today promises to be a lazy sorta day. hope so at any rate, the weather couldn't be much better: clear, blue sky and the temp. hovering between the high 60s, low 70s F. the month of February can be counted on to give at least a few days of teasingly spring-like weather before it greys up again for another month or two. then it gets hot! real hot, hotter than the surface of the sun, it seems. so hot that ice cream melts on the way home from the grocery store. I kid you not. the summer is hotter than blazes. it's brutal. summer light is fluorescent and the air is electric with cricket buzz.

which always reminds me of the movies. I grew up at the drive-ins, and my part of California back in the '70s and '80s was thick with them. in fact, there were over a dozen or so when I was growing up and begging my parents to take me and my brothers every weekend. and because it was cheap entertainment they often obliged us. but now there is only The Sacramento 6 Drive-In open. and that is slated to close any day. a bummer because the drive-in was not about watching flicks, tho we did do that at times, but an atmosphere to be indulge in. the air redolent of beer and popcorn, the tinny soundtrack from the window speaker, car tires crunching gravel, the playground equipment beside the snack bar, and best of all the intermission shorts. cartoons and live action sequences advertising the treats awaiting theater-goers at the snack bar. those commercials were so much a part of summer that now I'll buy crappy movies on DVD if the producers of the discs even make the hint of a promise of drive-in intermission shorts as a bonus.

ah but nostalgia is a bitch of a beast. but why not, indeed. if Proust can be transported by bread dipped in tea then I certainly can be transported at the sight of our last, lonely drive-in. and let me not forget about the films. I did watch them, and at the Sac 6 I would watch all the screens I could just by turning my head around. and then make up the plots to go along with the soundless projected images. these images became part of my consciousness. I fell in love with them, the films, and nothing beats watching b movies with the window open on a lazy spring-like day.