Alright, this is kind of curious. Maybe peculiar. Confusing. And hard. But the good news is that I have just discovered, talking at length to a good friend last night, that this may not have anything to do with being single and alone, or being in my 60’s, because my friend is about half my age and happily married. We both have, uhm, this thing. It is being uncomfortable, sometimes WAY uncomfortable, when people are not where they’re supposed to be. Let me explain.

I am every bit as single and certainly every bit of my 61 years, the rest of the week as I am on Saturday nights, but Saturday nights are painfully lonely for me while I do pretty darned well the rest of the time. Oh, I could give you reasons, like the fact that someone I was really in love with and spent most of the weekends with even if on the phone because we were long distance, is gone from my life and I still miss her and Saturdays which we spent together I now spend very much alone. But it’s more than that.

Monday through Friday everyone I know is in their proper place. They are at work or at home in the evenings doing what they do and I know where they are and that gives me a fair amount of comfort. So and so is home doing such and such, or at work, or doing errands, or… It just makes sense. But comes the weekend and anybody might be anywhere and it is as though the earth shifted beneath my feet and I am clinging to my uncertain surroundings for dear life. My world seems to be solidly in place in proportion to other people being where they are supposed to be.

Now I thought this was very odd until my friend said that she got so uneasy when her parents went out of town she told them they should just go and not tell her. Go, have a wonderful time, she told them, just don’t tell me you’ve gone. This made perfect sense to me. I swear my whole life seems to make more sense since this wonderful young woman and I have begun to be closer friends and talk on the phone. There are real people in the world who experience what I’ll call The Saturday Night Syndrome. It can happen at other times but for me since it mainly happens on Saturday night I’ll call it that.

I thought it was because I am bipolar and God knows I am more than peculiar as far as all of that goes, and I thought it was about being lonely and lost love, and I’m quite sure that colors things more than a bit. But it’s The Saturday Night Syndrome, or the “They’re not where they’re suppose to be” syndrome that mucks things up and by gosh and by golly I surely wish people would get some place and stay put. My friend is not bipolar either which further convinces me it has something to do with Saturday nights. Fridays still have enough of the rest of the day when people are in their proper place and Sunday is close enough to Monday when everyone gets where they are supposed to be soon enough but yegods Saturday is a no man’s land.

If it were just me I could understand it to be part of the slip-slidy bipolar ladder business. I tell people, and it is surely true enough, that my life and days are strictly structured, my routine is so rigid it is as though I am climbing a ladder and if anything disrupts my routine and causes me to miss a rung of the ladder the whole day can be in ruins. More than one rung of the ladder and the whole business will be so precarious I might fall to my death. This happens a lot this time of year which I call The Thanksgiving To New Year Holiday Slide during which the holidays cause so many disruptions to my carefully ordered life that I am as if an inch away from going down with the Titanic on a regular basis. Get me past New Year’s and I just might make it, I think every year, but even this is not the issue. The ladder and the Holiday Slide come each day or year in due course and I muddle through. Saturday nights can be treacherous. If I am going to blow my diet big time it will be on Saturday night. If I am going to have a glass or two of wine, yep, Saturday night. I go to bed with a sigh of relief on Saturdays. I will wake up on Sunday, one step closer to Monday, and it will all begin to make sense again.

It is 10:47 p.m. If I thought it wouldn’t break the internet I would keep writing here on into Sunday and stop writing only after I was safely past Saturday but this blog post would be one hundred times longer than a blog post is supposed to be and I think there are RULES about that somewhere. I guess I’ll have to stop here and sit and wonder and worry over where people are and if they are safe and if they are where they ought to be and when the hell they’ll get back to where they belong. I don’t guess the love of my life is going to show up again, after nine years one’s ardor cools anyway, and not much about my life is going to change before tomorrow, so I will just hold on. I will end this blog post and spare everyone 100,000 words of nonsensical blubbering. But it is still Saturday night and anything might happen, so hold a good thought and toss me a life raft (Or pour me a glass of wine.) and I think I might just make it. Maybe. Perhaps.

The pugs have passed out. They are all snoring loudly around my feet under my work table. Saturdays aren’t a ball of laughs for them either with me at the helm. It’s almost Sunday guys, hang on!