Sundays are depressing

On a Sunday morning sidewalk,
I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cause there's something in a Sunday
That makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothing short a' dying
That's half as lonesome as the sound
Of the sleeping city sidewalk
And Sunday morning coming down.
--Johnny Cash
"Sunday Morning Coming Down"

Sunday maybe the beginning of the week nowadays, but it really only amounts to the end of a weekend. It is the day to clean yourself up, to make sure your clothes are washed, to make sure your house is in order. It's more a day of preparation for the week ahead than a day of relaxation. We've got so much to do before the grind captures us and drags us unwillingly through the upcoming week. We lay aside our youthful adventures and put on a mask to wear to work or to school, so that we can conform with the ridiculous nature of our professional existence. We have become our parents, those same people we held in such high-esteem before we realized they were human after all and not the gods and godesses of our childhood. They could do anything, we thought then. Now we know. For we have joined them, we have taken their places, we have debunked the myth of the all-knowing and all-powerful entity which sent us to bed early and fixed our dinners. We have become that which we hated during our adolescence, as surely as our own will hate us during theirs. Yes, Sunday is a day of psyching ourselves up to do it all again, not a day of rebirth or of new beginnings. That's just a bunch of feel-good mumbo-jumbo. It is part of the cycle which keeps us chained to the past and drags us forward.

I wrote a few weeks ago about a sickness which infests me from time to time--not one of suicidal ravings or such as that, but one of seclusion and isolation. I was thinking about a time in school, in the fifth grade, when I first began this periodic habit of pulling away. I was one of the top students in my class, when one day, rather suddenly and for no apparent reason (at least none that I can recall now) I decided to stop taking part in things I enjoyed. I was the kid in class who knew all of the answers (and no, I'm not just being conceited here). One day, I stopped speaking in class. I no longer wanted to prove my intelligence by working problems on the chalkboard while the class watched. I moved to the back of the room, refused my teacher's suggestions to involve myself in the class, talked to virtually no one. The ridiculous thing about my self-imposed exile was that I was enjoying myself. I had nothing to prove to anyone but myself. Some days I would feel differently, and I ached to raise my hand to speak. But usually I just sat there, feeling strangely superior to those idiots who acted the way I had before. I mocked them in my head, when they answered incorrectly or even when they were right. I laughed at their stupidity. I knew all of the answers, but I was tired of being the go-to guy. I felt a strange sense of power because I no longer played their reindeer games. And for some reason, I enjoyed the ability to cut myself off from everything. To exclude myself, a kind of fast from those things which had determined my personality and characteristics. It's almost a religious experience in a way, and I'm sure those who know me will most likely giggle at the obnoxiousness of this activity. Yet it is one of the oddities in my nature. It's what makes me a really difficult person to understand at times.
And I don't really understand it either. I don't understand it at all.