2011’s Hurricane Irene was really bad. But then came Hurricane Sandy. I documented much of it on here, when I could, which was a problem because the power was knocked out for a week. What I went through was a minor inconvenience compared to the level of devastation experienced in many New York neighborhoods, as well as New Jersey in general. At time time, I lived on a cliff (basically), and this saved my ass in many ways. People at the bottom of the cliff in, say, Hoboken (and elsewhere) were completely submerged. People trapped on the second floor. Really bad. I was working at Martha Stewart at the time and her building was on the West Side Highway – sea level, basically – and there was water up to the second floor. I was out of work for weeks. There was gas rationing. Trees down everywhere. I was also kind of seeing someone – early stages – had been going on for most of the summer – and things had taken a downturn. I could feel it coming. He was SO INTO me and suddenly … he wasn’t. I was not at all well. 2012 was a great year, though: we had the reading of my script at the Vineyard Theatre, I was “courted” by a big-time agent (literally: they took me out for a fancy lunch and pitched themselves to me), there was this guy who was all over me (until he wasn’t), and etc. Sandy was symbolic of so much coming to an end. After Sandy I started losing control. I finally cracked up to such a spectacular degree in early 2013 that it led to my long-overdue mental illness diagnosis. Sandy is all mixed up in all of these other events. I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. I grew up in Rhode Island. But Hurricane Sandy was a horse of an entirely different color.
A couple weeks after the hurricane, I drove to “my” beach on the Jersey Shore. I needed to see it. To be with it in its trauma. I had heard about what happened. I knew how bad it was going to be. I needed to see it. A mile in from the shoreline, there was beach sand piled up in people’s yards, driven there by the winds. The boardwalk was crumpled like matchsticks. The little “welcome” house, where you buy your pass for the day to get on the beach, was miraculously intact, even though it had been tossed across the street.
I felt like everything was ending. Nothing can last. Everything is bad. There’s nothing on this earth but a perpetual state of mourning. This factored into my death-haunted mindset at the time, and my sense that the guy I was seeing was on his way to ghosting me. Which … I was right. That’s what he did. He just vanished. I wasn’t wrong about any of it.
New Jersey rebuilt the boardwalk. Jersey Strong.
