Hello there, fellow drone-bees! The workweek is upon us yet again, and we once again find ourselves hiding our true desires behind dead-skin masks. For forty hours a week, even the strongest and most original amongst us assume the personae of the tired and damned. In these times, we are nothing if not the hollow shells we’ve worked so hard to fill during off-hours.

Gatsby is jolted in the middle of the night, awakened by the American nightmare that sees him whimpering ,”Gatz…Minnesota…Dan Cody…”

Draper drinks and screws and sells himself into a life of luxury, and yet cannot shed the skin of Whitman’s despondency.

Kent writes the headlines that Superman inspires, but Kal-El will never get over the fact that he is the last survivor of a doomed lineage.

In spite of our most transcendental aspirations, there will always be forces working to keep us tethered to the material realities. And the most formidable of these forces is the bastard-thief known as the workweek. So there’s any hope of saving ourselves, we’ve only got one option.

We must remove our entertainment-swords from their scabbards and use them to slit the throat of the bastard-thief.

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Welcome to the MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE! I’m going to show you the various bits of entertainment I’ll be using to preserve my spirit during the workweek. Your task, should you feel up to it, is to hit up the comments section and show off the ways you’ll be keeping your heart alive.

Let’s do this!

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[This! Is! Mad Men! recaps the newest developments of Don Draper and his ragtag group of cohorts. In the spirit of the show, it will often be sexist and drunk. Apologies ahead of time.]

I’m worried about Don Draper. He’s always bent the elbow liberally, but never before has alcohol been such a destructive force in his life. Sure, there’ve been plenty of drunks in Mad Men — Freddy Rumsen and Duck Philips spring to mind — but Don’s supposed to be the exception to the rule!

Isn’t he?

When we first learnt of Don’s exploits in season one, there was a certain charm to them. He drinks? He philanders? He steals identities? All right…That’s not too cool but I guess I can see where he’s coming from. He was sympathetic – coming from nothing, he sought solace in the pursuit of the American dream. And just like Gatsby and Willy Loman and Hunter S. Thompson, Don Draper found out the hard way that the dream is dead.

How do know that that Don Draper has hit rock bottom? He gave away his secret identity.

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