Atlantic City

Last summer I read an academic monograph about American theme parks. It was a great book that I still think about all the time, but I have no interest in actually going to a theme park. The most I can probably handle is something called Rainforest Café, which is a theme restaurant decorated to make it seem like you’re sitting in a jungle. There are two of them in New Jersey: one in a mall in Edison Park (which is just outside of New York) and one in Atlantic City on the boardwalk.

June 20 marked my last set of deadlines, so I decided to treat myself by going to Atlantic City, which is about an hour and fifteen minutes from Philadelphia. I expected it to be a little sad… and it was in fact super sad. I’m not sure how to describe the sadness except to say that it was probably nice back in the 1970s maybe.

We got to Rainforest Café right when it opened, but there was still a 45-minute wait. It turned out to be the sort of place that makes borderline racist jokes on the menu and charges $30 for a bowl of pasta, and the general ambiance was so uncomfortable that we just left.

Next to the parking deck, there was a wholesale fish market called Barbera Seafood, and for $14 they fried us up a whole bunch of sea creatures, mainly shrimp and crabs. I also had deep-fried scallops for the first time, and it changed my life holy fuck. Since this place isn’t a restaurant, the food is take-out only, so we sat in the car in the shade of the parking deck and ate the freshest seafood I’ve had in at least a year straight out of the kitchen. I’m not sure I’ll ever go back to Atlantic City, but damn that was good.

About twenty minutes north of Atlantic City is another island called Ocean City, which also has a boardwalk. Unlike Atlantic City, Ocean City isn’t accessible by public transportation, and the people we saw were very… homogenous. It was nice, but also a bit creepy, so we drove back to Philadelphia before it went Shadow Over Innsmouth on us.

I can’t really explain why, but I’m fascinated by New Jersey. The entire state feels like a caricature of itself, like a theme park except people actually live there.

Next time I want to go to the Pine Barrens.

Invitation of Bread (Part One?)

Now that Philadelphia has lifted its pandemic restrictions, we were able to get someone to run a cable up to our apartment, and we finally have internet. Hooray!

(During the installation, I discovered that our apartment building has an epic murder basement. I might have to figure out a way to go back down there and take pictures, because wow. Meanwhile, the technician from Comcast wasn’t fazed in the slightest. I was tempted to ask for his number so I could treat him to a beer and hear his story. I bet that guy has seen some shit.)

I have a list of horror movies that I’d like to watch, but the habit of watching anime has become so ingrained that I turned on my PS4 and went straight to Crunchyroll. Most of what’s streaming is the same shōnen and isekai nonsense, but there’s a cute slice-of-life series with 15-minute episodes called Let's Make a Mug Too about an all-female high school pottery club. It’s about cute girls doing cute things in between sessions of talking about their feelings, and it was clearly financed by a regional tourism promotion board. My husband, who is 43 years old and served as an intelligence officer in the military of a politically unstable desert country before becoming the director of an internationally prestigious graduate program, unironically loves this show and watches an episode every day.

In fact, he loves it so much that he’s started writing (in his head) his own anime, which he calls "Invitation of Bread." From what I can tell, Invitation of Bread is about three thirty-something women who leave their corporate jobs to open a bakery in West Tokyo. This sounds like a solid and surprisingly legit premise. I’ll try to get more details and report back.