floats my boat

I've spent the last several weeks counting down the days (don't picture sharpie hatch marks filling my calendar, think peripheral glad awareness) of the season two debut of Mad Men. I thought it was coming on tonight, Tuesday the 22nd. But it won't air until this coming Sunday. I'm not even much of a television watcher, generally speaking, and this is the first cable program I've followed (minus, say, any we've rented in dvd form). Last Spring (late April '07) was the start of so much good and terrible. Moving back to Oregon: good! Staying in tiny, temporary apartment while househunting: Terrible! It was like camping in a crowded suburban apartment complex , with just a smidge of our belongings, both pets, and a flea infestation (oh, and there was a pregnacy loss and resulting complications, bad news!). Getting cable was our tiny, insufficient consolation prize. And Mad Men as a summer premier was such a decadent escape for me. I sunk into the storyline, the set design, the social implications of the era, all of it.

Last year I thought I was the only person watching this show and this year, it's everywhere! Only, not on my television tonight. Circumstance has exhausted the best of my patience and I'm in no mood to wait. So. I'll share the song that's stuck in my head these recent days. The last time I had a song stuck in my head it was Bon Iver's Lump Sum and I couldn't stop hearing it, humming it, feeling it for the bulk of our long, rainy Spring. Wait, actually, I probably still have that whole album stuck in my head, in a background music sort of way, though it's less simpatico with sunshine and freckles, for me, than with rain clouds and hot baths before bed.

No, my summertime song I can't stop wanting to sing is White Winter Hymnal from Fleet Foxes (who, I said elsewhere, I enjoy despite the unfortunate association I can't shake between the word 'fleet' and enemas and rental cars), which is fresh and jangly like a good summer song should be, even if it's about Winter (though it has summertime in the chorus). It's much more harmonic and campfire-song-y than what I think would be a typical 'summer song'. It's not so much drive at sunset, windows down, real fast, it's really more pedal your cruiser around the neighborhood in a late evening breeze. (Do you see everything in analogies, too?)