As God Is My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly

Only in Staten Island, friends. Only in Staten Island. If you don't understand what bearing the title of this post has to the linked article just google it. You'll figure it out.

Speaking of fish, the Mrs and I were having one of our after-dinner walks out on the boardwalk the other night and saw someone reel in a shark that was roughly a foot and a half long. Guess that's still too small for good eating because they guy didn't keep it. It's an interesting little Island sub-culture we've discovered down there in the last few weeks. The old Italian guys at the bocce courts, the Russian families out as a unit walking their almost invariably very large dogs, the largely Hispanic but partly pan-European fishing pier denizens, people of all ethnic backgrounds running with their kids on the sand...my old home borough is getting more interesting all the time.

Sadly the weather will only favor this activity for another month or two at the outside and we're wracking our brains as to where we can go and wander around and drink in this rich stew of humanity when it's cold. I thought about going to the mall, but mall walking seems too senior-citizen-ish and there's too much commercial stress and distraction for my taste.

I'm really enjoying the walks and I'm glad for all the work that was done at the beach at the turn of the 21st century. I remember what those areas used to be like: dangerous, decrepit slabs of wood next to broken-glass filled parking lots where teenagers, early 20 somethings and other upstanding citizens would gather after sundown to drink and whatever in the great outdoors. Of course, I was occasionally among those upstanding citizens and had a few adventures myself but that's another post. I look around at the other paunchy middle-aged men walking along today and wonder how many of them were among us Bud Nip connoisseurs 20 years ago or more.

The other thing that occurs to me is how much like stressed animals so many of us who walk too and fro on the boardwalk are. Repetitive behavior is a sign of stress in animals kept in captivity deprived from their natural environment. I wonder how many boardwalk strollers are exhibiting the same thing. We're trapped in small rooms or cubicles under fluorescent lighting for the overwhelming majority of the daylight hours and so when we're free we need to release the stress of confinement by going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth in the evening air.

Fortunately we're a bit more advanced than fish in a tank. Near as I can tell nobody at the beach has eaten anyone else yet. Though there was a large bonfire a few hundred yards off the end of the boardwalk the other night. One of the legends of barbecue is that the "low and slow" method was developed by cannibals. I am a, let's just say, a pretty well-marbled individual. I better watch my back. And my shoulders. And my ribs.

Mmmmmm.....ribs.