Hello, Sentient Folk. Welcome to Monday Morning Commute. This is the weekly call-and-answer column that sits atop the throne of existential feces that is The First Day of the Work Week. Within this aforementioned conglomerate of poorly formed sentences, cheap dick jokes, and the passive voice, I tell you what I’m looking forward to during a given week.

Then you holler back with your own choice arts, games, movies, comics, songs, philosophical musings. Let’s do this! Together!

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Ah, the early evening on a Monday of a long weekend. The past few days a welcomed respite from the grind of the semester. The next few days an unwelcome reminder of the daily grind. But I should not be too glib — I’m well rested, psychologically mending, and certain that I can grit out the next few days on campus. Though, if I may subvert and contradict myself — some of the “longest” weeks are those coming on the heels of an extended break. The body, it adjusts so quickly to levity, gaiety, enjoyment. 11 o’clock existential start times. Alas! Alack! Enough grousing.

Allow me to embrace this Monday Morning (non-)Commute. Allow me to share what’s going on in my world, what’s on my mind, and the armada of distractions I’m either using, or anticipating, to help me through this week. Then share your own! Let’s do it as a “squad” if you “will” you know?

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Welcome! SpartanFuckLords! To Tuesday Afternoon Commute! The day late edition of Monday Morning Commute! I’ll level with you. I worked until 7:45 pm yesterday. By the time I got home (8:30), ate dinner (turkey chili) and began to relax (put on sweatpants and ate an entire box of Star Wars Chez-Its while laying down), I was no longer willing to open my backpack. Unleash my computer. Type up this column! But now it’s here! Monday Morning Commute! By way of Tuesday Afternoon Commute!

This column! Where we share the ArtsFartsBooksBeatsVideoGamesEtc we are looking forward to enjoying during a given week! I’ll go first! Then you share what you’re up to this week! What are you drinking? Playing? Reading? Ruminating over? Let me know~

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Here’s a toast to the douchebags! Here’s a toast to the gluttons! To the slave drivers, to the apathetic consumers. Here’s a toast to the MarauderCorporations! To the BottomLineSwine, to the trash mongers! Earth is Toast, so let’s share a toast! Ain’t nothing we can do about it anyways. Let’s dance while the Palaces Burn! Together! And what a perfect column to do so in.

Monday Morning Commute Tuesday Afternoon Commute. Here’s a toast to the hard workers! To the people just trying to get by, to the loved ones who love their loved ones. Monday Morning Commute Tuesday Afternoon Commute. Where us trash mongers, hard workers, BottomLineSwine, we can all gather. Share what we’re up to this week. Be it the books we’re reading, the road trips we’re taking, the kids we’re trying to raise.

We’re all in this together, so let’s hold hands as we rocket not into Space, but off the cliff.

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Ah, autumn. Brings with it apparently the hottest day of the fucking year here in Massachusetts tomorrow. But also! The usual meanderings. Football is back, praise the Elder Ones. School is back, praise the Old Things. And with school being back comes my typical beginning-of-the-semester renunciation of caffeine. To an extent. I’ll level with you — I have to get up at 7 am. And while many call that “normal”, I call that “an hour and forty-five minutes before I’m used to.” With the knowledge that I must RISE~ earlier, I’m trying to scale back my caffeine consumption. So I can go to bed at an earlier time. Let me tell you — I still have enough caffeine in my blood to stop your heart twice over — but goddamn if my skull ain’t pounding. My jaw clenching. My eyes twitching. My detox is your overdose, but I’m going to make it through.

I hope.

Anyways! This here is Monday Morning Commute. That means I’m about to list the various activities, arts, comics, and cool happenings I’m looking forward to this week. After I’m done babbling about my poor choices (though I will admit I’m sweating a couple of things this week v. much), you share own weekly interests.

Let’s do this! With clenched jaws and slightly less prominent heart palpitations!

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I’ve spent the last week wondering what the fuck I’m doing. Let me tell you — the life of an adjunct is brutal. I stand a mere seven days away from starting a semester, and I don’t know what classes I’m teaching. How many, what time, their subject level. And I stand and I gaze into myself and I wonder why I put myself through such rigors. Every semester. The answers are obvious but when you’re stressed, when you have a haunting sense of not pulling your share of the financial weight, when you have a new mortgage, they seem to evaporate before they have any chance of distilling into anything appreciable.

Lord, I don’t know.

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Welcome to Monday Morning Commute, my friends. I’m going to spare you my usual Fusillade of Verbosity for the week. ‘Cause honestly I have a bit of a headache, and the SpiritsVapors are burning out in my synapses quicker than I anticipated. Don’t snort them, Caff. The GraveBits are tired. You will metabolize them too quickly. You know better! You know better. And I do. But when you’re tired, and you got a bit of the sludge-blood, what else can you do?

You can lay down.

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They didn’t know they were already dead. Carl and Martina had been chosen to pilot the last space-ship on Mars onto the Asteroid. They were supposed to till the Helium to power the rest of the Martians home to Europa.

They didn’t they were already dead. Some fatal flaw within the wiring, some poor-man’s rigging of This or That combustible chemical dispenser was waiting for that first thrust post-orbit to vaporize Carl. To vaporize Martina. To vaporize their hopes of getting everyone home.

They didn’t know they were already dead. As the Martians stared at the faint silver glimmer that was their doomed space-ship taking flight, puncturing the skin of the atmosphere to leave for the Asteroid, they felt hope for the first time since they could remember. The entire planet cobbled together the materials for the space-ship. The entire planet’s intellect poured into reimagining a type of vessel not used for decades. The entire planet’s hopes, literally, ham-handedly symbolically, invested into the space-ship.

They didn’t know they were already dead.

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The Red Planet was a promise broken. I don’t know, half-baked phrases that wiggle up out of the sludge of my brain. Dying on the shores of over-caffeination, lack of self-esteem, and attention deficit disorder. Never to evolve past their primordial stage. Never to take shape as anything other than a “hey, that may be neat to write about.” At least not in the last few years. Who knows. Maybe with a new home, my own room, and a distinct desire to create something, I’ll get beyond the “concepts generated while taking a crap-taking a drive-taking a shower” stage of my (lack of) creativity.

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Welcome, friends. To Monday Morning Commute. The weekly outpost at the Edge of Good Taste where those of us aboard the Space-Ship share what we’re up to during the next five days or so.

You know.

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