It took me years to realize that ?Black Friday? is actually a good thing, as opposed to ?Black Monday,? which was not. Nor ?Black Tuesday? for that matter, which somehow preceded Black Monday. Those were the days when the markets crashed in 1987 and 1929 respectively.
Oddly, some Christians call the day Jesus was crucified ?Good Friday,? which is probably better than ?Bloody Friday,? which, predictably isn’t on any calendars though there are about a dozen ?Bloody Sundays,? generally signifying various massacres.
?Sunday Bloody Sunday? is a John Schlesinger drama about a bisexual love triangle. It’s also a U2 album. ?Black Sunday? is the flick where Bruce Dern tries to blow up the Super Bowl, and Jimmy Carter along with it, via the Goodyear blimp. You can see how this can be confusing and we haven’t even touched Blue Monday, which some PR firm’s pseudoscience has deduced is the most depressing day of the year (mark you calendars for January 21, 2013). And let’s not touch Cyber Monday, which is when the robot uprising begins, I guess.
So, Black Friday is Better than Black Monday. Got it. Of course, one could intuit that Fridays are intrinsically better than Mondays ? at least for anyone with a job.
Black Friday is really a reduction of ?In the Black? Friday, referring to black ink versus red ink once used by accountants to record positive and negative balances respectively. The annual post-Thanksgiving retail bonanza is apparently when the ledgers are once again in the black. Or ?Back in Black? as AC/DC might sing, though I’m sure they’re working from an entirely different set of referents. They’re Australian and spell color with a U, which is both superfluous and suspect.
For whatever reason, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays remain relatively untouched by those who might ascribe symbolic meaning to the days of the week with an arbitrary color. We can fix this with a little help from Crayola and a personal crisis or two.
Burnt Sienna Thursday: That’s when your email autoresponder exploded while you were on vacation and spammed everyone on the Internet. Thanks to the heroic efforts of your IT guy, your email was hacked, the spam spigot capped and now he knows that all your passwords are a lyric from a Deee-Lite song. Also, groove is in his heart, too, if you ever want to, you know, go to that new gastropub or something.
Taupe Wednesday: This is when you got a parking ticket while running an errand for a friend. When you mentioned the ticket, hoping that she might elect to pay it, she didn’t. And when you were standing in line together at Starbucks, somehow you ended up paying. And she’s skinny. So, you made a really cruel observation about her feckless love life and now you haven’t spoken to her since. That is until …
AuroMetalSaurus Saturday: A sort of slate grey from Crayola’s 64 pack of crayons, AuroMetalSaurus is nearly as much fun to spell as it is to pronounce. When paired with the best day of the weekend (Sundays are so bloody), it commemorates the time you awoke on your skinny friend’s couch with a pounding headache and a crust of margarita salt encircling your mouth. You ask her what happened and she recounts how you felt bad about calling her a slut (not how you remember it but, whatever), which led to several reconciliatory rounds at that tapas bar. She recounts how you nearly went home with that ?computer friend from work? who showed up after you inadvertently drunk dialed him. Your friend had a better plan: go to her place, cry over a forgotten boyfriend from college, throw up that plate of fried calamari and pass out on the couch watching ?The Princess Bride.?
The jury is out whether it will be black or blue come Monday. Probably both.
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