by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Every day we needlessly suffer the unbearable tyranny of the calendar. Every moment of your life will occur on one of the seven days. No exceptions. We further tarnish our magical, majestic, terrible moments with a dinky number system. This article appears on 22-9-05. Our days are numbered.

Seven weekly dictators grind us down with their controlling, grabby personalities. Monday means back to work, Tuesdays and Wednesday force you to submit to the grind. Thursday is payday, Friday is escape, Saturday offers brief bacchanalia and Sunday is for rest and regrets.

You can’t escape the Seven Horsemen of Mediocrity.

Quebec needs to be where the rebellion begins. Why here? French Canadians are always seeking ways to become distinct. For example, in the ’70s, there was a slender, massively endowed politician from Lotbinière named Rodrigue Biron who tried to singlehandedly revolutionize men’s fashion by sporting the “Onassis tie knot.” He went over-the-top, skipping the final stuffing-through business. The gears of innovation never stop turning here.

The drabness of our days can be broken by employing Catholic tradition. Few remain devout, but Quebec maintains the spirit of Catholicism through such traditions as the Catholic Work Ethic, in which the average worker puts his nose somewhere near the grindstone, his shoulder almost to the wheel, and gives his full 40 per cent at all times.

Catholicism contains a little-used alternative calendar. We must steal it. It associates days with exciting and dazzling tales, tricks, miracles and more-than-frequent beheadings.

So take next Tuesday, Sept. 27. Just another humdrum day? Nope, on that morning the sun rises on Saints Damian and Cosmas Day. These twins from third-century Syria healed people for free until martyred by the bloodthirsty authorities. They once organized a leg transplant, connecting the leg of a dead black man to a white guy, a practice modern science still hasn’t mastered.

Next Thursday, Sept. 29? Nope. Don’t call it that please, ever again. It’s Saint Wenceslaus Day, named for the Duke of Bohemia. Many wanted him to continue paganism, but he got Christian and his land was taken over by German co-religionists. Little brother Boleslaus chopped him up at the door of the church in 935. Rotten Boleslaus has no saint name, mostly because he was so mean and there’s no pagans allowed.

September 19 celebrates Saint January, an Italian whose powdered blood sits in a jar in the hills. Every spring they take it out and it turns back to liquid blood, keeping villagers without cable TV somewhat entertained.

I dispute some choices though. Saint Bonaventure gets July 15 even though he was a tiresome blowhard who boringly argued that science exists to serve religion. He needs to be replaced by Saint Swithin from the 800s in England. Swithy was so angry when they moved his dead body that he brought rain for 40 days and 40 nights, all from the great beyond.

Coincidentally, miracles were way more common before cameras and scientific verification and such nitpicky stuff. It’s a shame, because a bit of religious magic could finally prove the widely-held suspicion that science is fake.

Friday, Sept. 23 is Saint Pio Day. He’s an Italian who died in 1968. The last pope canonized him in 2002, based on smell. Apparently his bloody stigmata smelled of flowers, or perfume, or Fabreze. It’s nice to smell good. But you shouldn’t get a day for it.

Saint Christopher Day needs to be restored. This 18-foot-tall badass was so mean that he decided only to work for somebody wickeder than himself. He served the devil, until he realized Beelzebub was scared of Jesus, so he got holy. Then he carried baby Jesus heavy-with-sins-of-the-world across a river on a boat. His story was deemed too hard-to-believe, unlike the others, which are entirely credible.

So with some scissors, white-out and maybe a plumber’s wrench, we could update the calendar, perhaps add a few Brad-Pitt- and Angelina-Jolie-type days to get some TV exposure, hopefully getting it done by Saint Benedict Day or Saint Polycarp Day at the very latest.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca