Regional Gothic: The Jersey Shore.

Explanation here: example here, via here.  Let’s do a couple.

  • Your friend from college staggers out of the bar with you at 2 AM. The smell of salt and baked asphalt flow over you both as you try to figure out which way to stagger back to her parents’ house.  In the yellow-light alleyway you see four people standing around something on the ground.  Your friend interrupts your staring. “Don’t worry,” she says. “You’re fine as long as you’re with me.”
  • You lean over the Formica table and put the garlic salt on your son’s first pizza slice.  Best he gets used to it early.
  • The drawbridge is up. One of the tourists tells her friend that it’s so the boats can go out. Her friend looks at the pier, where all the boats are still tied up; and then she looks down at the channel and points at the darker blotch there.  Time to start walking away, before you have to pretend that you didn’t hear the splashes.
  • They call it… pork roll.
  • There was a roller coaster, at the park: it was a double coaster, with one side steeper and faster than the other. It’s not true that locals only went on the right-side ride.  You had to go on the left side at least once. That way the park knew your taste. We don’t know what the park does, now that the roller coaster is gone. We don’t go any more.
  • Did you know that most of the houses on this block don’t have heating? That’s because they’re vacation homes for tourists. No, they don’t have running water, either.  I told you: vacation homes.

Interesting mental exercise…

3 thoughts on “Regional Gothic: The Jersey Shore.”

  1. Well, SOME of them call it pork roll. SOME of them call it Taylor’s Ham, for some eldritch reason, even though that’s not even the name on that actual product. And it is their secret, spoken of elsewhere only in hushed whispers, in terms most referential.*

    *I mean, seriously, why the hell is it so hard to find the stuff outside of Jersey?! My Jersey family members got me hooked on it then sent me back west to languish. Praise the living and loving God that I found an Air Force commissary right in my Denver metro area that stocks the stuff.

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