Coming to grips with the horrific reality that is being not hungover on weekends

You know when people talk about being on that 9-5 grind, working for the weekend, and you are like, ‘I’ll never be like you’. And then one day you are like them. And very quickly you begin to understand why people love getting shit-faced on the weekend. You work hard for those benjamins during the week, and fuck else you gonna do on the weekend besides piss it up the wall on beers and pingers, and literally your own piss, up the wall outside whatever establishment you just stumbled out of.

This goes on for a while. And it’s great. You just got Netflix too so Saturdays and Sundays are spent binge-watching Daredevil because you avoided it up until this point but heard Season 2 was hella good but you gotta slog through Season 1 first. You get Dominos delivered to your house with one of those 3 pizza/2 garlic breads/1 coke for $36.95 combos you find by Googling “Dominos Vouchers”. Ignoring forcefully the fact you’d save plenty if you just drove the approximate 2.5 minutes it takes to get there for a pickup.

But eventually you get tired. The five-day working week really only ends up being about two-and-a-half, because you spent most of Monday still hurting from the weekend in a physical fashion. Then most of Tuesday hurting mentally and spiritually because it’s Suicide Tuesday and that’s how serotonin depletion/replenishment works. By around Wednesday afternoon you’re basically back to full function, then it’s Thursday, which is close enough to Friday, which is basically drinking time because you finish work early on Fridays to have beers with your colleagues.

So you decide to mix things up, and only have a couple of beers on Friday arvo, take yourself home at a decent hour and go to sleep before midnight. This results in you waking up Saturday morning at like 9am (as opposed to just getting into bed like usual). Now I’m not sure if you’ve ever been privy to 9am Saturday morning but it’s a terrifying time and place. The sun shines really brightly, there's lots of activewear running around, and people are out walking their dogs or children or both in some kinda hellish half baby/half dog park sledding combination.

If you think that looks scary while you’re waiting out the front of some random’s house for an Uber at the tail end of a bender, wait til you see it at full brain-functioning capacity. At this point, you’re basically Neo waking up inside The Matrix.

The pods are hungover people.

A flood of emotions and questions wash over you.

"Is this what’s next? Is this phase two now that I’ve given up the partying? Do I really need to find somewhere else to get coffee ‘cause down the road is so fucking busy? Will my future dog be cute enough for its own Instagram which I will definitely have time to manage on account of the no more partying?"

Once you’re over the initial shock of having the ability to actually do things on your Saturday (or Sunday, let’s assume for the rest of this pile of word vomit both are the same), you have to think of, or find things, to do. Forget about hitting your mates up. They’re still fucked. They’ll probably just ask you to bring over Macca’s or more alcohol. This might sound fun – but being the fresh, alive person at a kick-on is the actual worst. There’s a reason people on The Walking Dead don’t stop and try to talk to the zombies before they cut their fucking heads off.

"Did you bring those pingers broooo?"

So it’s now Saturday DAY, you ain’t got no work… and you ain’t got shit to do.

For the obsessive-compulsive inclined, chores are a good start point. Imagine having clean clothes ready to roll out on Monday morning, instead of madly throwing them in the dryer on Sunday night when you realise you’ve still managed to run out of underwear despite receiving 10 new pairs last Christmas. Cleaning your own things is great, but cleaning the house is even better. Bask in the warm glow of your own self-satisfaction as you passively-aggressively stomp as loud as fucking possible around your sharehouse at 10am on a Saturday morning. Clean up what could be mistaken for a meth dungeon, knowing full well your roomies have only just reached the point of absolute drug-binge-induced exhaustion that lying down is at least physically possible. Hell, get the bloody vacuum cleaner out, and suck those demons up like there’s no tomorrow.

Once you’ve turned that former halfway house upside down, where to next? Instagram is always a good source for weird shit to do that you would never have normally thought of. There’s a very good chance the city you live in has about 100 different accounts dedicated to HOW FUCKING BEAUTIFUL it is, encouraging people to hashtag things like #FUCKMYCITYISGOODPLEASEREPOSTTHISPHOTOTOYOURACCOUNTSOICANCONTINUELIVINGMYLIFEVALIDATEMEEEEEEEEEE.

On a surface level they may seem lame, but they’re actually pretty good at showing you a bunch of weird/wonderful/cool looking places that you had no idea existed. Sure, the mystical-looking fairy forest you saw that’s astonishingly only two suburbs over might actually just be a swampy dump filled with mud and broken shopping trolleys – but you fucking went there man. And if you work the angles properly you could probably get a similarly misleading photo reposted to a different one of those accounts.

Expectations vs reality (via Global Hobo)

There’s also heaps of @CITY_TODO accounts. Generally they talk about weird pseudo-country town fairs and food truck stops, but it’s a goddamn start. Whatever you do though, stay away from breakfast Instagram accounts. In fact, stay away from going out for breakfast in general. People fucking love going out for breakfast on weekend mornings. LOVE IT. And you could too, if you also love sitting on a tiny outdoor table that’s in a completely different suburb to the café you’re waiting to order from. Don’t be fooled by the waiter’s pep either as he or she maniacally tries to appease 150 different couples (with their dogs and babies). That fucker partied last night, and they are hurting.

"Kill me."

You could visit your family. Honestly go and visit your family when you’re not coming down, you’ll both find it an incredibly enriching experience because for the first time in a long time when they ask you questions about your life you can actually answer because for once the previous 36 hours wasn’t filled with shit-talking and warm Somersby ciders in your backyard til the sun came up. Another option is going to a shooting range, something some friends recently assured me was actually great. And it might be a good way to shoot the fuck out of those remaining demons you missed in the great vacuum of 2016. Another friend has started mountain biking but if the weeping war wound that currently runs up the entire length of his left shin isn’t a sure sign of a stupid idea, I don’t know what is.

Beyond what I’ve detailed above, I don’t have much else to offer you. That’s right. If you’re not hungover on the weekends you can basically clean your shit up, or go on Instagram.

Because people don’t just get fucked up on the weekends because they "work hard" during the week - it's actually just a good way to forget about how miserable your existence is.

And partying all weekend knocks out the other two possible days of pondering your existence. And that's what it's all about.