A Site for Shore Eyes

I mostly avoided stores this year, finding it considerably less crowded in my home office. With the click of my mouse, thoughtful gifts show up at my front door within a day or few. As of this writing, I’m thinking the extra price for express delivery may have been a wise investment.

One big problem that presents (no pun intended) itself is that I have to do my Christmas shopping much earlier, meaning several days before the Blessed Event. Christmas Eve used to suffice, at least for some Christmases past. I found the stores and malls considerably less crowded in the evening of the Eve. I also found them considerably less stocked, but usually managed to find a few items deemed more than adequate by the recipients.

It appears that many people have taken to shopping online, except when it comes to my site, Barrier Island Art, found at www.islanderart.com I guess web surfers think my site is only about art, although such is not the case.

Fortunately, my wife possesses that common female trait of shopping early, usually somewhere around a day or two after Christmas, so everything she orders for me gets here well ahead of time. She also loves giving me things, for some unexplained reason, so my twelve days of Christmas stretches to about twenty or so, but not really a daily thing. She often manages to find excuses to give me some early presents, assuring me that I’ll still have plenty to open on Christmas Day. In reality, I’m usually wearing and/or using the more expensive items by then, so the presents I open on Christmas lean more toward the stocking stuffer genre, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

We made it to a couple of stores, though. BJ’s Wholesale Club comes to mind. It’s one of those discount places that feels like shopping in a warehouse. Most everything is cheap, as long as you’re willing to convert a spare bedroom into a pantry big enough to store the huge boxes and cans.

Anyway, our local BJ’s deemed their giant shopping carts inadequate, so they replaced them with double-wides. The lady shoppers no longer need to cling to the cart to ensure blocking the entire aisle. The cart alone performs the task quite well. It adds one more dimension of pleasure to your total shopping experience. No checker ever asks if you want paper or plastic, because they have no paper or plastic. Instead, they afford you the opportunity to rummage through a bin of discarded boxes, most of them pretty much useless.

My point is, shoppers managed quite well to create total chaos with the smaller, large carts. Giving them larger large carts puts them on a par with the average 80-year-old Cadillac driver behind the wheel of a large motor home during rush hour.

After describing my out-of-home shopping experience, I feel thankful to be back at my computer, with every item conceivable just a few clicks away. Now, if only I can figure out what to do with that 55-gallon drum of Gatorade we bought.

I find it ironic that a major network airs cartoons such as “Frosty the Snowman” during prime time. I don’t mean to knock the cartoon, or its presentation, but young children usually comprise the viewing audience for such fare. So where do I see the irony?

Well, boys and girls, in this time spot I usually see shows that can’t seem to figure out how to say behind, derriere, backside, rear, or even the less euphemistic, butt, without starting off with the letter “A”. The writers and the networks for years have believed that it’s about time the viewing audience “grows up.” By this, they mean becoming savvy enough to understand sophomoric and puerile humor, the type once relegated to schoolyards, bars, and graffiti in public restrooms.

Once upon a time in America, comedy writers found humor in many things other than sex, without overtaxing their brains. Yes, even back in the fifties, adults, upon seeing certain stand-up comedians on TV, commented, “You should see his live show. It’s rather risque! Maybe so, but at least they performed in venues restricted to children, but not restricted to older people with the minds of children.

Present day sitcoms rarely fail to mention humping, or banging, and continually interlace the word freaking in conversations. The not-so-subtle terms for both forms of body waste appear at times, usually to emphasize anger. That donkey word for the behind makes frequent appearances, probably more than any other. We’re supposed to laugh, but some of us simply shake our heads.

For some reason, a number of shows consider homosexuality a humorous personality trait. Some drama shows make it part of some of the plots, but their small minds never figure out how to fit it into the story line without actually depicting same-sex characters kissing each other.

Before our society attained its present “enlightened” status, screenwriters, producers, and authors figured out ways to effectively work certain actions and words into their products using clever and powerful inferences and suggestions. Nothing was lost on the mature viewer or reader, but much usually slipped by the minds of the younger generation.

But times change, and, with enough constant exposure, we go through the looking glass, where everything seems opposite. Sophomoric humor becomes sophisticated, wink, wink. Four-letter words break their bonds and entrench themselves in what we once considered “decent society.” They abound in books, movies, the next table at fine restaurants, in conversations outside convenience stores, and among shoppers at the local mall. They assault the ears of men, women, and children, but no one seems offended anymore.

Yes, once upon a time in America, we had something that Aretha Franklin once sang about, respect. We respected authority, we respected others, we respected our country and its flag, and most of all, we respected ourselves. It seems that we’ve mostly lost it.

“I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me… All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.” – Jackie Robinson

Seems that the inmates still run the asylum in Wildwood. The mayor stated that they are NOT bringing in “low-income” housing. It’s “affordable” housing. Okay, call it affordable housing with low-income tenants.

I moved away 35 years ago, when affordable housing generally meant North Cape May, or Erma, or other places in Lower and Middle Townships, at least for most working stiffs. I found affordable housing in Pomona at the time, and also found it easier to land engineering-related jobs in Atlantic County. It also shortened my commute to Drexel, not really a factor when I moved there, but I enjoyed the convenience later on.

Back on the island, the business district along Pacific Avenue seemed pretty healthy when I left. Marlyn Manor, in Rio Grande, still drew some shoppers, as did the Grant’s in CMCH, and, to a lesser degree, the so-called mall at Rio Grande.

In ‘81, I moved out of the state in pursuit of engineering jobs in the nuclear industry. Things in Wildwood started heading downhill a few years later, as crime in the area increased. This was totally unrelated, of course, to the increase in low-income residents. Actually, a number of factors caused property values to plummet, even in the Crest, and motels went on the market in the six-figure range during the mid to late eighties.

Eventually, the downtown area along Pacific Avenue lost most of its curb appeal to shoppers, mainly because it seemed unsafe to walk the sidewalks. By the 1990’s, elected officials decided that if a pedestrian mall worked in Cape May, it would probably also work in Camden, so why not Wildwood? Apparently, none of these officials had ever actually seen Cape May’s mall, but they heard it was a good thing, so they covered a stretch of Pacific Avenue with brick pavers and blocked vehicle traffic. This brilliant plan succeeded in driving most of the barely-surviving merchants out of business. The costs for creating this mall were assessed to property owners along Pacific Avenue who “benefited” from this “improvement.”

After someone alerted the officials that their mall plan didn’t exactly work, they ordered the pavers removed, and gave them away to residents. Concerned that visitors, upon crossing the bridge into town and eventually seeing the ocean, would not be aware of being in a seashore resort, the municipal regime ordered the new sidewalks colored turquoise and blue, in wavy patterns. This proved highly effective in scaring people, and most visitors refused to get out of their cars. They thought vandals had spray-painted the concrete and might still be lurking nearby.

Okay, so I kid about the reaction to the sidewalks, but not about the sidewalks themselves. In theory, the hideous pigment was permanent, which never explained why it started wearing off. Officials reconvened and came up with yet another way to fix a taxpayer-supported mistake. Without offering the old sidewalks to residents who wanted them, they tore them up and replaced them with ordinary sidewalks. Well, almost. Someone decided that blue inserts at some of the expansion joints would keep the drama alive. The current mayor works in the concrete placing industry, which might explain this obsession with replacing sidewalks every few years.

A year or two ago, property values skyrocketed as developers flattened motels and existing homes to replace them with condos and townhouses. The plan worked for awhile, and they sold like hotcakes at caviar prices. Then someone figured out that caviar only commands high prices because of its relative scarcity. Oops! New multi-family structures reached the saturation point long ago, yet construction noises still echo from every scrap of vacant land. In desperation, developers increasingly turn to auctions as a means of marketing their wares, while others attempt to add more water to an already dripping sponge. The island motto has become, “I don’t want to hear it – just build!”

News travels as quickly as one actually wants to hear it. Ignoring it never makes it go away, however. Some supposedly omniscient individuals decided that vacationers wanted condos, high rises, silly-looking street signs and street lights, and they wanted to pay dearly for them. As it looks now, all most of them wanted was good old Wildwood-by-the-Sea, with its cheap and not-so-cheap motels, and enough money left over to enjoy the party.