A nation turns its lonely eyes to you

[austin_dern]

Saturday I got up before noon so I could drive to the Ocean County Parking Garage. This wasn't simple eccentricity. One of my elder online friends, Morticon from spindizzy_muck, was making his occasional progress along the Eastern Seaboard and this would be our first chance to meet in many years --- since I got my new car, for example, and stopped being fat. We hoped to just hang out and do something, and particularly to get woodlander and Luaie in together. Nyni jumped in at the last minute too, getting a parental ride in, and I picked the garage as a fairly good meeting site, hard to mistake, where we could assemble and consolidate into a single car to head eastward to Seaside Heights. woodlander was the first person to get lost, since he got to the Ocean County Mall instead.

Nyni was there when I arrived, though, and Luaie never appeared; he didn't connect to spindizzy_muck for a week after committing to the gathering, and his e-mail was full. We resolved to wait a reasonable time for him and then go on anyway. Morticon, coming from the surprisingly packed hotels in Bordentown, on the far western end of the state, was a little late getting to the far eastern end, but no serious harm was done.

What we did want to do before riding small but exciting amusement-park rides was eat since it would be bad form, should you choose to, to have nothing to throw up. We found an International House of Pancakes right away, which worked well since Nyni had got breakfast at another International House of Pancakes. Ultimately I don't think any of us had pancakes.

My father believed there was a public parking lot just as one enters Seaside Heights, one which would save the charges (roaming up to $20 or so for beachfront parking), and that there was a shuttle running from the lot to the boardwalk. Mind you, my father believes in many things, among them that he lives somewhere around the Amboys and therefore north and central Jersey are about an hour closer than they truly are. In this case he was perfectly right, though: there was a remarkably empty lot with a few large puddles and some of those seagulls with the raven-black heads puttering around. We had to walk across the town to get to the boardwalk, but that just gave everyone the chance to suffer heat stroke before the day proper started.

Trivia: Baseball pitcher Rip Sewell dubbed his underhand pitch the ``eephus'' ball: it would arc as high as 25 feet. Sewell gloated for years that no one hit a homer off it. In 1946's Major League All-Star Game, Ted Williams did. Source: The Rules of Baseball: An Anecdotal Look at the Rules of Baseball and How They Came To Be, David Nemec.

Currently Reading: Exploration And Empire: The Explorer And The Scientist In The Winning Of The American West, William H Goetzmann.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

At IHOP, I tend more towards the omelets over the pancake-related dishes anyway; also I've not been to an IHOP in about four years. The local one closed, after convulsing through two locally-owned iterations; the Baylor one was responsible for my first cup of cofee and was a grandly-patronized late night stop.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never got into the IHOP chic, although I've been satisfied every meal I've had there. (I have a similar thing where I never went through a Denny's period.) I keep getting surprised when folks visit to see how many there are around me; it's like they're sneaking up for some reason.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

But where did your friends hang out late at night when you were in college? We all went to a place called the Waffle House. As in, we called it that. It had apparently been a Waffle House at some point in the past but not during my tenure there; I only ever saw it under the banner Sunshine Cafe.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Mostly, we stuck to the newspaper office. We were very dedicated left-wing journalists and we were there till the last bus of the night (in my case) or long after (in their cases). That was pretty much my whole social circle and we had logical reason to hang out there; it had computers and the wax machine and everything.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

my friends had the campus computer labs, but they closed at 10pm (But they never kicked us out, we could leave when we wished. Still, we left by midnight or 1am usually.) Still, there were those nights when you wanted to be up late and fed and coffeed; the IHOP was a bit more popular than the Denny's because of proximity. Taco Cabana was 24/7 and an option, but required crossing under I-35 late at night, and the underpass was a frequent homeless hangout/sleepspot; the exact sort of thing to creep out groups of college students that late at night. IHOP and Denny's were on the campus side of I-35.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I'm not even sure where we would have gone for late-night food and drinks. I suppose there must have been somewhere since I'm sure other people did. I think there were some all-hours grease trucks, at least.

Would you believe I was basically fine with the soda vending machines, as long as my budget for the week was loose enough to spare the 60 cents?

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, we avoided those. There was a nice breakpoint when FurryMUCK had its nightly lag when we'd go over and get the 32oz for 49 cent drinks at the mini mart, as well as some chips; Beyond that the dorms often had some industrious soul vending sodas bought in 12-packs and reasonably marked up out of his mini-fridge.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never got into the habit of leaving the building while connected to a muck, even when FurryMuck was having its half-hour saves or the like. Going to the laundry or a vending machine was fine but past that was just beyond what I could imagine.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Laundry would've been a longer hike for me. The convenience store was about a seven-minute walk; rather optimum.

--Chi

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I've never been that far from laundry facilities. The worst maybe would be my freshman year when the laundry building was separate from my dorm and a bit of a hike, but that was annoying just in the winter.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Oh, the laundry machines were in the dorm, mind; but the dorm was about a ten-minute walk from the campus computer labs you see.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I see. Our computer labs were far enough from my dorms there wasn't any point going between them.