Mahler’s Mondays: The Good Day and The Bad Day, Part 1

IF YOU ASKED THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU to rank their day-to-day lives on a scale of one to 10, my guess is that most would fall into the Jim Halpert four-to-six range. If you’re a few minutes late to work in the morning and everything backs up from there, it’s a four. If you hit a string of green lights and you’re favorite song comes on the radio, it’s a six.

That’s where most of us live our lives: in the middle.

Occasionally, something really good will happen and your day will spike up to an eight, or disaster will strike and you will drop to a two (I’m talking only about normal, day-to-day operations here. Weddings, births, deaths, job loss and the like are extremes that run off the chart).

But every so often, you’ll wander into that Michael Scott bizarro world and you’ll hit a 10 or – heaven forbid – you’ll plummet to a zero. Like a Shareef appearance, they are extremely rare and you never know when they’re coming. The only conclusive fact that I’ve been able to determine is that those types of days usually happen close together so as to maintain the overall balance of life.

Everyone has good days and everyone has bad days, but the 10 and the zero deserve grander monikers. They are, respectively, The Good Day and The Bad Day.

And last week, I lived through both.

Ah, The Good Day.

What makes The Good Day so good is the lack of expectation. Too often we look forward to a day and it never seems to quite live up to the way we pictured it in our brains. Again, it’s not about certain events you had planned going well, it’s about things breaking for you in a way that you couldn’t have imagined. That’s the secret of The Good Day: Just let it come to you.

The start of last Wednesday felt like the start of any other day. I knew it had the potential to be a good one, but I was smart enough to temper my hopes early on.

First, Wednesday was the 10-year anniversary of the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

I also had tickets to the Nuggets’ season opener against Utah.
And – most important – Game 1 of the World Series would feature my favorite team of all time playing against the one sports franchise I despise most.

A pretty solid lineup to say the least, but I had to figure out a few things before I could start running around anointing it as The Good Day.

First, I had to get through work, which sometimes can be a breeze and other times can bring choppy waters. Then I had to figure out my viewing of the World Series in relation to the Nuggets game. The baseball game was slated to start at 6 p.m. (I love Mountain time), and the basketball game was scheduled for 8:30. My original plan was to head downtown after work to watch the Series at one of the sports bars right next to the Pepsi Center and then walk into the game if and when I felt comfortable with what was happening in the Bronx.

But then The Good Day gods smiled on me and added a little bonus: snow. Growing up by the beach, I haven’t seen a lot of it in my lifetime. It’s actually another part of the reason why my Wife and I chose to move out here. We love snow.

The snow started accumulating so quickly on Wednesday that my office graciously let us go home early at 1 p.m. (and get paid for the rest of the day!). But now I had an interesting little dilemma: How was I going to kill five hours before the World Series/Nuggets night downtown. In a moment of inspiration, I e-mailed my Nuggets ticket agent and found out the team offers redemption nights if you can’t make it to one of the games you have in your ticket plan. It just so happens that one of those redemption nights is going to be when the Nuggets play the Oklahoma City Kevin Durants (Thunder) and one of my favorite players in the association, Kevin Durant.

Done deal.

I hated missing opening night, but now I was able to (A) go home and enjoy the snow, (B) watch the entire World Series game without feeling any pressure to miss any of it and (C) see the Nugs play one of my favorite basketball players on the planet . . . for free!

I could feel The Good Day momentum mounting.

Later that night, my Wife almost had to administer life-saving measures as my brain and body could not handle the euphoria of witnessing my favorite athlete in the universe, Chase Utley, hit not one but TWO home runs in Game 1 of the World Series. This then led to a successful negotiation process with my Wife to guarantee the right to name a future potential son Chase Mahler.

As I flipped back and forth between Cliff Lee putting the finishing touches on an all-time World Series masterpiece and Melo and the Nuggets taking it to the Jazz, I stretched out on my recliner and just basked in the glory of The Good Day.

We were supposed to get another foot or so of snow, so since we had been sent home early Wednesday, I knew there was no chance of going to work Thursday. As I got into bed, I didn’t even set an alarm. I peacefully drifted off to blissful slumber, having no comprehension of what was in store for me just on the other side of the night:

The dreaded Bad Day.

(Stay tuned for Part 2 on Tuesday.)

Josh Mahler is a Denver-based columnist with a humorous and _________ (insert: “skewed,” “neurotic,” “insecure,” etc. — probably “neurotic,” right? Or is that not even politically correct anymore? He’s not sure) perspective. Read more of his work at JustBeingJosh.com.