Memorial Day Weekend.  It’s once again upon us.  And it means many things to many different areas of the country.

In the Northeast, where I grew up, Memorial Day Weekend is a time for immense amounts of barbeques.  It’s a celebration that summer has officially started, and women everywhere are overjoyed that the rare time between Memorial Day and Labor Day has finally arrived so they can wear white pants without committing a fashion faux pas. 

In the Midwest, Memorial Day Weekend is the time of that vaunted occasion, the Indianapolis 500.  [Ed. note: To anyone who’s a fan of Nascar, you probably should skip to the next paragraph before you become mortally offended that I’ve insulted your religion.] Personally, I’ve never ever seen the appeal of Nascar.  Cars going around and around on a track… going nowhere for a long, long time.  If I really wanted to watch cars go nowhere, I wouldn’t have to watch it on TV—I could just head over to the 405 freeway.  Seriously, people pay money to get tickets to this occasion where they’re being assaulted by loud engines and exhaust to watch cars go around and around and around?  Nothing really ever happens, and the highlights of this several-hour-long race can usually be summed up in under a minute of highlights: This car blew up, that car flipped over, the pit crews did a stellar job, and this guy won.  Hooray.

Here in California, especially Southern California, Memorial Day Weekend marks the beginning of the June Gloom.  It’s a strange departure from our two seasons here (those two seasons being Summer and Not Summer/Rain).  The marine layer comes in every morning and every evening, so we actually only get about four hours of sunshine and nice weather every day.  The bigger problem—at least for me, personally—is that I’m fighting almost 30 years of weather instincts from growing up in the Northeast, where I see these kinds of clouds and every fiber of my being is screaming, “It’s going to rain!  Take an umbrella!” Of course, it never rains because we’re in summer, so I’m either constantly having to remind myself that it’s really not going to rain, or I’m the idiot walking around with an umbrella while everyone snickers at me.

That said, I really do enjoy Memorial Day Weekend, and I’m getting together with some other Northeasterners to have a barbeque and celebrate the joy that is a three-day weekend.  Hooray for the three-day weekend!  I hope yours is as good as mine will hopefully be, and here’s some tunes to help kick things off right.  Feel free to download them and put them on party mixes that you can burn to CD and bring to your Memorial Day parties and barbeques.  But for the love of God, right-click and save as, or I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger!

DJ Zebra - “More Insane” (The JBs vs. Cypress Hill vs. Average White Band)
Cheekyboy - “Switchin Alive” (Will Smith vs. The Bee Gees)