The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul

In his book Life, the Universe, and Everything Douglas Adams describes Sunday afternoons in this way, “That terrible listlessness that starts to set in at 2:55pm, when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock, the hands will move relentlessly on to four, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”
For me, the long dark tea time of the soul has, for a long time now, been a Sunday afternoon reality. Anytime I find myself with a Sunday off and Monday back at work, I dread Sunday afternoons. I get stressed out on Sundays. I find that as Sunday afternoon hits, I get restless as I think about how badly I’ve wasted the weekend and how the week ahead is going to suck because of it. Whether it was the term paper I was supposed to write, or the errands I was supposed to run, it all starts to pile up like “loose ends tying a noose in the back of my mind” (Beck). By 3 o’clock Sunday afternoon, I’ve watched all the TV I can possibly watch in a weekend and my mind just won’t concentrate on whatever is on. I start to get the urge to go out, but know that doing so will only cause suffering the next morning. So I sit and stare at the TV, not really watching anything, and my foot starts to violently twitch as the nervous energy starts to build up. I pace around and try to figure out what’s really making me all anxious, so I can maybe do something about it, but its never something specific, is it? Its either too late and you’ll just have to now consider the consequences or its just those thousand little things that on their own wouldn’t bother you, but taken together, keep you from enjoying The Simpsons.
I’ve long since given up trying to get a good night sleep on Sunday nights. With all the shit that builds up on Sunday night coupled having invariably slept in on Sunday morning I always just stare at the ceiling hoping that I fall asleep before 3am so I can at least get two hours sleep. I just figure that Monday morning is going to suck and I’ll be back in the swing by Tuesday morning.
The fucked up thing is that I know the solution to this little problem. I just have to not leave loose ends hanging on Friday and I need to get more exercise on the weekends so I’m more worn out on Sunday afternoons. And don’t think that I don’t make a pledge to do just that every time the long dark tea time of the soul rears its ugly head. But then Friday morning rolls through and you start to think about how hard you’ve worked all week and how no one works on Friday afternoon anyway and that you’ve earned a few beers…and there it is, and it all falls apart.
So here I am, deeply entrenched in the long dark tea time of the soul, stressing over the tiny crap that builds up, knowing that none of it is going to be as bad as it seems. Nevertheless, it almost midnight now and I have to be up at 5am. The scary thing about all this is that the quote I started out with is from a passage about how Sunday afternoons and the long dark tea time of the soul drove an immortal being mad.
So here's to hoping I'm not going mad.