I used to enjoy having being younger than most of my friends. For some reason, as a child, I assumed this meant that I got to live longer even if it meant being shorter and skinnier than my peers. Obviously, this was pretty dumb reasoning. Being younger than all of your friends stops being fun right after your 20th birthday.
My friend Dan and I are the last in our group of friends to turn 21. This means that while everyone else gets to go to bars, Dan and I recreate my social life from age 11 to age 16. Basically, I have enough time to start a Madden franchise and play through the 2027 season. As an aside, I always hated how Madden allows players to take storied franchises with deep ties to the local community – such as the Packers or Steelers – and move them to hundreds of locations in the country, including Puerto Rico…but not to any cities in New Jersey. Yes, the geniuses at EA Sports will allow you to take the Giants and move them so home games are played in Yellowstone National Park or something, but I can't move the Jaguars to Newark.
Another friend of mine, Jon, came up with a list of the worst possible fake IDs which one can use. This was inspired by a story of a time that this kid we both knew actually took a novelty McLovin ID from a Superbad promotion and used it at a bar, and the bouncer thought it was so funny that he let the kid in. Jon's list included:
- A Dominique Wilkins jersey
- The limited edition director's cut of the movie 21, in which a talented group of misfits from MIT takes on Vegas…and wins! (spoiler alert)
- An index card with the number 21 written in Sharpie. *must have charisma and/or moxie to get away with this one
Neil, previously mentioned in my recap of the Toronto Spring Break trip, turned 21 over Memorial Day weekend. Dan, Mike, me, Nate, Neil and eight of Neil's high school friends chipped in and rented a house in Ocean City, Maryland to celebrate. As mentioned, Dan and I aren't 21 so our weekend was considerably tamer than the ones everyone else experienced. Still a great trip though.
Thursday 12:15 pm – 2:15 pm
Technically, not part of the trip, but this time period certainly affected my travel plans. I had to drive my friend Ojus to the Department of Motor Vehicles to update his license since he too had recently turned 21. The DMV remains a model of efficiency matched only by Comcast's tech support and the Philadelphia Eagles' 2-Minute Drill. I had intended to leave Jersey by 1:00 pm but was delayed nearly two hours.
Thursday 3:30 pm – 8:00 pm
The Drive. If I were John Elway, I would just capitalize everyday verbs so I could make them feel epic, though I guess at some point they begin to look like titles to Seinfeld episodes (The Deal, The Fix-Up, etc.). Thank god the annoying writers from Friends didn't work in sports journalism in the 1980s, or Elway's exploits would all have titles like The One With the Drive or The One With No Regard for His Body, First Down Denver.
Unlike Elway, I actually went into Baltimore. I had to stop there on my way south in order to pick up a friend. The first thing I saw from the highway was the shipyard made famous by Season 2 of The Wire. Baltimore on its surface doesn't seem so bad – nice skyline, sparkling football stadium, plenty of waterfront areas. But I guess the genius of The Wire was exposing the corruption and urban decay that lurk slightly below the surface – even though tourists like me are completely oblivious to it.
Thursday 9:00 pm – 12:00 pm
I left Neil's and went to my cousin's for dinner and to watch Game 5 of the Suns-Lakers series. For the past decade, I would mark the end of the season for a given league in two ways. First, the season was pretty much done the day Nets or Cowboys were eliminated. But, I would breathe a sigh of relief and consider the season truly over once the Lakers and Eagles were prevented from claiming the championship. Once those teams were out, I could enjoy the rest of postseason play stress free.
Why? Because for most of the past decade, the Nets and Cowboys have sucked. Dallas was great in 2007 and the Nets were decent in a crummy conference for two years, but that's three seasons out of a total twenty combined NFL and NBA years where my teams had a realistic chance of winning a title. In contrast, the Eagles and Lakers are something like fourteen for twenty in terms of combined contending seasons. And I don't hate the Patriots as much as the Eagles because New England wasn't beating Dallas by forty points twice a year for ten years.
So, I was rooting pretty hard for the Suns. Thank god Ron Artest provided me with the following two quotes over the next three days; otherwise I'd be legitimately bummed out by his Game 5 heroics:
"Say Queensbridge!" – to Craig Sager after the game.
"Growing up in New York, if you called someone for charging, you knew someone was getting stabbed after the game." – from a SportsCenter report on how Phil Jackson wanted his team to draw charges in the Finals.
Friday 9:00 am – 2:00 pm
We wake up early to pack and head to the beach. The Friday before Memorial Day is one of the busier traffic days of the year, so we knew ahead of time it was going to be brutal. One of my few talents is the ability to fall asleep during any car ride, which means that instead of being awake for five miserable hours, I went to sleep and woke up at the beach. One of the special features to an extended edition Lord of the Rings DVD said that Elijah Wood used to fall asleep all the time on the set. Again, I really didn't have a social life from age 11 to age 16.
Friday 3:00 pm – 8: 00 pm
I paid something like $39.99 for two slices of pizza before eight of us got a pickup football game going at the beach. I hadn't gunslinged in several months, but gunslinging is a lot like riding a bike – assuming that the bike has no brakes and maybe one tire inflated. In short, I was awful. Still a fun time though.
Mike, who was previously named Gunslinger of the Year for his decision to drive from Philadelphia to Disney World for the night, is a high roller. As the rest of us were putting our groceries away and determining bedding arrangements, Mike called some beach company and began a spirited defense of his title as Gunslinger of the Year. The conversation went as follows:
Mike: Hi, how much does it cost to rent jet skis?
[inaudible response by the other person on the phone]
Mike: Oh ok, thanks. I'll keep you posted. [hangs up]
Jetski would make a great last name for someone from eastern Europe.
Friday 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm
We went to dinner. Ocean City, Maryland is nice, but not as nice as Ocean City, New Jersey. A lot nicer than Seaside though.
Dinner was key since it was the last time I ate a vegetable until Monday at 9:30 pm. In fact, renting a beach house and living with a group of friends is both a lot of fun and incredibly disgusting. For example, my friend Nate claimed he was happy he showered on Sunday morning because it was the exact midpoint of the trip. It was his only shower over 3 days.
When you're at a beach house, a lot of little things that make life livable get taken for granted. For example, no one buys any antibacterial soap. Many people will seek to be magnanimous and state that they will buy some the next time they go on a 7/11 run, but it never happens. Meanwhile, the only groceries we bought were all pseudofoods – Ramen, hot dogs, etc. We would have been better off just pouring salt in oil and drinking it. So to recap, your hands are going to be encrusted in filth because no one buys soap and you're going to be eating nothing but material that put the "stuffs" in foodstuffs. And yet I keep coming back.
Saturday 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
More football and lounging on the beach. My ankles and knees were killing me from running on the sand all the time. Andre Bynum recently had 70 milliliters of fluid drained from his knee, which are almost two shots of knee fluid with which Ron-Ron can chase down that Hennessy at halftime.
There was a radio blaring 808s and Heartbreak in front of a sign that said Free Magic Show. I don't know what the magician was getting at here.
Saturday 8:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Dinner at a kebab place on the boardwalk. Still no sight of a vegetable. Six or seven of Neil's high school friends came up for the night, which relegated me to the bench. Still, I did a solid job of bailing out failed jokes and staying out of the way – a good performance from a hustles/intangibles standpoint. This was me.
Saturday 11:45 pm
An extra large coffee is purchased.
Sunday 1:00 pm – 6:00 pm
I hung out with our neighbor for a bit and then headed to the beach. I think what bugs me the most about political commentators on Fox and MSNBC (no one watches CNN, whose programming now consists mainly of John King reading assorted Twitter feeds at you) is the insistence on grouping people into monolithic demographics. Nascar dads, soccer moms, the key backgammon seniors block of western Ohio.
The neighbor I met would have made a pundit's head explode. He drove a pickup truck and cursed at the Volkswagen we saw driving by our shared building. But he wasn't religious or into sports. He didn't attend college and worked as a contractor. He didn't hate the government.
Anyway, by Sunday, my diet had consisted of nothing but pseudofoods. I don't know how the hot dog eating contest is legal. The winner usually eats around 60 hot dogs, which comes out to something like 660 grams of fat. This is equivalent to nearly 30 KFC Double Down sandwiches. Identity politics are pretty awful.
I soon spent $60 on boardwalk games trying to win a Brandon Jennings jersey. No dice.
The boardwalk, as required by law, had many of those stores where you can buy t-shirts of things like Calvin wearing a Redskins jersey peeing on the Cowboys logo. Strangely, these stores were also selling tons of sweatshirts with the Monster drink logo. I don't wear energy sweatshirts though, since they make me jittery.
Monday 10:00 am
The drive home begins. Very bittersweet that the weekend was ending – most of us begin work in the days right after Memorial Day, so it was a de facto end to summer vacation.
Monday 6:00 pm
We arrive at Neil's house eight hours after leaving the house. Memorial Day traffic was a dagger, but luckily I fell asleep for most of it.
Monday 9:22 pm
I arrive at my home in New Jersey 223 miles away from Neil's house. As the announcer in N64's Star Wars Episode 1: Podracer would have said, "It's a new course record!" Have I mentioned that I had no social life between the ages of 11 and 16?
Monday 9:30 pm
I eat a vegetable.
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