A while back some journalist asked somebody why they’d done some specific thing, and they said, “I don’t like Mondays.”  Ironically, the thing they’d done was very bad, and their quote stated while being dragged away by the police.  Ironicer still, I don’t remember any of the
details.  Ironicest of all?  She wasn’t quoting “The Boomtown Rats,” who had yet to write that song.  It was almost as if she knew.

Perhaps it’s crass to begin a “comedy” essay with the words of Brenda Spencer, a Woman who murdered two people and severely wounded nine others back in the day when schoolyard shootings were still avante garde.  Why would I do a thing like that?  See, that’s my point. That’s what they asked her, and “I don’t like Mondays” was her response.  Madison Avenue would later paraphrase Ms. Spencer in their legendary Budweiser campaign with the slogan “Why ask Why?”  To paraphrase yet further, as I often say to my wife when she wants to know how I can walk by the same dirty sock for fifteen straight days and not pick it up, “Ayuhno,” universal shorthand grunt for “I don’t know.”

Constantin Stanislovski is credited with a great leap forward in the history of modern theater by insisting his actors examine the motivation of their characters.  This is perhaps the most significant, but hardly only, reason why modern acting is so bad.  Why does Uncle Vanya want to kill himself?  Perhaps because he saw a highschool production of “The Cherry Orchard,” but my bet is if you made a time machine and traveled into the past to ask playwright Anton Checkov just what Vanya’s urge toward self destruction was all about, he’d say “Ayuhno.”  Except he’d say it in Russian.  And probably he’d cough a lot, because he was sickly.

Why, why, why do we do what we do?  Why do I constantly “forget” to mop the kitchen floor, why do I still read comic books at the age of thirty nine, why do I fly into a totally inappropriate rage if my six year old asks for a second glass of juice before I’ve even put a fork in my rapidly cooling dinner, why do I like to hike my pants up to just below my nipples and say to my poor, long suffering wife, “lets dance,” why do I have the keys to several widely scattered South American bus station lockers, why am I seriously considering learning that trick where you fill your mouth up with milk and let a dog drink it even though that would mean buying or at least borrowing a dog?  Ayuhno.

In Cervantes classic “The Impossible Dreamer” wasn’t it the prostitute Aldonza who asked the musical question of Peter Otoole, “Why do you do the things you do?”  And wasn’t the answer “I’m as loopy as a crap house rat” just another way of saying “Ayuhno?”  When the guy that climbed that really tall mountain said, “Because it’s there,” wasn’t he pretty much just saying “Ayuhno?”  When Job begged God Almighty to tell him what the deal was with the dead family and the boils, and God is all “Cans’t thou draw out Leviathan with an hook?”  What the hell was that supposed to mean?  I’ll tell you what.  Ayuhno.

Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe you’ve got it all figured out, maybe your day goes according to plan, maybe you’ve never missed an appointment or said the wrong thing at a party or had to tell a Jusge “Your Honor, I have no idea how the dentures in question got into the grill of my car.”  Maybe you never once found your  keys in the ice box or got surprised by the results of a paternity test from a southern state that didn’t remember ever even driven through, let alone visiting.  Maybe if I went through your sock drawer I wouldn’t find matchbooks and receipts and empty shotgun shells you couldn’t easily explain.  But you know what?  We’re not all saints and geniuses.  We’re just the little people, your store clerks and toll booth types, Janitors and Meter Readers, Baby-sitters  and Doctors and Airtraffic Controllers and Presidents of the Free World with our Fingers on the Button.  Most of us ‘plain old folk’ have no idea what we’re doing or why we do it.  Don’t kid yourselves, ladies and gentleman, the world we live in is a mine field populated with three billion rolling loose cannon.  Cannons?  Cannai?  What the hell is the plural of cannon?  Ayuhno.

But I’ll tell you what I do know.  The next time someone says to you, “This is going to hurt me more than it does you,” or “It’s not you, it’s me,” or “I’m not giving you the promotion because the person I gave it to is way better at the job than you are,” or “I wouldn’t kiss you on the cheek if you were the last man on earth,”  you tell them, “Why don’t you just tell the truth and say ‘Ayuhno?’”

‘Cause they don’t.  I don’t think they do.  Right?  Unless they have a lawyer or a court order or something like that in which case just knuckle under.  Didn’t I learn that the hard way.

Man, I hate Mondays.

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