cruel summer.

this heat is killing me. just because i haven’t been in grade school since the 80s doesn’t mean that i don’t remember what that last few weeks of school feels like just before summer vacation. come mid june, my body has a pavlovian response to the first really hot days of the season. i lack concentration. i stare out the window aimlessly humming vacation by the gogos. i abandon my work shoes beneath my desk and pad around the office barefoot. why on earth do we train our children to expect that life comes with 2.5 months worth of vacation, when it usually comes with 2.5 weeks at best? it’s fucking summer vacation yo, and i should be at the beach.

while i’m quietly languishing in the air air conditioned cubicle that is the shackles of my adult responsibilities, i thought maybe i would twist the knife a little harder by thinking about all the things that i would be taking to beach if i actually got to go:

the swimsuit is obviously imperative. however, if perhaps you’re still carting around 30 excess pounds of divorce weight, something skimpy from the victoria’s secret swimslut line doesn’t exactly do the job. i don’t know about you, but i’m not really interested in helping redefine the term “inappropriate ass coverage”.  however, i also don’t desire to be encased in a sacky lycra cocoon of modesty and shame. nestled somewhere in between the two, is the retro suit. draw attention to the tits, cover the lumpy bits.  swimsuits are stupid expensive for how little fabric they involve, and a nice looking retro suit can run upwards of $100. my secret, newport news. yes, a little dowdy, a little dated, and with a healthy side of 1980s hooker. basically, somewhere in between the softer side of sears and fredricks of hollywood. randomly though, they have an awesome selection of swimdresses, some of which are even kinda sexy. oh, and around $50 or less.

although it is definitely always important to know where your towel is, it is perhaps the very most important at the beach. i don’t know if it’s the fact that i grew up in the 80s, and that my mom always bought me jc penny knock offs of the cool clothes, but i am LOVING these lacoste beach towels. somewhere underneath this aging art school kid exterior, there’s a prepster screaming to get out. sadly, as my mom well knew, preppy is pricey. a better bet would be to toddle over to target and pick up a myself an attractive pedestrian towel. do you think the alligator affects absorbency?

once you’ve got your suit and towel, you’re gonna need somewhere to stick it. i’ve been coveting one of these vintage style pan am totes pretty much forever, but who the fuck pays $90 for a beach bag? or pretty much any bag that isn’t encrusted with semi precious gems or at least filled with free donuts. a more practical and almost as attractive solution is the good ole ll bean boat & tote. classic, sturdy, affordable! and you can’t go wrong pimping that maine economy. seriously, half the people i know either work there now, will work there over xmas, or were working there until very recently.

well, those are pretty much the 3 main food groups of shit you need when you go to the beach (and i’m so easily distractable right now that 3 is pretty much as high as i can count without wandering off in another direction) , but you should also strongly consider some other less interesting beach bag accouterments such as sunscreen, maybe some sort of hat, something to promote hydration, a really trashy book, and of course like 17 wacky noodles. did i forget anything?

well, somehow that bummed me out more than i thought it would. my own summer vacation (one whole week!) doesn’t actually happen until august, so i’m pretty much fucked until then. maybe i’ll just lock myself in my room and watch a summer place (have you been bad with girls johnny?) on loop for a while. or maybe i’ll just let jasper from the simpsons sing me the theme song until i black out. bananarama was right, summer is the cruelest season.

and the lord taketh away.

the universe is a messed up place. this weekend initially seemed like an incredible thrift shopping sleepwalk through unbelievable deal after unbelievable deal. like all of my garage sale wishes were finally coming true. and then everything fell apart. in an expensive and heartbreaking way… but first, the dream:

score #1: the boyfriend and i were actually driving out of town to go flea marketing down route one when we stopped short (way short- about 4 blocks from our condo) at a small roadside garage sale. beckoning me from the street was a sunshine yellow solair chair. i have been lusting after one of these bitches for YEARS, and have on several occasions strongly considered stealing them from the poolsides of old orchard beach motels. upon closer examination- a little dirty, a couple of spider eggs, but in otherwise excellent shape. $10 price tag- SOLD. a super deal, even if i did have to carry it up the hill in 4″ platforms.

score #2: the ex husband (who i am mercifully still friends with) texted me early sunday morning to tell me that there was a hot looking garage sale happening on hampshire street next to the sketchy east end rite aid. um, this was no ordinary garage sale. this was a WARY FUCKING MEYERS garage sale. authors of the super-incredible interior design tome tossed & found, i’ve long felt fortunate to share a city with such awesomeness. and on sunday morning, i got to scavenge through that awesomeness with both hands. and by awesomeness, i mean the most gorgeous orange enamel electric fireplace (still working!) that i have ever seen. there was plenty of other cool stuff, but this was the only thing i could see. apparently the original price was $25, but i stood in front of it for long enough (trying to figure out where i would put it, how i would fit it in the car, and how i was going to convince the boyfriend bring this giant thing into our home), that they knocked it down to $10. $10!!! the universe was smiling upon me (save for the part where we had to disassemble the unit in the rite aid parking lot in order to get it in the car).

also rolled up in the best thrift store weekend ever, 2 strawberry patterned mugs, a wall hanging of 2 parakeets, a jeremy brett sherlock holmes feature length episode on DVD (still sealed), and a kathy martin book (juvenile nurse fiction from the 50s) that was missing from my collection.

but don’t forget that part about how much the universe loves to take me down a notch whenever things are going really well. while moving some furniture around to make room for the new toys, an old toy was inadvertently destroyed. a dear friend that i don’t see anymore gave it to me for my 30th birthday. and when i picked it up off the floor to put it back into its rightful place… the head toppled off and smashed into a thousand pieces on the floor. devastated. it had survived multiple moves and was one of my most prized possessions. i can and will replace it at some point (well, the next time that i have $175 rattling around in my budget), but it’s not really the same. 2 glasses of wine and an entire bowl of buttered popcorn later, i’m still bummed out.

like i said, the universe is a messed up place.

flea market feature- montsweag adventure!

as i mentioned yesterday (as i ever so classily begged for you to enter my contest), this weekend i took the first trip of the season to my favorite seasonal flea market in maine. i’ve been compiling and manicuring my list of best maine flea markets since last fall, but i thought it might be worthwhile to do a little profile of some of the superstars as i thrift my way through the summer months.

the montsweag flea market, located on a fairly low-key stretch of route one in woolwich (in between bath and wiscasset), opens on mother’s day weekend (weather permitting), and shuts back down “when the tourists stop coming”. it’s literally nothing more than a vacant lot filled with aging plywood tables and a few summer camp cabin-like shanties, but for some reason, this is where all the A+ people come to set up shop. no, it’s not all faberge eggs and first editions, it’s still a lot of crazy crap just like other flea markets… but it’s the BEST crazy crap in town. the judgment criteria:

1. new stuff is kept to a minimum. (i’m talking about you cascade) how horribly disappointing is it to go to what you think is a cool flea market, only to be assaulted by dollar store tchotchkes and ultra-trashy OOB-worthy t-shirts (ex: “if i wanted to hear what you had to say, i’d take my cock out of your mouth” heartwarming!). nobody wants this shit, sand it’s always uncomfortable to walk by your table, so please cut it out! (montsweag only had one table of this variety- dragon statuettes i think).

2. there’s lots of old stuff. even when it’s not worth anything, old stuff feels sexy, mysterious, exciting. from antique to retro, i wanna dive into boxes of musty old socially irrelevant books, try on enormous vintage cocktail rings, smell the mothballs of long forgotten fabric stashes, and fiddle with exotic examples of outmoded technology. going to the flea market should be like going on an archeological dig. i want to rifle through crumbling cardboard bins of relics feeling like every single thing is going to make me an ebay millionaire.

3. there’s lots of weird stuff. i want to see nightmare inducing creepy old toys, stacks of water damaged low-rent retro porn magazines, and at least a 10% saturation of stuff that elicits the comment “what the fuck is this?”. even if you come home with nothing, your day will never feel wasted if you spent the majority of your time pointing out the hilarity & terror to your fellow flea-marketers (also, this this a great place to work on your prop comedy).

4. prices are reasonable & they’re willing/ready to haggle. there’s a ton of antique stores and flea markets that easily meet the above criteria for awesome stuff, but cruelly price it just out of reach. what’s exciting about a box or a field full of incredible stuff that you want but can’t afford? why not just go browse the cartier? i bet they don’t have a port-a-potty (a minimal downside, but there isn’t a hook on the door and i was forced to wear my purse around my neck like a feedbag to avoid contamination).

if i was going to get in the habit of giving out stars, montsweag would easily gets a 4.5 out of 5. it meets all of the above critera with gusto, and save for the porta-john issues and the dragon statuettes, from vintage toys to scary dolls, they know what i like. plus, if you do so much as breathe near an item- someone will offer you a deal. bring cash (small bills), go early (the dealers get there at the crack of dawn), and prepare to be surprised (make sure you have room in your trunk). the boyfriend offered to buy 3 vintage cameras from a dealer for $15, and ended up with a rubbermaid tote full for $20. you can check out the rest of my montsweag exploration on flickr, or you can get your ass to wiscasset and have your own adventure. this weekend is supposed to be sunny and 70s, where do i go next?