[RED/GLARE]

Politics. People. Decline. History. Music. Redemption. Thoughtcrime. Humor. Revenge. Mistakes. Fear. Media. Antiauthoritarianism. Truth. Longing. Insecurity. Schadenfreude. Complaint. Peace. Love. Nothingness. Nature. Something new all the time.

16 July 2006

What I Did On Summer Vacation

As World War III broke out I was on vacation in Rehoboth Beach, Del., a beach resort with a mile-long boardwalk, putt-putt golf, and dozens of stores specializing in bad-taste tee shirts, henna tattoos, salt water taffy and $100 sunglasses. I go every year with my wife's family.

Last year was the year of bad changes down in Rehoboth Beach. For instance, they tore down the Hobo Beach Motel. This was a big deal.

My wife's grandfather, now in his mid 90s, began taking my wife's family to the Hobo Beach Motel in the early 1950s. It was a 50-room beachfront property with private decks in back, looking out onto the Atlantic. There were no in-room phones, but the breakfast buffet was decent and each room was supplied with a flyswatter.

However, due to the real estate bubble, the latest owner of the Hobo Beach Motel sold the land off in small segments that each commanded about half a million dollars. They took the wrecking ball to the old beach hotel to make way for multimillionaires and McMansions.
So last year, following the demolition, my wife's grandfather booked the family for the next-closest hotel, about 40 yards down the beach. But when we pulled up to the parking lot of the new place for our 2005 vacation, the empty lot that used to be the Hobo Beach Hotel bummed us all out.


Worse, the city had re-engineered the beach itself, dredging up tons of sand from the seafloor and spraying it upon the oceanfront beach to compensate for storm erosion. The result was a lousy beach, with sharp rocks everywhere and a vast no-man's land between the seaside hotels and the water itself. Riding waves on a boogie board, rafting, or swimming, one risked being raked over the artificially dredged shell fragments that seemed to collect where the water met the land.

But the blue crabs were as delicious as ever, the Sunrise Café's coffee was still made fresh at 6a.m., and the newest members of the family -- my one-year-old and a cousin's four-year-old -- needed indoctrination in the family ritual. Lead by our nonagenarian sponsor of the annual vacation, we planned to keep coming back to Rehoboth Beach in spite of the unwelcome changes.
For this year's trip, my wife and I rented a car here in Brooklyn, but on the way to the beach, as we merged onto I-95 in Philadelphia, the rental car stalled. A light reading "OIL PRESSURE LOW" started flashing. I made it to an off ramp and hit the hazard lights. The first guy to pass, a white dude in a pickup truck, stopped to offer help, and told me, "This is a really bad place to break down, man."


He gestured at my two-year-old in her car seat and my pregnant wife, who was on the cell phone outside the car calling for assistance from family members in another car on I-95. "I'd keep my family locked in that car, it's a bad neighborhood," he warned, then drove off.
It kind of freaked me out, so I got my wife back in the car and nervously locked us in. But as we looked around we saw that where we were stranded was your basic working class African American neighborhood. In fact, the next dozen or so cars that drove up the off ramp had black drivers, all of whom stopped to offer us help. I realized that the neighborhood was perfectly safe for us, but that the car was in a dangerous spot traffic-wise.


Our help arrived and we pushed the crappy Mercury Sable (that we rented at Speedy, by the way) to a parking lot, rented another car (a nice Toyota Camry) and had the first car towed away, where I hope it gets crushed and remade into soda cans.

Finally we arrived in Rehoboth Beach. The good news: The rocks out on the beach from 2005 have settled due to wind and the pounding waves (and mechanical grooming), and this year the beach is as sandy as it was before the dredging. We've decided that the new hotel, the Atlantic View, is better than the Hobo Beach ever was. There are phones in the rooms and a big, enclosed deck where our two-year-old could play safely.

But I was surprised to see that nobody has built anything on those half-million dollar lots where the Hobo Beach hotel used to be. Maybe they can't get flood insurance for coastal McMansions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. After all, look what happened to Trent Lott's place.

We kept CNN on in our room as much as we could stand it, watching conflict widen between Israel, the Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Iranians. Slathered in sunblock, we'd come in from the beach, where we were digging big holes near the water, to "Breaking News" about kidnappings, Katuysha rocket strikes upon Israel and Israel's overreaction. It's really obvious that Israel was looking for an excuse to fight. And the quick involvement of Iran in this thing is scary - a clear result of our stupid Iraq invasion and the subsequent expansion of Iranian influences in the whole region.

Back on the beach there was another family that set up nearby to our family several days in a row, since they were also staying at the hotel. It was a father, mother and two sons. The father and boys all had matching mullet/rattail-like hair that they'd braided in the same way. They were like a little tribe. And the first day at the beach they built this ambitious sandcastle barrier around their towels and beach chairs. They had ramparts and moats and towers and turrets, as well as an American flag planted in the highest tower. Their sand defenses eventually ringed their place on the beach, and attracted lots of attention from everyone strolling on the beach.
I was kind of jealous of their sand fortress. But I realized their effort was futile.


It made me think about how defenseless we really are from danger and change -- like the Hobo Beach Motel, their castle would be knocked down in due time. The new Rehoboth beach will erode again. And wars will destroy everything eventually. So what's the point of locking doors in fear?

04 July 2006

Independence Day

Whew! I’m relieved to have this blog, as most of my posts over at DailyKos were recently wiped out. Whether it was on purpose due to a change in policy at dKos, or a mistake, I do not know. But this is now the one place to get all of my blog posts. I delcare my independence!

I will start putting more exclusive stuff here, too, so as not to make this a clone of my dKos page. I think I should establish a “best of …” list of my favorite blog entries, so newcomers don’t have to read through the whole blog history to find highlights.

Anyway, thanks for coming here! Happy Fourth of July! Let’s keep America clean!