The Beach Boys Lied
If everybody had an ocean, Across the U.S.A, Then everybody'd be surfin,' Like Californ-i-a
You'd see them wearing their baggies, Huarache sandals too, A bushy, bushy blond hairdo
Surfin' U.S.A
We'll all be planning that route, We're gonna take real soon, We're waxing down our surfboards
We can't wait for June, We'll all be gone for the summer, We're on surfari to stay,
Tell the teacher we're surfin'
Surfin' U.S.A
When I was a little kid I actually believed teenagers went on surfing safaris and I was mightily pissed when I found out it that this was just another lie foisted on me by the man. My parents were not about to let me just go on safari for the summer, surfing or otherwise. There would have been no one around to mow the lawn and take out the garbage, plus if I saved up my allowance all summer, I’d have had like forty bucks to finance my surfin’ safari. I went surfing once and wound up taking three stitches in my lip when I fell off and did a faceplant just after the surf break. I wanted to go on a surfin’ safari, I really did, but I sucked at surfing, and I knew exactly zero people who could go with me.
Growing up on the Jersey Shore, my teenaged summers mostly revolved around going to the beach all day getting enormous sunburns and spending nights on the boardwalk in Seaside bumming cigarettes off the girls who were down for the summer from Staten Island. That lasted exactly five summers, until my second year of college when it was time to become a contributing member of society. And once that happens, you’ll never be allowed to take enough time off from your job to go on an actual full-length surfing-focused safari. It’s all lies. Damnable lies.
Anyway, I’m ready for summer to be over. September is a good month. The ending summer brings us back to a more civilized pace. It’s the civilized stretch between having to do all of that summer stuff and having to do all of that holiday stuff. The routine is familiar again. Summer is great but the internal need to constantly do stuff, mixed with the heat and humidity, has us all exhausted and salty by Labor Day. When we were kids, summer vacation was basically a race against the clock to live a life free from boring facts and the lessons we all knew we’d never need once we graduated. Summer was a time to do stuff, constantly. That was easy then, not so much now, but we never got over our hard-wired need to suck up every ounce of summer. Hence our exhaustion, and often our disappointment when summer ends and we feel like we squandered it. It’s the expectations that get us because we’ve lost the ability to live in the moments of summer like we did when we were kids. Those unrealistic expectations are what fuels our nostalgia for the very few days of our youth when summer had us on top of the world.