MonoMay 1

Don’t Like Mondays

The alarm woke Kate. She felt that initial enthusiasm for the day drain away. She had woken up feeling that her head was going to explode. She knew it was Monday again without even having to think about it. How? Well, Monday was the only day of the week that this happened. Why it was just Mondays. It was as if Monday had a grudge against her. It had been like it ever since she could remember. There was something not quite right, a bit edgy, about Mondays. It was the one day of the week that she didn’t touch alcohol. She didn’t trust herself not to get steaming drunk - it had happened before resulting in lost days. It had always been the same. Even at school she felt that she had never learned anything on a Monday. Every other day of the week was fine. It was just Mondays. It was something that she often thought about. She couldn’t explain it rationally, because there seemed to be no rationality to it. Kate had come to terms with the fact that this was not the usual sort of Monday morning blues that most people experience, but something much more profound. What she experienced on Mondays was an almost physical manifestation. She had been through all sorts of counselling and therapies to try and work out what the actual problem was. Whether it was sociological, psychological, or something completely different. No one had ever been able to come up with a convincing explanation, and most just didn’t get her point when she described it as an almost physical manifestation. She always felt that she was not very productive on a Monday. This didn’t seem to be a problem for the small publishing house where she was a production assistant. They seemed to understand and left her to her own devices on Mondays. For which she was very grateful.

One of Kate’s all-time favourite songs was the Boomtown Rats track I Don’t Like Mondays. She could fully identify with it, especially the line ‘The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.’ That’s exactly how Monday felt, as if her brain was being subjected to an overload. The day never got any better. Mondays never improved. Of course she knew the background to the song, the school shooting in San Diego in 1979. She knew the title came from the motive for the crime. When journalists interviewing her asked ’Tell me why’ Brenda Ann Spencer had replied ‘I don't like Mondays. This livens up the day.’. Bob Geldof was known to have said that he thought not liking Mondays was a bit of a strange reason for killing people. He was also on record as having regretted writing it, because in doing so he had made Brenda Spencer famous. She had read quite a bit about this and similar events, and had come to the conclusion that such events seems quite pointless and senseless. This had, on many occasions, led Kate to speculate as to whether or not what she experienced might not be a much wider phenomenon. After all she could not be the only person to experience such an antipathy towards Mondays. But she had never met anyone else who had anything other than the ‘normal’ Monday morning blues that most people experienced. There again, if she had they never admitted it. It also made her think about the word normal, and to question what actually is normal, and whether she might, in some way, be abnormal.

That opening line, ‘The silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload.’, always struck Kate. Where did that come from? What did it mean? Questions that might have interesting answers. Questions that might be open to interesting speculation. Then the thought struck her, do we all have a silicon chip inside our head, are we all pre-programmed with our likes and dislikes?  Could this make sense of her wishing that Mondays didn’t exist. Of course we wouldn’t know whether or not we were implanted with a silicon chip at birth - a bit like a dog or cat being microchipped with its owners details. Yes, of course, it’s Monday. The day for eccentric thoughts and ideas she thought. Of course this was a bit of a sci-fi concept - if she was honest about it. However, she was aware that there were such developments in the technological field. That people were experimenting with silicon chip implants, seeking to solve all sorts of neurological problems. She was fully aware that her job brought her into contact with very many books, and consequently with many ideas and concepts. Kate thought that this may be one of the reasons that her parents were of the opinion that she had some sort of mental health problem. Of course, she was different, and had wide ranging interests, but that didn’t mean she was a raving loony, as she suspected her parents thought. These were just the sort of thoughts and ideas that captured her imagination. Maybe that was due to that fact that she came into contact with so many creative people, people who could take a mundane idea or concept and turn it on its head to make one think about the world differently. If she was completely honest, that was why she loved her job, no two days were ever alike, there was always something different to be dealt with. This was an idea that she decided to run with, to see where it went, and grabbed her notebook and pen.

Kate would have loved to talk to Phil about all of this. Biotechnology was his field of research. She could only ever understand about half a percent of anything he wrote, but it was fascinating stuff when he explained it. She had learnt a lot from him over the last five years or so, some of which she had been able to bring into her work environment. But there was no way that she could ask Phil what he thought, because he had left last week to move in with a woman he had met at some conference or other. They had first met at a book launch for one of his academic friends, and had got along famously. A few months later they were living together and planning their future. Her parents were not that keen on him, and warned her that he would always be looking for greener grass. How right they were. She had never listened to them. All had been fine up until a year ago, which is when she felt that their relationship started to change. It wasn’t something that she could pin down with any degree of certainty. Just niggling little things like not wanting to go to the pub at times, a little extra fussy about what he ate. If she was honest with herself the signs that he was having an affair were all there. But she was too wrapped up in her work to give it much thought. She had no idea how long that affair had been going on, and to be quite honest she didn’t care that much. It had been about six months ago that she had first thought about kicking him out, but had never done anything about it. In the end it had been Phil who had made the decision to leave, and, quite frankly, there was a sense of relief that he had gone.

Kate started scribbling down her thoughts, she wanted to see where they would lead her. George Orwell was one of her favourite authors and she had read all of his books, many of them several times. This concept was taking Orwell’s Big Brother into a whole new sphere of existence. With the right sort of chip implanted whoever was in control could know at a glance exactly where you were, and who you were associating with. So, it would be impossible to associate with the ‘wrong kind’ of people, and thus become a problem for the state. Instead of simply watching you, they could modify your behaviour, without needing the thought police or torture, that is unless one stepped out of line. The monitoring of individuals, even groups, would become as simple as watching the news. Thinking in terms of Nineteen Eighty-four Kate realised that under such conditions Winston and Julia would have been in serious trouble long before they were. This led her to question just how dystopian the world was becoming, especially with all of the mass surveillance in place these days. She could just imagine that if Orwell were alive his comment on the present in relation to Nineteen Eighty-four might be along the lines of ‘I didn’t write it as a fucking manual!’. She was thinking that whoever was in control might have an app allowing her, or him, to change anyone’s behaviour at a whim? That was a scary thought. Which led to the query, if there is an app to control us, might there be one that could override it and make us more independent. Kate realised that now she was digging deep into the realms of science fiction - a genre of writing that she was an avid reader of. Relating this to her own situation, she wondered whether or not whoever was in control wanted her not to like Mondays for some specific reason.

Kate realised writing down all of these weird thoughts had been quite a productive few minutes. Hey, not bad for a Monday morning she thought. Maybe the silicon chip inside her head had somehow got switched off. Reading them back she suddenly had the notion that here was the germ of an idea for a novel. But who would write it? Orwell certainly would, if he were still around. She was a production assistant in a small publishing house, so, did she know anyone who could? Thinking about it she was aware that they had at least two authors on the books who, while not true science fiction writers, dabbled around the edges of sci-fi/fantasy writing. One of the was a female writer who she liked a lot, even though she couldn’t really get into her writing - it was all a bit esoteric for Kate’s taste. She thought it might be a good idea to drop her an email later and suggest meeting up for a coffee and a chat. She knew that there were those who would argue that it was just repeating Orwell’s Big Brother concept. But was it? Who was to say that one couldn’t taken an existing concept and push it beyond its original envelope. Yes, of course it would work, and Claudet was just the person to make it work.

Author's Note
It's been a while since posting a bit of writing - too much reading for this module. Trying to get back into writing something every day, and hopefully will get there - that is if I can find the words. Some of you may have noticed that music seems to play a big part in my life
Vincent
Yesterday
Ziggy Stardust
how bloody right you are! In searching out the posts for the links I noticed that I pave posted a couple or so stories more than once. Apologies, I will try to do better in future. For those who enjoy the stories/thoughts more of them can be found here - yes, I know, blatant self promotion.