That troublemaking Bear (yeah, I know, which one?) turned fifty on July fourteenth (to certain people out there: Don't you feel old now?). I would have shouted it out except I was grounded from computer, and my family went down to the shore instead (although not to the beach, much to my sadness, though Dad says that trip is coming; just to walk the Ocean City boardwalk).
To celebrate his birthday and, you know, represent, as they say, since nobody else in my family gave a squid, I wore my Nightmare on Elm Street T-shirt, the one where it looks like his claws are coming through the shirt and the one I bought with my own money. I also could have worn my Breaking Away "Cutters" T-shirt, but that movie wasn't really about him and him alone, and besides, I wore that one in my photo for my pool pass. So I wanted to be fair.
Then we all got in the car (after a minor dust-up because I wanted to sit behind Dad on the way to someplace for once, and my brother wouldn't let me and Mom and Dad said it didn't matter--so if it didn't matter, why couldn't he move to the right for once?) and started driving. I really like being in cars and driving places (well, have somebody else driving), and not just cars. I hate my school like it's a horrible flesh-eating disease, but I like the bus ride there and watching things go by and stuff. Field trips, sixth-grade camp, driving to my grandmother's every weekend...Most people can't wait to get to wherever they're going, but often I enjoy the ride there more than the actual place. I just go with the flow, man. You know?
Okay, enough with the philosophy. It was a long ride down, but Dad got us pretzels from WaWa and I was planning out a new novel ,so it was all right. I would have written one, too, but I can't write when the car is moving. Plus, I often bring stuff with me in the car but end up not using it because the stuff outside the window is more interesting (one time, I brought The Outsiders with me on a ride to Philadelphia, but I didn't even touch it. Philly is like an alien planet! I mean, I saw a kid lean out his apartment window and spit!). So I brought my idea/planning notebook and that's it. Well, and this cool mirror I got from the Dollar Tree. And my Kelly Leak sunglasses. But that's it.
I was surprised, because we try to go down at least once a year (though we haven't been in the actual ocean for a few years now...grr!) and when we do I'm usually tired by the first block and it all seems to drag out. This time, though, we were actually moving and moving fast, and I wasn't even tired once we reached the thick of it.
To pass the time when we were walking down, my brother and I made up an amusing story about the Bad News Bears--and yeah, my brother's just as sick of hearing about them as the rest of my family (well, except my mom, but she might just be too patient to say anything), so the fact that he was actively participating in this was, to say the least, startling, but not unwelcome--and what would happen if they all went down to the beach for the day (they live in California, y'all. Don't tell me they never went. I got a fiver on Kelly driving that freakin' sweet van). If you don't care about them at all, first of all, what the heck are you doing on my blog and, second, skip the next paragraph (but I won't tell if you peek).
First off, this is a magical fantasy beach (but, really, what California beach isn't?) where both Carmen and Amanda are present, as well as Mike Leak and Morris Buttermaker. Carmen is acting like some bigshot, saying he got the beach house they're staying at because somebody owed him a "favor." At that moment Carmen's mother comes out of the house, spoiling his Mafia mojo, and offers sandwiches, which Engleburg promptly devours. Engleburg has also managed to hunt down fried chicken while they're there. Kelly Leak is checking out all the chicks in bikinis and Amanda is attempting to get his attention by building a giant sand castle right in front of him in the shape of the Astrodome at a life-size scale. Ogilvie is scaring the s--t out of Timmy by reading shark-attack statistics. Jose and Miguel are beachcombing and digging for seashells. Toby, Regi, and Jimmy are off playing catch. Tanner is getting into fights with weightlifting guys a million times bigger than himself and kicking sand in peoples' faces. Ahmad is boogieboarding and chatting on and on about Hank Aaron. Mike Leak is supervising them all because if nobody else does, somebody's liable to wander off and drown. Why can't Buttermaker do it, you ask? Well, that's because he's busy getting geezed on a bench somewhere and can't be roused even when one of the Bears runs over to inform him that Tanner is currently getting the crap kicked out of him by some Arnold Schwarzenegger-lookalike.
All right, the Bears segment of this is done. To continue...
My family and I ate at the same pizza place we had the year before, which has apparently been visited by a numerous amount of Miss New Jerseys. How do I know this? Because they had autographed photos of them up on the wall. Wouldn't you (depending on who you are)?
Then we started walking again. I'm not giving you a play-by-play because they don't pay me to do that (they don't pay me anything, actually; I do this of my own free will), but we went in an out of stores and looked at all the different rides, like the Ferris Wheel and stuff--I would have gone on, but nobody else would go on with me because they all suck, and I didn't feel like going on by myself. I don't need to spin slowly in circles that much. Dad kept making cracks about Timmy and Tanner going on the Ferris Wheel together because he is convinced they're gay, and I'm convinced he's wrong, so many that I wanted to go on with him just so I could thrown him from the top. Then again, there's a lot of people who make me wanna throw them off the top of Ferris Wheels, and for a lot less, too. So I don't know how balanced a scale that is.
Before I knew it we were at the end and turning around to head back, and I still wasn't tired yet! I'm telling y'all, it was a miracle of Jackie Earle Haley's birthday! Hallelujah!
We walked back and then, all of a sudden, it hit me so hard I could've just fallen over right there. I got tired. And we had, like, thirteen blocks left.
Well, I got so convinced that I was going to die that I begged them to let me sit down on one of the convenient benches they have (you know, the blue ones, with plaques for people who died and whose families donated a bench in their memory, a topic I'm going to have to discuss later), but Dad said no, because then I never would wanna get back up. Well, duh. That's the whole point. Because everybody wants to rot away on a donated bench down at the Jersey shore.
I'll tell ya, the only thing that got me back to the car was the fact that we were going to go to Coldstone Creamery once we got back home and I will do anything for chocolate. I all but fell asleep on the car ride home, and the only reason I didn't is because--well, there's two-- a.) like I said earlier, I enjoy car rides and wanted to look out the window and b.) the sun was shining right on my side of the car, so it was too hot for me to sleep, even with the air on. I'm really bad with heat and sleep. So my skin didn't burn and peel off, I pulled off my beloved Nightmare on Elm Street shirt--don't worry, I had a tank top on underneath, and that's because my NOES shirt was white and there was no way in heck I was going to risk getting chocolate ice cream on it; you should have seen how paranoid I was in the pizza place--and used it as a kind of sun-repellent blanket the whole ride home. Dad's reaction was priceless when he glanced in the rearview mirror: "*NiteOwl*, what the hell are you doing?"
We went to Coldstone and I got my peanut butter cup ice cream in a sugar cone, dipped in chocolate with nuts on it, and my brother kept cracking up every time I said "My nuts are falling off" or "I'm dropping my nuts." I know. Isn't that hilarious? Peanut-other nut humor? Yeah, all right, I laughed too. And Dad said "You guys are sick" as he laughed along with us. And I ended up getting full and eating the cone the next day.
And that was how I spent Jackie Earle Haley's fiftieth birthday.
P.S.--While Dad was in a gas station checking his lottery tickets, my mom informed me that as soon as I walked into a bookstore down at the boardwalk, a kid who looked just like Kelly Leak walked by. Just my luck.
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