Rules for life. Number two in an occasional series

Take care to walk through the correct door in a crematorium.

Getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip

Time for some more lyrics analysis, and there are few songs riper for study than I Get Around, the Beach Boys’ paean to dawdling in a car on a Saturday night and ogling girls. Specifically:

My buddies and me are getting real well known,
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone

Lyrics, even those of the Beach Boys, don’t get much more thought provoking than this. The question is: have the boys attained the best of the four available scenarios? Obviously, it is preferable to the bad guys knowing them and not leaving them alone, and indeed the bad guys not knowing them and not leaving them alone. But is it better than the bad guys not knowing them and leaving them alone?

Does the bad guys’ knowledge of the boys suggest that they might interfere with them in future? Were they scared off in the past, and if so will their wounded pride cause them to return, better armed, to settle old scores?

Who are these bad guys, anyway? Are they generic finger-clicking punks in Letterman jackets of the type seen in West Side Story, henchmen in orange boilersuits, or literary antiheroes like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights or Humbert Humbert from Lolita?