Good Morning Rockaway Beach

By Glenn 

Good morning. This weekend I went to Rockaway Beach TWICE. This is a less famous version of the famous "Coney Island" beach in New York City. Rockaway has less trash, bigger waves and the ghosts of many drowned children. Luckily Scott's apartment has a child's coffin sitting in his foyer, so we were ready when the most recent child drowned after a giant wave.

[No child drowned, but I did get thrown by a big wave. Scrapped up my knee real badly. That child's coffin is still empty.]


Today's Weather

The weather forecast looks great today at Rockaway Beach! It will be clear with a high of 85 degrees. Unfortunately the surfing weather won't be as good today. It will be as flat as a graph showing the average income of middle class families over the past few decades.
These arrows actually represent the direction of the wind and the strength of the wind. Surfers use this to figure out if they will be able to surf, yet my friends and I just enjoy punching the big waves and letting them envelop us and dominate us. It's cheaper than paying a dominatrix.


Today's Song

The Ramones are a famous band from New York in the early 1950s, and this is a song they perform that was written by the Beach Boys. It's about surfing at Rockaway Beach and driving your Ford car around really quickly. These are some of the most important things that 1950's teenagers dealt with, which makes me think these really were the "good old days." If you like the Ramones, music videos, Rockaway Beach and YouTube, you will DEFINITELY like this video. That's called niche marketing.


Today's Wave-Related Disaster

We had a lot of fun at the beach this weekend because the waves were so big you could ride them, punch them or sue them in a civil court for defamation of character. But there isn't anything fun about the tsunami in December 2004 that killed over 230,000 people. I remember when it happened, not being able to fully grasp the loss of life. Until that point, September 11th was the only natural disaster I had ever witnessed and the death toll from that was less than 1,000 people (would have been more if the Jews hadn't stayed home). The destructive power of oceans or Al-Qaida should never be forgotten and by mentioning this today, it never will be.


Today's Prediction
I will return to Rockaway Beach, only to find the entire beach and surrounding community under water (except for the Jewish inhabitants who found dry land just in time). In response, my friends and I will organize a benefit concert featuring the Beach Boys and the Ramones, who will play covers of great songs about cars and surfing from the 1950s. Joey Ramone and Mike Love will say "if only things were like they used to be back then" before someone points out that "back then" in 1556 over 800,000 people died in a Chinese Earthquake. That kind of takes the punch out of the recent Mad Men season premiere, set in 1556.