It was a crazy Friday for all who call the Tri-State area home. For those of you who are not familiar the Tri-State area consists of New York, New Jersey, and one of the other states that touches New York or New Jersey that no one really pays attention to. Is it Connecticut? Is it Pennsylvania? No one knows, no one cares. At approximately 10:23 AM a MASSIVE earthquake from Lebanon, NJ reverberated across a 100-mile radius. By MASSIVE I mean not massive at all. At first I thought the sound was just a big truck driving by my house. Then the lamps started to shake, my coffee started to spill, and I figured all it would take was a big truck driving by to knock down my 100+ year old house. My house resembles The Burrow in Harry Potter and for a guy who has absolutely no skills at fixing or building things, I silently hoped it would topple so I could collect the insurance money and build anew.
After the brief shake the house was unfortunately still standing and the news of the earthquake spread like wildfire. Did we, in New Jersey of all places, actually just experience an earthquake? I called my wife, received a call from my mother, there were texts from friends, dormant group chats sprung to life with the – ‘did you just feel that?’ or ‘everyone okay’ texts. When the initial panic wore off I started to laugh because I’ve always had this theory about places that experience extreme weather vs. places that experience extreme people.
There are places that are constantly on the verge of experiencing some type of catastrophic weather event and these places are always the most appealing to live in. Take Southern California for example. The weather is perfect. For the majority of the year it is a balmy 70-80 degrees, sunny, not a single raindrop in sight. When living in Southern California you feel as if you’ve woken up in a dream. The problem with that perfection is that it comes with the possibility of the entire state slipping off the San Andreas fault line and nose diving into the sea. It also doesn’t have its own water supply. As the great Thomas Sowell once said - there are no solutions, only tradeoffs, and that rings true when it comes to living in places that are perceived as perfect. Sure, I’d love to live in the Caribbean, but every Autumn you have to wonder if your house will still be standing after a few category-five hurricanes roll in. You can’t have perfection without risk.
I will admit here, to the dismay of the readers, that New Jersey doesn’t come up first on a list of ideal places to live. Most people just assume the entire state looks like the intro to the Soprano’s. I don’t blame them. If you’ve ever landed in Newark, our grossest city, and assume that’s how the rest of New Jersey looks you won’t think much of our state. We like it that way. The more people deterred from moving here the better. And that’s because instead of extreme weather we experience extreme people. In your average New Jersey calendar year there is absolutely no worry of any extreme weather event taking out you or your family but god forbid you get on the Parkway and don’t buckle up. You will run into no less than 20 insane drivers per mile. The probability of dying in a tornado in New Jersey is probably the same as winning the PowerBall three times in a row, but you could easily run into someone who “works on the docks” and “knows a guy”. There is very little wildlife in New Jersey except for an abundance of deer, but you could accidently cut a woman online at a supermarket and verbally get your bowels removed. Once again, there are tradeoffs.
I personally love New Jersey and specifically the Jersey Shore – the real one, not the one you’ve seen on TV. You get all four seasons, you get rain, you get shine, you get snow, you get the beach, you really do get to experience it all and only on occasion is the weather ever extreme. But the major trade off is the people (the amount and the types) and what I would like to do here is give you the Jersey Shore version of extreme weather events. You might think we have it easy in terms of extreme weather but we certainly make up for it with extreme people.
Flooding = Traffic
When it rains for a few days in New Jersey maybe a street or two will be flooded, but we’re used to that. Our storm water systems are built for rain. There is no major river just waiting to overflow and wash away home after home in its wake. The elevations in New Jersey have a small range. There will be no landslides here. But what we do have is traffic. A shit ton of it. When you stuff over 9 million people into 7,000 square miles there are bound to be backups. If you mistime any drive the consequences could be drastic.
For example, let’s say you decide you want to drive north and visit Montclair for the day. Montclair is a hidden North Jersey gem Tony Soprano has never been to. There are large trees, beautiful houses, parks, restaurants, a college campus – nothing you’d ever associate with New Jersey. But you lost track of time and hop back on the New Jersey Parkway at 5:15 PM. Unfortunately for you it’s a weekday. If your drive to Montclair was an hour it has now turned into a three-hour “drive” home. You will be screaming at your windshield, biting your wheel, and pulling out your hair by minute 30 in stand still traffic. There is a reason I have no hair left. On a daily basis a mass migration flows in and out of New Jersey and New York and if you are not familiar with these stampede like patterns you are bound to be crushed by them.
Tsunami = Memorial Day Weekend
A pattern is brewing and it all has to do with New Jersey’s close vicinity to New York. Half the reason why living in New Jersey requires the ability to navigate crazy people is because it is next to the biggest city in the country. And every year on Memorial Day weekend the entire city decides to descend on my home. It is terrifying. You can practically hear the heard of BENNY’s approaching. For the uninitiated a BENNY is anyone from the Bayonne, Elizabeth, Newark, or New York who decide to clog up the Jersey Shore beaches. The term BENNY can probably start being extended like the LGBTQIA+ acronym because people from all over now decide that the Jersey Shore is the place to be every summer. Memorial Day is the time of year that the Jersey Shore actually begins to resemble the television show. You can almost smell the fake tans and Aqua de Gio begin to enter Monmouth and Ocean County. If you decide you want to visit New Jersey on Memorial Day I have to warn you - you will no doubt encounter the mongaloids in the below gif. There will be rosary beads, there will be tattoos, there will be hair gel, there will be steroids.
On some days during the summer, but especially during Memorial Day, I wish a real Tsunami would gracefully hit our shores and wipe these people out.
Hurricane = D’Jais
The guys in the above gif are not coming to the Jersey Shore for a nice quiet afternoon picnic with friends. They are coming to party and party is what they will do. If you wait until the end of the gif and read the juicehead in the ginny T’s lips you’ll clearly see him say “mother-fuckin D’JAAAAAIIIS” (I’m allowed to say ginny, my wife and children are Italian). He is referring to the legendary bar in Belmar, New Jersey that is like the Mecca for guidos. Each year they make their pilgrimage to pay their respects.
D’Jais from the outside looks like any other bar you might find in a beach town. A little outside seating area, a couple bars inside surrounding a dance floor, nothing fancy. But just wait until Saturday around 3 PM and you’ll find that it is crazier than any named storm. The line is so long it travels more than three blocks and stops Belmar traffic. If you do get inside, which I highly recommend against, you will find a massive amount of sweaty drunk and drugged out people having the time of their lives. It’s wetter than a hurricane. The speakers are so loud they practically create wind. I’d take my chances of survival in Miami during hurricane season over entering this hell hole in the summer.
Tornado = Easter Egg Hunt for kids aged 0-5
This one is a little new and a little personal but I’ve never experienced a more frightful moment in my life than going to two town sponsored Easter egg hunts with my daughter this year. I doubt a small town in the middle of Nebraska has this same problem but if they did have to experience an Easter egg hunt in New Jersey they would surely wish they had a tornado bunker to hide in.
For one, there are a lot of parents that show up to these things. The first one I went to had no less than 200 parents, each with 2.5 kids, all surrounding a small playground field filled with Easter eggs as if they were headed into battle. I watched one dad put eye black on, another was stretching, a third even brought a pair of running shoes he changed into. I had no idea what I was getting myself into until the whistle blew. There were dads pushing over four-year-old’s to get to the goods, mom’s screaming expletives, it was a mad house. The saddest part is that if you are a normal parent and will not harm other people’s children then your kid gets the short end of the stick. Luckily my daughter was smart enough to avoid the crowd of Viking like New Jersey fathers and found a hidden egg in a bush. So sure, once in a while the people in Tornado Alley have to hop in a bunker to avoid 150+ mph winds lifting their house into the air, but at least they don’t have to experience an Easter egg hunt in Central New Jersey.
Good Weather = Everyone Is Out
Now that we’ve gone over the Jersey Shore equivalents to extreme weather I just want you for a second to imagine good weather. 80 degrees, sunny, not a cloud in the sky – your typical day in Southern California. Because it is a typical day in Southern California, the mood is tame. People are going about their daily lives. They are headed to work or walking to the beach or doing chores around the house. There is nothing to get excited about because…it’s typical.
Now think about New Jersey. You might get ten of these perfect days a year during the three month span of June – August. And because these days are not typical just understand that everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, is going out. All 9 million people in New Jersey will be up and at em early and often, doing things. And they’ll do just about anything. Go to the store, go to the beach, go to the bars – nowhere is safe. And they will do all of these things with an attitude. You will have to fight for every parking spot, wait in absurd lines, constantly jostle for your place in said absurd line, take verbal abuse, and possibly fist fight for bumping into someone. The list of obstacles on a perfect New Jersey day are endless. So I know it must be hard to live in a place that could be washed away by a hurricane at any moment or a place that could be swept up by a tornado or a place that could fall into the sea due to an earthquake, but just imagine the horror of living in a place that any time the weather is perfect you will have to enter a battle royal to do just about anything. That’s New Jersey. And I love it.
Gotta love NJ ❤️
Always so much fun reading your posts, Alex. They are a bright spot in my day!