In the 70s and 80s we owned the Jersey Shore; it was our playground, our education. Manasquan was Middle School, Seaside was High School, and Belmar was College.Today, watching MTV’s Jersey Shore is like watching a girl you were in love with in High School and seeing that she married an asshole.
I blame movies for my failures in love. I was taught, at a very young age, that when you fall in love, you will know it. There will be fireworks, the soundtrack of your life will swell to a magnificent crescendo and, if you are very lucky, there will be some slow motion running in a field of flowers.
One thing that I found very interesting about my blog posts were that other websites were linking to some of them. Websites that specialized in or talked about divorce linked to the post I wrote about my divorce. The same was happening with dating websites. I often Google myself (and I haven’t gone blind yet) to see where some of my posts landed out there on the web.
The bartenders were all characters, but my favorite was a tall, lanky man named Robert John. I don’t know if John was his middle or last name, we just called him Robert John. He was over six feet tall with crew-cut black hair and Coke-bottle-thick glasses that made his eyes appear surprised whenever he looked at you.
Online dating — where we take the culmination of mankind’s technological advances that could be used to cure cancer, bring universal peace and allow for the expansion of truth and knowledge throughout the world, and instead use it to post pictures of ourselves and tell total strangers who we are.
After your initial separation, the first thing you will need to do is find a place to live. You may have the option of moving back in with your parents but, if you ever want to get laid again, rule that out. I was lucky in that respect when I separated. A friend had a condo she was trying to sell, and it had been empty for months.
When I was younger, I was a bouncer. I walked through crowds, wearing the “I’m in charge here” shirt, broke up fights, threw out drunks and tried (tried) to pick up girls. It was a great time. Even after my bouncer days were over, I would still jump in and break up fights, though it proved more dangerous without the shirt (I’ve heard ‘who the fuck are you?’ more than once).
Online dating — where we take the culmination of mankind’s technological advances that could be used to cure cancer, bring universal peace and allow for the expansion of truth and knowledge throughout the world, and instead use it to post pictures of ourselves and tell total strangers who we are.
The first thing I need to say is that Boots and Sparkle are not strippers.
We all board the train. After one stop, Amanda, her boyfriend, whom we’ll call ‘Paul’ (because that’s his name), and my youngest son got off, leaving myself, my other son, my ex-wife and her boyfriend behind to finish the journey. The doors closed, and we were off to Jersey City.
At least, that was the plan.
I tell my kids they are lucky to be living in a time where there are so many outlets available to them which allow people to read their stories or essays, or listen to their music. “Not like when I was a kid,” I lecture, one cliché away from telling them how I walked ten miles to school in the snow, or how we had to actually get up and change the channel on the TV by hand. Apparently I grew up during a technological Dust Bowl; if John Steinbeck were alive today he would most definitely blog about it.
