B. Boys, makin' with the freak-freak

Beach Boys fanaticism update:

My two favorite Beach Boys albums right now* are Friends and Wild Honey, but I just got Sunflower and Surf's Up, and those are great, too. Discovering all this music that I didn't know existed, within a career arc I (foolishly) thought I had at least a loose grasp on, is exciting in itself—a bonus, on top of the already considerable enjoyment of the music.

This experience of unexpected discovery is like entering a small structure and finding an impossibly larger space inside,† like discovering a hidden door in a (probably 8-bit) video game, like the kind of infinity that doesn't spread vertiginously outward but instead folds fractally inwards, the infinity that exists between any two points or integers instead of reaching out beyond them.

Incidentally, this is also what metaphors and similes are like.

* I mean non–Pet Sounds Beach Boys albums—although between you and me, I'd rather not think about ranking Pet Sounds in there because it might get too confusing and upsetting: the established-greatness problem makes the whole thing so damned heated.

† Q.v. Yellow Submarine cartoon and the planet-building planet, Magrathea.