(I’m really busy this week. So you get this fantastic cut and paste re-run from last year. Umm… I meant to say…that is…I’ve gotten lots of requests to reprint this. Yeah, that’s the ticket.)

I remember when Friday meant something. It’ s a fuzzy, dim memory, like differential equations or the theme song to The Joey Bishop Show. But it was real, once.

You got paid on Friday. A check that you brought to the bank after work. A slip of paper that represented a fiduciary obligation on the part of your employer; you know, that sort of thing. You’d go to the bank… no, I’m not kidding, you’d actually go there and wait in a line between velvet ropes depending in caternary curves from chrome stanchions, like it’s an opening night on Broadway and not a crummy line to get beer money. You’d stare at the clock and the neck of the person in front of you and remember lame jokes you saw on the Tonight Show about the little chain on the pen at all the stand-up desks. Why, those jokes were funnier than airline peanuts, I’m tellin’ ya.

And you’d have that slip filled out to go with your paycheck– but never correctly; always with your deposit on the first line until you noticed that line was labeled “cash” or “currency,” and you’d scratch it out and fill it in a line lower, and then wonder if it was OK to have scratched out stuff written on a DEPOSIT SLIP. It’s like a legal document and all, and you can’t just have a do-over on that, can you? So you’d make out another and put the info on the second line, like a good doobie, until you noticed the “cash” line you avoided has a check box with it. The first one was correct all along, and now you’ve got one with the first line inexplicably left blank; and you’d do it over but you’re last in line again already and you need to get out of there — It’s FRIDAY!

After you wait and wait, the clerk behind the bullet proof glass that doesn’t even go up to the ceiling barely even looks at what you wrote. They just read the check and push a few twenties back and grunt at you anyway.

But it’s Friday! You don’t care. You need to find clean clothes that match. That’s only two variables. Why do you still end up inspecting your second clothes hamper — the floor –for stuff only lightly worn that looks slightly better than the Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax tee shirt that’s the only clean thing in your drawer? Who cares? It smoky in the bar anyway, and it’s Friday!.

Oh. You can’t go to that bar. She’ll be there, and you took her number and didn’t call. You meant to…

No you didn’t.

Who cares? It’s Friday! There’s many other places with a common victualler’s license, ain’t there? Your friends all have dates — or geez poor Steve got married fer crissakes — but you’ll find someone you know at the Irish Bar, won’t you? Yeah, but maybe it’ll be that guy you impaled with the dart two weeks ago. You keep asking yourself the same two questions about that place: Who walks in front of a guy throwing darts? That, and: What kind of person wears a sheetrock knife on his belt in an Irish Bar on… yup: Friday night!

What’s on TV? Remington Steele. A repeat. Hello Domino’s? No anchovies. No; no anchovies. The little fishes. No, I don’t want extra anchovies. I WANT EXTRA NO ANCHOVIES.

(fast forward)

It’s so much easier now. Friday! is still the best day of the week. There’s always clean clothes. They still don’t match, but you’re old and you don’t care. Who are you going to impress? Your wife? She bought you those clothes. The money is already in the bank of course. You only go to the bank to sign mortgage papers once every ten years now. The rest is just keystrokes. Where is the bank, exactly? You haven’t had money in your pocket for ten years. What would you do with money? Get pennies handed back to you. Who wants those? Even my children want quarters. Pay the plastic bill when it comes. Keystrokes. Stamps? What are those?

But it’s still Friday! and Friday! is still wonderful, because Friday! is the day you take the six plastic bags that have been lurking at the bottom of the stairs all week to the end of the driveway. Yeah, those bags. The ones with the diapers in them.

Happy Friday! to one and all!