This entire summer, all you wanted was some decent weather. Not perfect weather, mind you. Just maybe a week where you didn’t have to take your umbrella everywhere. A brief period of time during which you knew you could wear normal work clothing and not get soaked — either by rain, or by your own disgusting, trickle-down-your-ankles-at surprising-moments sweat. Was that too much to ask? One weekend where you could make a plan to go to the beach? Where you could count on escaping your visiting family for eight minutes while you basked in the sun? Your 15 to 30 backed-up issues of The New Yorker aren’t going to read themselves, you know.
This past week gave you some hope. Sure, it was still raining. But the temperature was reasonable! You even felt comfortable wearing pants! (And you never feel comfortable wearing pants.) But you forgot, see — forgot that late summer is the time of hurricanes. Those maelstroms that are only supposed to devastate people who live down South, where the humans need to be punished for making the obviously correct decision to inhabit a climate that’s pleasant year-round. By the time hurricanes and so-called “tropical storms” (what is that term, anyway? It’s like a “gorgeous slap in the balls”) get up to the Northeast, they’re tepid, splashy little things that only serve to ruin your weekend.
But this weekend was supposed to be the one, you know? The last weekend before Labor Day. The one where you had some fun — finally made the trip to Jones Beach, maybe, or that nudey place on Sandy Hook in New Jersey. Sure, you’ve got that three-day trip to your parents’ house planned for the following weekend, where you’re hoping your boss will be nice for once and let you leave the office after a half day’s work, but it doesn’t really matter because it’s funny to watch your mom pretend not to be annoyed that you arrived at one in the morning anyway. But this weekend, it was supposed to be relaxing. You were going to hang out with friends and play that board game someone gave you forever ago but you never unwrapped because sitting around and drinking always just seemed so much easier.
Well, that’s shucked. Shucked like the clam you never learned how to steam. Shucked like all that summer corn you wanted to boil but never had time to get to the market and buy. Shucked like when you missed your morning train because you suddenly had to go to the bathroom, of all things, and you were late for work and your boss yelled at you, and you couldn’t think of a term that combined the two swears you wanted to say at the same time. Shucked because of “Tropical Storm Danny.” They’re always named after some dude you dated who seemed really cute and freckly but turned out to have a crooked wang, aren’t they?
“Danny” is going to bar you from the beaches this weekend. Because of waves, or wind, or “rip tides,” or some sort of cockamamie meteorologist construction that’s not going to even be effective enough to wash some sort of sea monster up on our shores. Really. In the olden days, people used to swim in tides so nasty they saw humans with bottoms that were made out of fish. That was some real weather. This Danny crap, it’s nothing. But it’s still going to steal your last beach weekend away from you. Intel suggests you steal Danny’s iPod, have some last-minute hate sex with him, and never call him back again. That’s what we did would do.
Tropical Storm Danny threatening to spoil another Jersey Shore weekend [NJ.com]
