Okay, or Joan Miró.

[Seen in front of Bette’s Ocean View Diner in Berkeley. Front side had info about a City of Berkeley soccer field and skate park, named after Gabe Catalfo, a Berkeley teenager who battled leukemia for eight years and died in 1998.]

Step one: with the sweet memory of a gentle, bathwater-mild midwestern lake still fresh in mind, test the surf with mama and gramma–but oops! It’s fed by the “California current,” whose surface temperatures are in the vicinity of 60º F.

Step two: skeedaddle.

(Wanna see how bad it is, in cartographic splendor? Feast your eyes on Pacific temps here, Atlantic temps here.)

Guest captioned by a friend: “Heineken?! I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

Bad news: flight delayed three hours due to “mechanical failure” (now I know why the bro-in-law calls it “Northworst”).

Good news: Axel’s Firepit Lounge or whatever it’s called was happy to let in a patron who was way, way underage.

Bad news: Axel’s Firepit Lounge has TVs everywhere, and the one above us was airing a bikini volleyball tourney.

Beloved partner: Must they wear bikinis while playing volleyball?

Moi: My guess is some folks’ questions might rather be: “Why can’t women wear bikinis all the time? Why can’t that waitress wear a bikini? Why can’t my flight attendant wear a bikini?” And so forth.

But of course the bikini is surely the great equalizer (I say, having worn not a one in numerous decades of female living), and if all men and all women wore one, I suspect it would lose a good deal of its allure. Just a guess.