Friday Schmy Day

TGIF, they say, and is that a good thing? Five days work to earn a few days for your "lifestyle of leisure"?

And here comes Memorial Day Weekend just a week from now, when summer starts in earnest, and we're even more intent on making it look like we're the most laid back and best outfitted grillers in the 'hood - as opposed to doing what keeps us shut in most of the time - channel surfing.

Oh Fridays don't matter quite as much to me as to most of you since I barely work. Indeed, I barely function in any conventional sense. Most of my function - including my few strains/veins of High Function - is in the unconventional, rather unAmerican venues of... contemplation, sitting around thinking - really known, if you do it with any articulation or systematic thought, as that thing that sounds so hackneyed - philosophizing. And who does that any more? Well, there are those of us who do, but I just don't think we're ever bunched up, more like few and far between, like spotting a big hot air balloon - as opposed to, down on the ground below (and below ground) the industrious and dutiful ants.

Strange that we, homo sapien sapiens, are sort of a cross between apes and other primates (of course), strutting, courting birds of a feather - and ants. Our ant natures so often seem to win out. We make worn paths going from home to get stuff and bring it back home and from home to work moving stuff around and going back home, like ants in rush hour, traffic jams, all tuned to the weather and news and sports scores.

I figure, of all the animals, ants must have cable down in their apartment homes. It's cheap to hook up - like getting free cable included in your rent at a humongous apartment complex, gated no less, so anteaters can't get inside and you can enjoy the scene at the swimming pool at your leisure, in peace, with residents and guests of your own kind, approved, ant-like like yourselves.

Amazing, to me, for all the human variety - and there is a hell of a lot, I am not kidding - that so many of us are just that, not quite ant-like but, yes, birds of a feather, flocking together. Sure, we're social animals to beat the band - we put the antics of dolphins and chimpanzees and peacocks to shame - but we, perhaps like they (if we really knew them), certainly are a quirky bunch.

We seem to be relieved to have jobs and relieved to be away from them. How many ants love what they do? They're lucky, those ants - they don't love. But we humans, we love, and we have passions and contradictions. And that sort of stuff - all the id and the ego and the (uh oh) psyche get in the way of comfortably sorting out and "balancing" all the stuff we do that we don't really want to do from the stuff we do that we do really want to do.

Who invented this weekend thing anyway? Does the ration of 5:2 make sense to most of you (ants)? Why not 4:3? Or even 3:4? Americans work more than most human animals ever have - yes, harder and longer. Maybe somewhere in there is a badge of honor and a gold watch, but it seems there's so much else to do, too - like sit in the front yard and let your mind wander around the scene and the universe a bit.

Just a bit. Try it. You might really like it.

And you'll be oh so human.


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