Preface to Weekends: It's Only Tuesday?!?!

I am a fanciful person, by which I mean I make a lot of stuff up. If you were me, you'd understand. I've not gotten so bad that the truths I invent to understand or enrich my life have completely overtaken me, & I believe them like they really happened - no, I'm not a Republican! - but I do sometimes have amazing fantasies in my head that are so far & above how the real world works that it's a durned shame that some of them aren't true.

Some are fed by a steady diet of movies, music & books - for example, I did once contemplate (at the age of ten) opening a microwave oven while it was operating (in the days when you could do that) so I'd be exposed to the mysterious rays & get super powers like every other Marvel Comics super hero. But some are just the workings of my mind, absurdities trying to elbow out the mundanities of tepid life in the 21st century.

& some are propped up by the arbitrary ways human beings, in our ten thousand years of so-called civilization, have constructed their ways of seeing to make sense in the world. For example, I am a bit obsessed with time. Time as a concept seems straightforward enough - it has something to do with light, something to do with the universe expanding, something to do with the nature of our mechanical, physical world - the fact that we live on a planet that spins on its axis & rotates around a yellow star. What's fascinating to me is how humans have chosen to chop up that time - seconds, minutes, hours, days - to months, years, centuries, millenia. In between all that, there is this phenomena called "the week."

I am tempted to write a very silly story about how the week was invented by a bitter old man - Ted Week - when he got really sad when his schoolmates from some ancient Babylonian or Greek or Egyptian or Chinese grade school equivalent - his pals like Herbie January & William Saturday, for example - all got periods of time named after them. Even weirdos like Horace Second & Bernice Century got some divison of time named after them! So Ted Week plotted... You can see how it would have gone.

But the truth is even weirder. As I'll explain (or try to, anyway) on my show Friday, time divisions like the month or the year are easily understood with natural phenomena - the moon, the seasons. In this wonderful book I found, "Waiting For The Weekend" by Witold Rybczynski - the author points out:

Day spans the interval between the rising & setting of the sun... The month measures - or once did - the time required for the moon to wax, become full, & wane; & the year counts one full cycle of the seasons. What does the week measure? Nothing. At least, nothing visible. No natural phenomenon occurs every seven days - nothing happens to the sun, the moon, of the stars. The week is an artifical, human-made interval.

I love the hell out of that. So why make anything up? The truth is already plainly delightful. & it doesn't even begin to suggest why humans invented a "weekend" as we now understand & experience.

By the way, this book (which I just started reading today) has nothing to do with the show being about the weekend. I'll talk about why I'm doing a show about weekends tomorrow.