Jersey Shore IV

July 12, 2012

The weather continues to be wonderful, and the ocean water warm. The Monday-through-Friday crowd is a lot smaller. The beach is sparsely populated and boardwalk rides are without lines.

In what’s become my arcade hangout, I won the girls over 7,000 tickets playing a game I don’t fully understand. Here’s the modern arcade: I use a credit card which I purchase with cash in a machine. The card is inserted in the games—any game—even the old-fashioned crane lifts, now populated by Angry Birds. The machines disgorge tickets when you score at an alarming rate, right onto the floor, but connected, like unused movie tickets. I then take these tickets to what I call the “ticket eating machine” which slurps them up the way Gabrielle eats cappellini, which then issues me a paper receipt.

I really need to find an old fashioned pin ball machine with flippers and lights.

I finished John Irving’s new novel, In One Person. It’s a disturbing tale of gender confusion, family secrets, and unrequited love—somewhat typical Irving. I leavened that with The Third Gate, a pedestrian science fiction work from Lincoln Child. I intend to finish Fifty Shades of Grey today, which is only hard to read because it’s so boring, and I’ve started Joan Rivers’ I Hate Everybody, which seems like too tepid a title for her narrative in all fairness.

Seemed like I went back in time yesterday as a real U.S. Navy blimp floated over our heads. The famed Lakehurst Naval Air Station is not that far away, the site of the Hindenberg Zeppelin disaster.

We dined at Graziano’s, a famed Italian restaurant a couple of miles from here from before Columbus, where I had tripe and shrimp parmesan. Since it’s BYOB, we shared the bottle of Opus I had stashed in the car for the trip.

It’s 7:30 am and I’m watching gentle waves roll in from the Atlantic with an occasional jogger staring down the boardwalk and missing the real beauty. The gulls are grounded, I guess by avian air traffic control, and of course are all facing in the same direction, fighter jets aligned on the runway awaiting clearance.

I’m going to write Balancing Act in the next half-hour, have some breakfast, and head for the beach. I’ve already fixed my own coffee (by pushing the indicated button on the coffee maker prepared by Maria last night), so I’m pretty exhausted.