Bow Wow Wow Days

This is the unofficial start-of-summer weekend and we’re off to a dreary start here in Valhalla by the Sea. The rain showers, if not the cloud cover, should pass though and there will be trike action goin’ on.

Oni and I were looking at the evolve e² site again last night over Jen’s kick-off-to-canicular-days margaritas (chica is lethal with the adult bev chemistry, lemme just tell you). Gotta say, I’m just aching for one of these babes. Check out this vid — I could pack this beauty up and go tooling around the Isle of Skye, the Orkneys and the way northern, lunar-esque Highlands.

WANT!

In any case, here we are at the precipice of shorts and tanks season and I've got California Girls stuck in my head. No, not the Beach Boys', who I mostly despised, version. It's the wonderfully, joyously bizarre one by that ex-Van Halen dude — David Lee Roth.

Why the Beach Boy hatred? Their music was always painfully upbeat, artistically emaciated, with the emotional depth of a baking sheet. Yeah, yeah, I know...it's pop music fer fuck's sake, what did I expect? Well, when California Girls hit the charts in 1965 (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction by The Stones was at #3, The Beatles' Help! was at #7 and Petula Clark's Downtown was at #6. More fun and more relateable. The Beach Boys looked like a passel of dweeb-ish, Eddie Haskell-ish, Republican voting goobers who were just itching to join a frat, date-rape an insecure sorority sister and join dad's accounting firm.

Yeah, they squicked me out, even at the sweet, tender-y age of seven.

Summer afternoon — summer afternoon; to me those have always been the
two most beautiful words in the English language.
~Henry James

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the
trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar
conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give
it sweetness.
~John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an
invincible summer.
~Albert Camus, Noces / L'Eté

A bee
staggers out
of the peony

The dragonfly
can't quite land
on that blade of grass.

The morning glory also
turns out
not to be my friend.
~Matsuo Basho

Bow Wow Wow — I Want Candy