Blues Festival.

It's over. The vehicles, the people, the music, the drunkeness, the free range children have quit the park. No more lighter fluid drenched campfires, s'mores residue, broken camping gear stacked against garbage cans, nighttime screams of ecstasy and angst, generators switched on after midnight.

Goodbye Bonnie, Boz, Los Lobos, The Mavericks. Your music was solidly professional despite crappy audio mixing. A beautiful venue and fair weather made for a good outdoor concert, except for the frigging zombies.

You ask, zombies? I tell you they are real, ugly and rude. Nearly all of them are white, late middle-aged to young seniors. The women wear flowing skirts and upper body coverings that do not manage to cover that which should never be revealed in public except by permit. The men wear Harley Davidson shirts, pork pie hats, smedium t-shirts, tropical themed shirts. Both sexes sport ink on their limbs, backs, stomachs, hands , including scary neck art.

As they pour beer or wine or mixed drinks down their gaping pie holes, they begin to move, undulating unnaturally to the over amplified blues. They stand in front of their Tommy Bahama low back chairs swaying from the waist, moving their rounded shoulders and weaving their arms through the air while flapping their hands ostensibly in sync with the music. As dusk approaches, these mostly gray or dyed hair creatures resemble those plastic air-filled comic vinyl characters found at children's birthday parties or in front of small businesses in strip malls. THEY ARE ALL HIDEOUS, SHAMEFUL AND DISGUSTING and they amuse me greatly.

I forgot to mention a sub genre of the zombies. These are the hulks firmly seated within their canvas chairs, usually vaping pot or pouring vodka into their lemonade. Speaking of vaping...... Is it the preferred method for ingesting medicinal weed? Anyway, watching these folks trying to rise from their close to the ground chairs is a hoot. I could distinguish those who desperately needed to urinate from those who were going for food. The urine loaded crowd kept their thighs tightly together and relied on their chairs for support. The hungry crowd crawled on the ground after rolling from their chairs, usually finding a standing friend to assist them to their feet.

A good time was had by all, at least until they got to their cars and tried to navigate out of the park and onto the freeway. As for me and she-who-must-be-obeyed, we walked back to the campground along the beach at high tide, amused and glad to be returning to our trailer trash existence.