.