I love, absolutely love and truly adore the sweet season of summer here in our sunny coastal beautiful little village. Trying my best to co-exist on Sundays with what I call “Invaders from outer pace’” however, is cramping my smile. I got the Malibu Sunday blues, baby. Because what’s going on here on my day of rest and play has become way beyond any definition of the word obnoxious.
I do not know how to describe life in Malibu on Sundays during summer. The other day I did a test. I wanted to see if it is really true that the dumbest, most disrespectful, unbelievably unconscious of the cave people masked as lucky American beach lovers really are makers of Beelzebub’s chaos as they are blatant examples of shocking Sunday tourist inconsiderations.
We’re talking heaven changing to hell here, dear reader.
My test?
I ask you to decide on any conclusions. Try picturing this: It’ a classic, perfect Sunday weather-wise. I drive in to fill up for the day at a local gas station. Nozzle in hand, I begin pumping. My car gets locked in. I can’t get out. And I had made a point of pulling up front to keep a good flow of things for others, etc. But cars came in wantonly to surround me. Surprisingly, all drivers got out to stand around to yak on their cell phones. Six of them! The loudest was a selfish, unconscious, rap music blasting clunk-head who, because of his screaming, made it clear to everyone around that he was talking of nothing very vital-something about how she wronged him and if she ever showed her face again, he’s gonna, well, you know the drill. Every word out of his yap was effing this and effing that. Although it got to be absurdly funny, it wasn’t nice in public. Too many young kids around. As for all the others talking on their cells, not one cared or even knew anything about the benefits of streamlining ingress and egress per gas station protocol. After too long a time, I escaped from the clueless. But not without ticking off an incoming scowling car-driving stupid-looking Neanderthal who felt it best to give me a two-handed flip-off for my having been inside what he deemed what was his very own anger laced right of way. A bad vibe. I did not like it. I don’t know why I still care about good neighbor relations. I drove on.
I parked along PCH across from Beau Rivage beachside. Draconian monster-like gothic motorcycles ridden by people wearing jackets carrying soul-comforting slogans painted on their backs ripped past with ballistic record-breaking decibel shattering open loud exhaust pipes. The cute and cuddly messages shown on the backs of their jackets announced: “I’m Gonna Kill You!” and “Your Mama Was Just Under My Tires.” The behemoth biker power junkies shot by. Of course, all kinds of car alarms were triggered because the blasts and vibrations from the motorcycles’ diabolical tailpipes activated them.
Follow all this up, and I ain’t kidding, all this is true, follow all this up with tremendous fire trucks plus an ambulance screeching past me with their deafening emergency sirens at top levels wracking the brains out of peaceful bystanders. Also, waiting nearby at some place cryptic, were three sheriff’s black-and-whites who must have surely radioed each other saying: “Okay, Robert’s nerves are sufficiently back to normal (this author’s nerves). So, let’s floor it and follow those fire trucks up ahead pronto.”
Oh! And let’s make sure our buzz-crackle electronic noise things are cranked to maximum when we speed by.” The cop cars engaged in their war maneuvers shot by like cannon balls. Ending my test, I climbed onto the top of my car. Taking a General Petraeus ready-for-anything, legs-spread-apart-and-centered stance, I panned to scan the lay of the land with binoculars. I saw up close a lady sneaking a litter deposit into the sand. She’s dropped a soiled baby diaper thinking no one had seen her. I saw a guy get rid of his lit cigarette butt flinging it into dry grass, which is prime kindling just perfect for lethal California wind fire catastrophes. I saw a quarter mile up PCH that four cars had collided, thus all the above-mentioned noisy municipal rescue workers racing to that crash scene. I saw a couple of families arguing with one another each clan speaking a different language. I saw, I saw … by the time I brought the binoculars down from face, I thought to myself I know exactly how neurotic Jack Lemmon felt in the old movie, “The Out of Towners” by Neil Simon. I still love Malibu. But, oh, I got the Malibu Sunday blues.
Robert Leaman Sanders