Vaca!

Walt Clyde won't be posting much for a few days. I will tell you about it when I am around more consistently!

"The Trails"

Random anecdote about childhood...

When I was back up in Teaneck working this past July, I stayed up there for a couple of weeks straight, crashing back at my mother's house (even though I'm 31!) It was a very enjoyable time. A lot of memories come rushing back to you, seemingly channeled through all five of your senses. I found myself walking in my mother's neighborhood near Teaneck High School. Here is an overhead map of the High School, incase you are not familiar with the area.


View Larger Map



We lived about a block and a half away from the high school. When I first moved to Teaneck, in the summer of 1985, I was eight years old. As an eight year old, my primary means of transportation was my bicycle. I met the kids in my neighborhood. I quickly found out that the local kids took their bikes to this place called "The Trails".

"The Trails" was actually just one trail. It was a dirt trail that ran parallel to Route 4 (West-East) on the embankment of Route 4, on the opposite side of the high school. Here is a view of where the trails start on Margaret Street. If you looked directly to the left from this position, you'd see the start of the trails.
















And here is the aforementioned look to the left. This is the start of the trails. We have turned 90 degrees left from the previous picture.





As an aside, as you start walking down this trail, if you look to your right, towards Route 4, you see Route 4 in the background, with an area that had a bunch more garbage than this picture caught. I think high school kids hang out there at lunchtime and after school, and do whatever kids do.)





















Anyway, if you started riding your bicycle from Margaret Street, you could pick up a lot of steam if you were heading east from Margaret towards the next block, which was Alicia Street. It is a relatively straight path, slightly downhill, with little bumps. Here's what it looks like.















Just after Alicia, the path took a turn to the right, and there was a huge hole which was perfectly shaped to ride your bike into and jump out of the other side. When we were kids it was about... (hopefully the lens of retrospection won't fail me here)... eight to ten feet deep, and fairly wide. Like a mini crater. I was excited to see the dip again. Alas, when I made my way to Alicia, it wasn't there at all. The area there where the quick descent started was there, but overgrown.




And while the ground still was lower there, it was inexplicably filled with a bunch of logs! Here's the picture.















As it did when we were kids, the trail still petered off slowly after the dip, eventually fading out on the block past Alicia, which was Stasia street.
















I was kind of sad that the dip was not there, and I wonder if it was filled intentionally after my childhood to keep kids out of there. It is town property, I'd assume.

As I strolled down this path to take the photos for this blog post, a couple of old guys were hanging out in their backyard at the end of Alicia which abutted the start of the jump, and when I was lining up and snapping photos, they started eyeing me suspiciously. They asked who I worked for - town or county? I said, "Neither." They continued to stare, expecting an explanation, but I just smiled cryptically and walked away.

July Poker League - Games #9, #10 and Conclusion

I had completed my stint of working in Teaneck and moved back down to South Jersey. As a result, I missed the last two games of the July Poker League. Daffy, who hasn't blogged much since he was "back", has emailed me an Excel document that has the standings from the last two weeks of the League. So, without any further ado...

Recap of Game #9 (Monday, July 28):

It was a night for a first time winner, the continued hot play of the Donkey, some more Ziggy-esque luck for My Choice (he did call me to tell me about a couple of specific hands - and he did get it rough), and the consistency of .com.

Tonight's Standings:

Lady Luck - 1st
Donkey - 2nd
.com - 3rd
Chick - 4th
True - 5th
Karma - 6th
Daffy - 7th
Zeus - 8th
My Choice - 9th

Points (Total):

.com - 6 (49)
Daffy - 0 (39)
Chick - 3 (28)
True - 1 (24)
Donkey - 8 (22)
My Choice - 0 (20)
Pads - 0 (20)
Lady Luck - 10 (14)
Zeus - 0 (14)
Karma - 0 (12)
The Terminator - 0 (7)**


Recap of Game #10 (Thursday, July 31)

The absence of Pads, Zeus, and My Choice, who were enjoying a family evening, was filled by the void of two Rocks, relatives of Daffy's wife. Despite this, the night seemed to feature much of the same - Donkey and .com both keeping their games up, and another positive night for Lady Luck.

Standings:

Donkey - 1st
.com - 2nd
Daffy - 3rd
Lady Luck - 4th
Chick - 5th
Rock - 6th
Karma - 7th
Rock Jr. - 8th
True - 9th

Final Points (Total):

.com - 8 (57)
Daffy - 5 (44)
Donkey - 10 (32)
Chick - 1 (29)
True - 0 (24)
My Choice - 0 (20)
Pads - 0 (20)
Lady Luck - 3 (17)
Zeus - 0 (14)
Karma - 0 (12)
The Terminator - 0 (7)**

The overall winner is... .com!!!

Congratulations to .com, who won the league using all of the grit, consistency, and random food items that we've come to expect of him.

Props to Daffy (2nd) and Donkey, defying early expectations with a furious late rally to finish 3rd. They both won money (though not as much as .com).

Special thanks to our league commissioner... Daffy.

Daffy was more than the David Stern of our league. He kept the league going with tireless energy, phone calls, enthusiasm, and wacky spirit we've come to expect from the Daffster.

Thanks to all!


P.S. I'm practicing incorporating some new HTML tags! Oh, and I never posted player profiles for Lady Luck, True and Karma... without pictures, what's the point?

Classic Posts: The Central NJ Explorers

On my previous blog, I posted this anecdote. After driving back and forth many times between North and South Jersey, and getting continuously stuck in the Exit 7 area, it reminded me of times when it didn't happen very often - back in the glory days of the early 90s... Thanks to Goldman who helped me put the memories back together, back when I originally posted it.


It was 1995 and 1996, and Teaneck High School had spring break a week off from the week that most schools had off. I was still around town in Teaneck.

Also, around this time, I was getting closer with my brother, Evan. I wound up driving him places as was not yet 17, and through this I remember us getting much closer during this time than we had been before.

So one of Evan's friends mentioned to him that Great Adventure in Jackson, NJ had opened for the season, even though it was early in the spring. A trip which now at age 31 would seem relatively small to take to get to a big theme park like Six Flags seemed like an adventure at the time, especially for teenagers with little to no driving experience or with no experience taking trips like these without their parents.

So I forget if we had off of school on a weekday, or if it was a Saturday, but off we went, not thinking to call the park ahead of time (looking up their website was probably not a viable option back then). I had last been there for our 8th grade trip, where myself and somebody else (I forget who) rode the then-unbelievable and new Great American Scream Machine over and over until we almost missed the bus back.

This day, it was myself (I was 18 or 19) and my brother (15 or 16), and several of his friends: Goldman, Jay Koeppel, and Seth Kriegel (all 15 or 16).

Sure enough, after making our way all the way down the turnpike, it was too early in the season, and the park hadn't opened yet for the spring/summer.

Rather than be discouraged, we made the best of the situation. I felt like we were in the middle of a new world. It seemed very rural down there to us suburbanites. We decided to wander around and see what we came across. We drove around and soon came across a paintball place. The place was abandonded. We ran around there and stole some random shit (like beat up bowling pins). We marveled at the fact that paintball ranges existed, and that it was seemingly a bunch of random shit spread around some field somewhere. We stopped and grabbed food somewhere. We eventually came across a place called "Horse Park of New Jersey". We again marveled at the fact that we were apparently "in the country" and checked out the festivities, and chatted with some "locals". All the time we had a good time. Eventually we made our way home.



Dan Goldman has remembered and added on to the story:

The funniest part of the trip, as I recall, was a) when we started doing the rhyming couplets about each other's Moms (we were in the middle of a sonnets lesson in English at the time and I told Korean Shawn I would write a sonnet about his Mom) and b) when we got off the Turnpike and stopped at a McDonald's and people just looked at us like we were from another planet.

Even in a state as small as NJ, there are vast cultural differences between north and south, east and west, urban, suburban and rural and I guess, with our sunglasses and baggy shorts, we didn't fit the Jackson, NJ resident profile.

Right away, someone in a McDonald's uniform came up to ask us what we were doing there and when we told them we were going to Great Adventure, they laughed and told us the park was closed.

The reason we goofed was because Teaneck's spring break was a different week than the rest of NJ and Great Adventure had been open the week before when the rest of the civilized world took a week off from school. That was the root of our mistake.

Also, the best part of the horse park was not the smell, which was awful, but when Skip or Jay or someone asked some random girl whether they could get a ride...on the horse!

And don't forget the detour into Trenton when we asked some random guy on the street what there was to do in Trenton and he couldn't come up with any ideas, except "DRINK!"



Now, in retrospect, we were certainly not out in the middle of the country. In the 12 and a half years since then, I have lived all over New Jersey and taken trips to many of the corners of my state. Infact, once in my early 20s I interviewed for a teaching position at Jackson High School, where Great Adventure was. (They didn't offer enough money.) And certainly, I have been down rural roads much more rural than central New Jersey. I have taken road trips of a lot longer than an hour and a half. In short, this little excursion is in perspective now. But what is not lost on me was the feeling of exploration of that day. The feeling of being somewhere entirely new, unknown, and out of your element is one that is prominent in childhood, and can become lost as you become an adult. What seems like a silly anecdote remains in my mind as one of many fond memories of that time of my life.

Jackson Whites

(Background articles can be found here and here. Probably also in Weird NJ somewhere.)

The Jackson Whites is the informal name for the Ramapough Mountain People. They are a group of people who have remained largely unassimilated since the 1800s, and are mixed white, black, and Native American descent - more noteworthy in the 1800s than it is today. They have lived, and continue to live, in less developed areas in northern Passaic county and southern New York State, in the Ramapo Mountains. Read the articles if you want a real history on them. The first article contains a number of pictures of them, but they are probably most noteworthy for a strange orangey color to their skin.

Back in the 1980s, they tried to get a gaming license but their status as "Native American" was challenged by a group of people, led by Donald Trump (for obvious reasons - many people go to A.C. from the NYC area and give Mr. Trump a lot of money!) and were ultimately denied. If it hadn't been, many people wouldn't have so far to drive to gamble! When I was up in North Jersey in July, out of curiousity we took a ride up to Ringwood to a less developed area where they live, and indeed many of the Jackson White people were there, staring at us (for being gawking intruders, presumably).

Many people who grew up in Bergen County have heard of the Jackson Whites. I hadn't heard of them until recently. There are occasional news stories involving members of the tribe. I was just surprised that I hadn't heard of them before. I felt compelled to blog post to see if any of my loyal readers has ever heard of them before.

On Cash

- With the way our currency has inflated over the history of our country, I got to thinking that it must not be worth it anymore to make pennies - i.e. it must cost more than a penny to actually produce a penny. These people think so. Will we actually get to the point where we phase out the penny? Seems like we're already there. There have been "Leave a Penny Take a Penny" bins at convenience stores for years, but now I've noticed that more recently, sometimes when I buy something, from local stores or chains, some clerks will just round up or down to the nearest 5 cent increment when giving you your change. The pennies are so freakin irrelevant.


- The way in which change is given physically has started to fucking irritate me. Let's say I buy a coffee, newspaper, and bagel from the local Wawa. Let's say it costs 3 dollars and change, and I pay with a ten. I'll take my wallet out of my pocket, produce the ten dollar bill, and the clerk will sequentially put the five, a one, and the coins in a pile in my outstrecthed hand. I then have to put the change down on the counter, put the bills in my wallet, then put my wallet away, pick the change up off the counter and put in my pocket. I would much prefer that the clerk places the change on the counter and hands me the bills while my wallet is out. Therefore, I would not have to put the change back on the counter. Nitpicky? Absolutely. It's just so inefficient. Maybe some people just like to stuff all the money, coins and bills, in their pocket? I don't know.


- How much money do people carry on them? In today's world, just about everything can be paid for using debit / credit cards. I've broken down and charged stuff like $1.00 at the post office, whereas I used to think that was gay ("Just use a dollar bill, jackass!" I'd think when I'd see somebody do this.) However, I realize that I usually feel comfortable with close to $100 in my wallet, if it's possible - even if I'm not planning on spending cash on anything. If I don't know with certainity that there isn't a spontaneous A.C. poker trip in my near future, I will find myself trying to have even more cash on me - say, near $300. But, I've rarely spent all of the cash I have on me, when I have near $100, without a reasonable chance to pass an ATM and get some more. I've talked to people, who aren't rich, that feel comfortable carrying several hundred dollars cash all the time ("Just incase"), and others who feel uncomfortable with cash of any decent amount. Cash is very handy if you are paying for something that you want to remain untraceable.

(Side note on this point: Some time ago, my brother and I were driving with our friend who was borrowing his stepfather's car. This friend's stepfather has a lot of money, and the borrowed car was a loaded Lexus, if memory serves. We go to McDonalds and the friend opens the glove compartment to reveal cash. A lot of cash. Stacks of hundreds. We estimated that there had to be several thousand dollars in there. My brother and I went nuts asking the friend about the money. "I don't know, guys, he just likes to have a lot of cash on him." I have no idea why, but it certainly seems shady for a guy to have several thousand dollars in cash on him, doesn't it? If there's anything legal that one would be buying for that much cash, wouldn't one be able to charge it?)


Finally, this is more about the economy than about cash per se, but the declining dollar has led some players to sign in Europe when they have the option to play in the NBA because it makes better economic sense! Wow.