A while ago, I got an email from someone who had a site (or at least a page) dedicated to the famous Boardwalk Cats. But, like so much else, the page was writ in water–I checked my link yesterday and saw it was down. Bummer.
Looking for more information on the Boardwalk Cats online, I found this possibly unintentionally ironic paragraph on everything2.com:
Today, Atlantic City is slowly rising back into a classy resort town. The city is still accessible by several NJ Transit buses as well as one train running from 30th Street Station in Philadelphia to the Convention Center on Baltic Avenue, not to mention the entire fleets of charter buses that make daily excursions (there’s so many that it’s its own industry to Atlantic City) from the nearby metropolitan and suburban areas. The jitneys are still in service, though the trolleys no longer exist. There are currently a dozen casinos operating (discussed later). The beach is a public park owned by the city, and there is no charge for entrance (unlike most places in the state during the tourist season).
Yep–fleets of charter buses is what makes a town “classy.”
Then there was this elegaic prose poem to the Atlantic Ocean:
Where the noise never stops
Inside an Atlantic City casino, if you haven’t prepared yourself by hanging out in Grand Central Terminal during rush hour or a steel mill, the noise can be overwhelming. It’s all civilized and artificial noise. Nervous gamblers clacking their chips hand-to-hand or on the table; blackjack dealers reading off the value of hands in an affectless monotone; waitresses asking “Coffee? Soda? Juice?” every few tables as they walk; and the constant metallic brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrring of the latest slot machine to pay off big.
But the funny thing about Atlantic City is that it’s extremely close to the ocean of the same name. The casinos are all built to turn their backs on it, but it hasn’t gone away. And if you walk out of the back door of the Tropicana–as I did before dawn this morning when my poker game broke up–the ocean is waiting for you.
Not a hundred feet away from where Chinese businessmen exhort their hands to come right and American retirees complain about the service, the overwhelming noise is the endless hiss and roar of the surf. It was there long before mankind invented the slot machine, and it will be there long after the last roulette wheel rusts to a stop forever. Long after Donald Trump and his works are forgotten, and the boardwalk is covered under drifting sands, and the hotels house nothing but rats and squirrels, the ocean will still be there.
The ocean has nothing but time.
That last sentence was so gnomic that I stopped looking for the Boardwalk Cats and just contemplated time. I’ve always hoped that, if I traveled to a post-apocalyptic future Absecon Island, I’d realise I was back home when I came across an abandoned Mr. Peanut statue sticking out the sand. According to this guy, I’ll have to jockey with rats and squirrels to get a room.
Speaking of gnomic and pithy, I bought a DVD of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast the other day, and I was blown away by this bit of wisdom, which I think came from Judy Tenuta–if not her, definitely Space Ghost or Zorak:
“Friends are just enemies who don’t have the guts to kill you.”
That, and Sonny Sharrock’s music, made the DVD a worthwhile purchase.