“Monday, Monday, just can’t trust that day,” sing the Mama and Papas, but T Bone Walker in “Stormy Monday” argues Tuesday is just as bad.

Not so for Steve Wright of the Easy Beats, who feels better on Tuesdays, claiming that “even my old man looks good.”

It’s Wednesday morning at five o’clock when that Beatles girl slips away from her parents to meet “a man from the Motortrade.”

Tripping on acid, Donovan claims “the gulls go willing spinning on Jersey Thursday,” referring not to the scavenger gulls of Asbury Park but to the ones of the isle between England and Normandy.

Again, the Easy Beats: “On Monday, I got Friday on my mind.”

Twenty-four hours later, Tom Waits is gassing her up, hand on the wheel, arm around his sweet one in his Oldsmobile, looking for the heart of a Saturday night.

That leaves the Christian sabbath, Sunday, Bloody, Sunday. Lucinda Williams and I can’t seem to make it through Sunday. [sigh]

 

 

Sunday Evening Blues

 

On Sunday nights

I remember

lying on the bottom bunk

in my pajamas,

wishing I’d done my homework,

listening to the stampeding notes

of Bonanza’s theme song

echoing from the den as I dreaded tomorrow.

 

In the stasis of quarantine,

it seems I should be able to shake

this chronic case

of the Sunday blues.

 

After all, Monday mornings don’t matter anymore.

I don’t need machines to measure minutes,

yet that childhood sadness endures,

indelible, resistant to erosion,

carved into the tombstones

of so many Sabbaths. [1]

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[1] Yes, dammit, the shortening of each successive line of the last stanza is intentional.