The summer always seems kind of dangerous to me. I could be lazy and credit my years in New Orleans for this feeling but that wouldn’t cover the issue. I can’t seem to enjoy the summer the way other people do, when they share pictures of themselves looking warm, loving, clean and happy like the actors in a commercial for wine or STD medication. I don’t experience the summer that way, although I think I did once a couple decades ago in Maine on the tail end of the first serious relationship in my life. Last year in Michigan for a wedding was nice, too, but it was a September whirlwind up and down the glove for the first time, and the moments were packed in with a warmed-over desperation that is very present after Labor Day among the people who live in places with extreme winters. Around here there’s a serious precariousness with the timing for the rivers, and for those of us who grew up here, a steady overtone sense of the effects of climate change droning through every bright day. I vibe more with the way the pre-modern French saw the summer: a dry and insane period full of burning discomfort and a miniature famine between the end of the stores of winter and before the harvest time of late summer and fall. I’m not saying I’m a victim of famine or heat stroke, but there is something there in the edges that isn’t just a malcontent byproduct of personal neurosis. Hot days and easy living feels like shacking up with an unstable drunk; it can be fun, but you know the storms are coming.
I do really love riding my bike at night. That’s something that is both easier in the summer and full of more interesting critters on the roads and trails. And I enjoy the berries and blooms everywhere, and the fruits from our local farms. I don’t hate this season at all. I just feel that I don’t experience it the same way as other folks. But that’s from the outside looking in, so who knows?
Ugh, I feel like Andy Rooney, a moldy white prune complaining about the weather. Maybe that’s the problem — summertime makes me feel much older than I am because all the times I felt any of the frictionless joys of childhood were literally in another century. No wonder I despise nostalgia. Sorry to be a bummer, here are some fun ways to spend your week.
Thursday
Let’s start with a show at my favorite DIY venue Moss Oak Commons in Arcata, where at 7 p.m. you can find a rip snortin’ punk show built to ripple amp speakers and briefly light up the switch matrix of a few silicon chips. Dream World from Richmond, Virginia, is the touring act on the bill, and they sound like a punk band on the path to satori. Also in the mix are Petroleum Apes, Guffer and Robert Williams, all of whom fit into the landscape of the untamed punk ethos. Tickets are a very negotiable $15, which basically means you should bring what you can spare to help the touring band continue its tour.
Friday
We’re returning to Moss Oak tonight at 8 p.m. for some tunes courtesy of Presence, whose recent record I reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Also on board are local shoegaze band Petiole and Oakland’s own off-pop kaleidoscope screamers Welcome Strawberry. The promoters are asking for a reasonable $10-$15 sliding scale at the door, but you can probably test your speech rankings if your pockets are lighter.
Saturday
Here are a couple of events that reflect the better side of our nature. Over at 2550 Table Bluff Road near Loleta at noon, it’s the sixth iteration of Outer Roominations, the outdoor art installation and live music festival that will run through the weekend. For exact directions, ticket and parking information, it’s best to search online, and remember this is an unsanctioned event, so come and enjoy it before the crooked dipshits who have enabled a landscape full of Flock cameras, Amazon Warehouses, economically cratered mom and pop weed grows and mass graves full of animals for adoption try to shut this patch of homegrown Humboldt beauty down.
Five hours later at the Eagle House, you will find Shredding Hunger Vol. three, a local rock benefit for Food for People featuring a Ramones set by Good Enuff, Good Time Charlies, Widdershins and Dos Galletas. Tickets are $10 and, as stated above, go for a very worthy cause.
Sunday
There’s a musical celebration of Jerry Garcia at the Eureka Theatre this evening at 7 p.m., on what would have been his 84th birthday. Come join DJ Logic and Friends, Swizlow, Rosewater and more for a jamtastic time ($20, $15 advance).
Monday
Monophonics are a crunk, funk and plasmatic soul act from the Bay Area who have spent the last two decades playing augmented analog road jams centered around the organ bank headquarters of lead singer and key meister Kelly Finnigan. A familiar act on the festival and jam party circuit, the band returns to Humboldt tonight to hold down the stage at Humbrews at 8 p.m. ($30, $25 advance).
Tuesday
Cowtown serenader, musical sideman and possibly my favorite local human songbook Daniel Nickerson will be playing by the gazebo at the Old Town Farmers Market in Eureka starting at 10 a.m. (free). This is peak market season, and with the weather being what it has been, this has the makings of a sublime time.
Wednesday
There are very few movies, if any, that inhabit the same aesthetic coordinates of The Adventure of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension (1984). It’s just its own bizarre and hybrid reflection of childhood boomer sci-fi pulp comics mixed with the bespoke adult anti-humor of the same generation. A quick and lazy comparison for the unfamiliar would be to imagine Flash Gordon mixed with Repo Man, but that doesn’t really do it, either. I’ve always found the film mildly infuriating, a cult artifact from the VHS days featuring a fantastic performance by a pre-Robocop Peter Weller, along with many other gems in the cast. If you’d like to see a truly unique film from the 1980s on the big screen, roll through the Arcata Theatre Lounge between 6 and 7 p.m., drop down $6 ($10 if you want to leave with a poster) and make an assessment.
Collin Yeo (he/him) considers a garden to be a Rosetta Stone that translates some of the language between art and nature. He will not elaborate on that.
This article appears in Folk in the Fresh Air.