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Welcome summer visitors! Your call is important to us!

Instead of your usual existential nightmare of Santa Cruz County amusements and survival needs (food, clothing, shelter) served up pipin' hot under the indifferent mercies of a University Student, you are instead confronted with a flustered and kinda peeved owner type best kept in the back office pounding away at an adding machine and far from the sunburnt faces of, well, you; and/or an "honor system" jar and a deserted store with a lot of tie die on the shelves.

Woohoo! Let the looting begin! Hey..... where is everybody?

Look, Santa Cruz County is a small town, and the locals are in tune with the various, um, vibes of the season.

Yes, like salmon swimming back to their places of, um, big whoopee, and happier times, Santa Cruz locals like to head for the hills, come Labor Day Weekend-ish. Like ancient Athenians celebrating  the Eleusinian Mysteries, the local tribes have collected around two different sacred rituals:

Burning Man

The Strawberry Music Festival

Now, you can sort of sort the people according to their preferences for which sacred ritual they tend towards. Take me, for instance, and I think I can stand as an example of one of the two kinds of people on this planet: those who have worked construction and laid sub-floor in the Sacramento summer of triple digit 100+ degree hell, and those who have not.

Am I going to par-tay on top of some "playa" at the end of August and watch what amounts to a huge bon-fire?

No.

Okay, so that means I end up at the Strawberry Music Festival!

Make it stop! It hurts! It burns! Okay, Strawberry isn't that bad. In fact, it's sort of sublime. True Story (the old, boring guy began) I was at Strawberry, oh heck, don't recall the actual year, but Peggy was there and some number, of, um, "children of the corn" shall we call 'em?, anyway, Peter Rowan was performing, and he started to sing "Free Mexican Airforce" on that big stage set up in that beautiful meadow at about, I dunno, 4,000 foot elevation where the stars are all just laid out for you to examine and pick and ooh and ahh at, and we're sitting back there somewhere in the crowd as he starts this little number, which is about a group of, um, pilots, um, bringing, um, contraband, up norte into the US of A when all of the sudden from over the back of the stage and over our heads and out of his sight, comes a streak of light like an airline-slow shooting star, way way up there, which then breaks into three separate shooting stars, and the crowd is already whooping, like, Alright, contrabrand! and he looks a little surprised by the gusto of the second stage of the whooping, the increased, meaningful vigor, of the synchronicity of the one, now three lights streaking slowly, majestically, over his head beyond his vision. He had no notion of what we were seeing and hearing, perhaps to this day he thought his was the only performance on that, the only stage.

Me? I thought Russian ICMB-mounted nukes MIRV-ing over Yosemite.

See what I mean? Sublime.

Meanwhile, over at "the playa", the other half of humanity is engaging in all sorts of mayhem.

We are a conflicted community. Play fair with the honor system jar or Uncle Whoop Ass's gonna call. Nothing personal.