Makeup For The Silence

All Time Low - The Beach

I didn’t really grew up with the beach.  I never spent much time there as a kid, other than occasional day trips during the years I lived in CT, and we certainly never spent a vacation down the shore or rented a beach house or any of that.  There’s a whole beach culture in places like Ocean City, MD (where I am right now, on a vacation with friends) that is kind of foreign to me.  I say kind of, because in a way it’s something I’m totally familiar with — from tv shows and movies and especially from pop songs — but at the same time I’ve never actually experienced it, never knew how much of what I’d seen and heard was real and how much was embellishment.  I was never a fan of the sand or the ocean, so it was never something I really explored.  But it’s pretty clear now that it’s real, there’s something special about these places to the people that come back and back again.  I want to come back too, just to see more, sink my teeth into it, figure out a place that’s familiar on it’s face but with some seriously alien undercurrents.

(It’s also, incidentally, one of the whitest places I’ve been in a long while.  Is the shore a “white people thing”?  Are there racial issues to all this that I was totally unaware of?)

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It also happens to be Senior Week here in Ocean City this week we’ve been here, and it’s been a blast seeing my friends’ reactions to the kids. My friends from back home are in a really different place in their lives than I am, the married-and-talking-houses-and-kids place that barely even exists in NYC, at least not in the NYC that I know. (That said, the kids at the Shore aren’t anything like most NYC kids either, it’s a pretty strictly suburban scene). And they’re a good 10-15 years removed from their high school days. It’s funny, what seems shocking (like, say, a “DTF” or “Come At Me Bro” tee), or even just surprising or unusual, to them.

To be honest, I don’t even notice that stuff anymore; there’s nothing I see here that doesn’t look positively normal to me.  It looks like the crowd at 90% of the shows I go to.  Hell, it looks like a lot of my friends! (And for that matter, I even have a couple friends who ARE just-graduated seniors like all the kids here!)  So it’s funny to see how (admittedly) disconnected they are from what’s happening in youth culture.  I suppose that sort of thing is inevitable as you get older; things change, and you don’t even see it until it’s happened.  I spend a lot of time looking that way; I’m probably missing things changing off in the other direction.  

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Everyone I see walking around here looks like a little Gaskarth or Barakat.  It’s clear that Maryland’s pop-punk superheroes’ (and favorite beach rats’) roots run deep!