Traffic on the way down the shore is a bitch. We are backed up and crawling before we even cross the bridge into New Jersey. We inch along. The sun beats down on the car. The whole thing is something out of a punishment doled out in hell. Sit in traffic to paradise for eternity!

Paradise? you ask. In New Jersey? you rightly emphasize.

I know how it sounds. But I stand by my statement. One might not expect to find paradise in New Jersey, but it’s there. It’s little communities of houses and hotels tucked against the coast, separated from the ocean only by a stretch of hot beach (yes, even the mile wide beach at Wildwood which makes you feel like Moses by the time you get to the ocean).

The Jersey Shore is a huge part of the lives of many Philadelphia area people. It sure was and is for my family. When I was a kid, there was nothing better than going down the shore. It was a week at the ocean. Salt air, blinding sun, eating sandy sandwiches on sandy beaches. A cold drink never tasted as good as when you have it just after coming out of salt water and off a hot beach. During the hot day you’d never think you’ll need a sweatshirt, but at night, the ocean breeze comes in and the improbable happens. You walk the boardwalk and play video games and eat Kohrs Brothers soft serve ice cream or funnel cake in the sweatshirt your mother made you pack. When it rains, we improvise and go to the movies or play boardgames. The rain is less annoying near the ocean. Come to think it, so are people.

In my current age, which quite rudely storms towards “not young at all anymore” I have found that nothing makes you feel older than a knee injury.

Last week, feeling the waistband-stretching effects of subsisting on cupcakes and cheesesteaks for a month, I decided to go for a grand workout performance. You know the kind, the ones that are meant to snap you back into shape, to show your body who’s who. Yeah, that one.

I looked up “Crossfit workout no equipment” and laughed at the images of men and women walking around on their hands and doing pushups up against a wall. If I did the first, I would be in a hospital nine minutes later, assuming I was found. Otherwise, I’d be dead. The second, feet against the wall pushups, I simply don’t understand. How? Why? If I attempted it, I would fail. If I attempted it and was caught by my mom, I would be murdered. Lose-Lose. I moved on.

In the end I chose something which entailed running 100 meters and doing 10 burpees, another 100 meters and doing 10 pushups, 100 meters and then 10 situps and a final 100 meters and doing 10 squats. This was to be done 4 times. I did the math. I run, I do plenty of pushups, burpees, situps, and squats. I could do this. For the location, I chose my parents’ driveway. This would lead to the least amount of public humiliation as only when I popped down to the sidewalk would anyone see me huffing, puffing, and praying for death, and those people would be in cars so they couldn’t gawk or, worse, offer medical assistance.

I managed three rounds instead of four. I was simply too tired to get the last round. Also my ankles were starting to hurt, because I was wearing deck shoes, outside of high heels the most inappropriate shoes to run in. It took me an hour to catch my breath and to stop hyperventilating. I walked around the block (1 mile) and only one woman offered to drive me home (or to the ER). I viewed this as a win.

My loss became evident later when my dad and I went to the airport to pick up Burke. She was arriving from Prague and would spend the week with our family before we headed down the shore. My dad and I had an earnest discussion about working out on the way down I-95. He had seen me working out.

Grimly, he spoke, turning down the radio. “You know, you shouldn’t overdo it like that when you’re working out. You’re not a kid anymore.”

“Oh is that right!” I was immediately in my Irish. On a scale from 1-10 of sedentariness, with 1 being Tom Brady in 2015 and 10 being Orson Welles in 1984, is 610. Moreover, my dad has a way of suggesting people do things that make him more comfortable not him. “Your mother should slow down, take it easy,” he has said. But my mother at 73 moves and acts more like a 50 year old. The inference is, it doesn’t make her uncomfortable to be on the move all the time, but him.

…and leaves a whole lot of folklore in his wake

On the night of August 13 1938, future famous blues musician Robert Johnson was drinking and playing guitar in a juke joint near Greenwood Mississippi. The night seemed to be normal until he began getting ill. According to accounts, his suffering increased for three days and he bayed at the moon in agony until he, mercifully, died on August 16.

If you don’t know who Robert Johnson is, then a hipster in your neighborhood just had a stroke. You might not know him, but you know what he looks like sitting with a guitar across his chest, smiling, cross-legged, and with a bowler hat, he’s been the pictorial ambassador of American Blues in all of our lifetimes. Johnson was a blues guitarist in the 1920s and 30s who is known for his singular genius with a guitar, his death at an early age, which is considered a tragedy of music both early blues and contemporary.

Johnson’s lore partially resides in the time, place, and manner in which he played music. He was a roving musician, playing the juke joints and dance halls all over the Mississippi Delta, the gritty birthplace of American blues. Another level of the lore of Robert Johnson are the mysteries enshrouding his life and death. Though today he is widely regarded as the first and quintessential guitar genius, this wasn’t always the case. According to some of his contemporaries, Johnson was subpar on the guitar until he disappeared for a few months and came back a fingerpicking demigod. Legend goes that he sold his soul to the devil at the junction of Highways 49 and 61, which was evidently the place to be if you needed a skill, didn’t want to put in the time, and didn’t mind spending eternity broiling in hell fire.

Other Johnson mysteries are that nobody knows exactly how he died and nobody knows exactly where he’s buried. This information is completely dependent on whose stories you believe. His burial place is an unmarked grave in a Baptist graveyard, a pauper’s grave, or under a big pecan tree. And it seems as though Johnson might not have needed any help from the devil reaching that hell fire. He was known for having a different girl in every juke joint and he was also apparently a heavy drinker, according to some “drunk more than sober.” And it’s possible this love of women and whiskey that got him killed. Some have it that his whiskey was poisoned by the jealous husband of one of Johnson’s many lovers (roving musician my ear). One doctor later in the century deduced that he might have had an aneurysm brought on by whiskey and congenital syphilis. Either way, baying at the moon seems an appropriate reaction.  

It is possible that he was deliberately poisoned, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that 1920s juke joints for black Americans were similar to white America’s speakeasies. During prohibition that both communities were subject to, bad alcohol flowed like arsenic. Dirty and dangerous whiskey killed many people as did bathtub gin. Juke joints however were blacks’ last bastion away from those white people and their pesky Jim Crow laws, segregation, intimidation, and murder. They were a venue where they could gather without (sadly) white supervision. In the early 20^th century, juke joints were put up near rural work camps in order to attract workers who didn’t have a centralized location to hang out. They had no pub, so a pub of sorts was created. Here, people could play and listen to music and dance. Some owners sold moonshine and whiskey to visitors to make extra money. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that that moonshine or whiskey would be dirty and accidentally dangerous.

I have been visiting my parents for about a week. To say that I have not done much in the way of visiting humanity is accurate. More accurately, I am something like Howard Hughes meets Boo Radley. When I come home in August, I spend most of my days in my parents’ house being catered to by mom, watching baseball with dad, and working. I know this doesn’t sound exciting, but it’s 100 degrees outside and we have air conditioning so any opinions stop mattering to me when it’s a public health issue.  

Once a year, my sister and I enjoy a day completely void of work and completely filled with pleasure and self-spoiling. We go swimming, get massages, eat cheesesteaks, drink at a pub, go shopping for stationery, and work a diner breakfast in there somewhere. We gossip and talk about movies and say how much better drinking is when you don’t do shots all the way up until we start doing shots, then we switch to talking about how great shots are. As this is everything I enjoy about being alive wrapped into one day, I was very for this plan.

My sister picked me up early. It was rainy, so instead of swimming (aka the only quasi-physical activity planned) we called an audible and went for breakfast. I find little difference between omelettes and the breaststroke, so I saw this as the warm up to the massages that swimming was supposed to be. Also, anyone who can say no to scrapple doesn’t deserve a massage.

Thomas Cromwell climbed the scaffold to his execution and addressed the crowd. “I am come hither to die and not to purge myself, as some think peradventure that I will.” Translation: I’m being screwed. I’m not admitting guilt. Let’s get this over with. He was officially charged with high treason. He’d come so far, started out the poor son of a smith, and had risen to be Henry VIII’s chief minister and the Earl of Essex. And now he was about to be beheaded in the Tower of London. As he committed his soul to Christ and rested his head against the chopping block, he was maybe wondering how it had all gone wrong. Right before the axe came down, he hit it: Oh yeah, I was born in 15th century England and my boss is a sociopath.

Getting in trouble was remarkably easy in Tudor England and just about everything was a crime. Gossiping, drunkenness, and believing in the wrong religion were harshly punishable and sometimes executable offenses. Women could get burned at the stake for adultery. Poisoners were boiled to death by being dipped for hours into any boiling liquid (wine, water, tar, oil, dealer’s choice really). High treason got you drawn and quartered, during which they were dragged by cart to a gallows where they were hanged but – to their chagrin – not killed. They then had their penis and testicles cut off, their stomach split open, and their intestines removed. Their head was cut off, parboiled, and left at the city gate for a warning not to visit that town.

Among the crimes under “high treason” were speaking against of the king, counterfeiting, and imagining the king’s death, all while making the unfortunate mistake of having been born in 15th century England. Cromwell’s crime was that he had exaggerated the attractiveness of Henry’s arranged wife, Anne of Cleves, and then failed to get Henry out of his marriage. Oh and for repeating the, I’m guessing confidential, information that Henry had been unable to get the royal pecker up to consummate his marriage to the evidently homely Anne. If Anne was upset by this, she didn’t let on. She gave him the annulment he desired and received a generous settlement in return, including a palace, a castle, and no sex with Henry VIII before being beheaded.

If Henry VIII enjoyed one activity, it was executing people, and friends, wives, or trusted advisors weren’t safe from his fury. For Cromwell’s unforgivable infractions against the royal penis’s owner’s royal ego, Henry came up with some faux charges and had Cromwell executed. If Cromwell (or his testicles) had something to be thankful for, it’s that he was beheaded instead of drawn and quartered. But Cromwell can’t have been too surprised, if for no other reason that getting executed was one of the easiest ways to die in Tudor England. It ranks up there among playing sports, having bad teeth, poxes both small and English (syphilis), and drowning (laundry in river, slippery rocks, heavy wool dresses – the quiet pandemic). Life ended for most around or before the age of 35 and was almost always violent or involved awful rashes. Women often died during or after childbirth by fever, infection, or being twelve years old. So, with the chances of dying badly at about 87% and being executed at about 70%, what was one to do?

One Drank.

One drank a lot.