Work.Retire.Die.

What the heck is up loyal WRDies?? My deepest condolences for the lack of top flight content the past 2 weeks. You’ve been rudderless, lost at sea without my guidance and thoughtful prose to get you through your sad pathetic lives. If I were the type to make excuses, I would point to the fact that I went on a complete bender during the week of 4th of July from which I am just now recovering, and then was swamped with work at my real job for a week straight (it pays my bills.)

But excuses are for cowards. So I’ll do what I normally do when I fight with a girlfriend –  apologize profusely even though I don’t really mean it and try to make amends. I’m sorry, I love you, and most importantly, I’m back.

I come to you hat in hand with a tale from this past weekend that will blow your mind and make you love me again. It starts, like all good stories, at the Jersey Shore.

Some quick background – I’m doing a share house this summer down in Manasquan, NJ. Every weekend there’s about 15-20 people in the house and I generally know about half of them coming into the weekend – the rest are friends of friends. On Friday, I made the bold choice of returning for another weekend after spending 5 straight days at the house during the week of 4th of July. And boy am I glad I did.

Timeline of Events:

Friday afternoon: 

Get out of work early and take the train down with 4 other friends. We get to the house at around 4 o’clock, expecting to be the first people at the house. Front door is locked, so I go get the key, because I am a leader and a great guy. As I’m walking around the side, we see a teenage boy walk down the driveway. Didn’t think much of it – the driveway is shared with another house and our backyard backs up into another couple of houses.

When I go around back, the door is wide open, so I walk in. It immediately reeks of weed. “Cops” is on TV, there’s a pint of ice cream open and a bong and a butane torch on the table. For those who don’t know, this is how you smoke “dabs” or “wax,” which is basically pure weed. It’s some gnarly shit. See below

Pretty weird, but at this point I just figure maybe it’s one of the roommates I don’t know having a grand old afternoon. We come inside, put our bags in rooms and then start looking around the house. This is when it gets weird. We find the following items.

• a bike on the back porch
• an blender full of daquiri mix and tequila, with the lid off
• salad in the fridge
• most of our beer gone from the fridge
• more ice cream in the freezer (Reese’s Cup)
• bluetooth speakers (water proof)
• a basketball (woman’s size)
• our spare house key, broken in half

At this point, it’s pretty clear what happened – some teenager broke into our house during the week and has been living like a goddam king. Smoking dabs, mixing himself daquiris, eating ice cream and salads. Basically being the coolest kid of all time. We’ll call him Jake. He hears us at the door and bolts, mid-mixing a daquiri. Snaps the key trying to lock the door in his panic. Open and shut case.

Now, I personally think this is an awesome move. If I was a teen living down the shore, I’d be breaking into rental houses non-stop and just doing hood rat shit with my friends. However, the rest of the house wants to call the cops. I don’t want to get Jake in trouble plus I’m not a snitch, But they remind me that breaking and entering is a crime and there’s a bunch of drugs lying around. Plus, the only key we have is broken so we need to call the landlord anyways. Fine.

We call the police and they come over. Unfortunately, we basically put our fingerprints on everything so they were a little pissed but what can you do. They end up taking the bike (don’t care),  our trash can (annoying), weed paraphernelia (bummer), and the blender (absolutely crushing.) We did get to keep the speakers and basketball, which was honestly pretty sick.

Sidenote- this is the first time it truly dawned on me that I’m an adult. In high school or college, I would’ve just smoked that weed and said nothing. Now I’m that adult neighbor calling the cops on the meddling teens. A bit of a sombering note, but we move on with the weekend. Share a good laugh, talk about how Jake rules and imagine what his posse loos like. Probably something like this:

Come on guys let’s go to the beach and smoke cigarettes. Don’t parents stink??

But we move on. That is until…..

Sunday Afternoon

Most of us head back to the city at around 1 pm. My roommate sticks around to do a little extra cleaning because he’s pretty nice. For the sake of privacy, I will give him a fake name – “Jo.”

Jo finishes cleaning and goes to lock the back door when he sees 2 kids walking through the backyard. Rather than run in fear, these kids stroll up to him and tell him their “friend” left their bike there over the weekend. Has he seen it?

Now Jo doesn’t have a ton of options here. He’s not going to try to citizens arrest them and hold them at the house. Not a lawyer but pretty sure it’s frowned upon to assault minors. He’s a pretty big guy (not as big as he thinks) so he decides to go with the verbal intimidation route.

Jo- “oh yeah? He also left a bunch of other stuff in the house”

Teen 1- “yeah can we have that bong back?”

Jo- “No dude. We called the cops. They have everything”

Teen 2- “What the fuck man that was our stuff! Do you have the rest of it?”

Jo- “No!!! Get the fuck out of here and don’t come back”

Teens slink away. Jo is our hero. We worship and praise him.

That is until…

Monday

The cleaning lady comes by and guess who is there. That’s right – Jake and crew! Like any good criminal, the kids return to the scene of the crime FOR THE THIRD TIME.

She call the police and they catch these little shits. Apparently, the devious demon children had found our key, made copies, and then snapped our key to throw us off the scent. Better yet, we find out that they are 14!!

These kids…RULE. Look, it’s not my house. I don’t really care. They didn’t take anything. They’re just fucking legends. When I was 14, I spent my summer using my hand to practice making out. These kids are breaking into homes, creating fake keys, smoking dabs, watching Cops (ironic), making mixed drinks. And not being scared of Jo AT ALL, which is honestly a pretty big blow to that man’s self confidence. A cleaning lady is a better citizens arrester than him. Sad.

Maybe shore kids are just cooler than suburb kids, but still. I’m going to keep my eye on these strapping lads. They’re either going to be lifelong criminals or run Wall Street. What’s the difference right??? Burn.  

That’s all folks. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram @WorkRetireDie for some B- memes