The Marquis’Intimate Diary

WEDNESDAY, 9 AUGUST, 2000, REHOBOTH BEACH, DELAWARE
Violent place, this state, this land, this “Delaware.”

Despite this little beach community in southern DE resembling something along the lines of Santa Cruz in California (“The Lost Boys” setting) complete with nausiatingly cutsey-wootsie shop names like…

  • The Purple Parrot
  • Bad Hair Day?
  • “Trinket’s” (with quotes and erroneous apostrophe inclus.)
  • Catcher’s
  • The Mustard Seed (a bible shop — the ‘t’ of ‘Mustard’ being a cross.)
  • Happy Harry’s Discount Drugs
  • Crab Barn
  • Comtemporary Stuff

… and despite the preposterous number of families with their screaming spawn running loose and despite the profligation of gay nightclubs from which throbs the ubiquitous and totally uninspired “Dance, Dance, Faggit, Faggit!” beat of … I guess it’s called “music”? — and despite candy shops, Hallmark shops, clean streets, tic-tac “housing units” and a notable lack of anything but white people, this place is still violent.

But it’s an intriguing violence because it’s good ole Mama Nature who takes her subtle revenge against such cutsey-wootsiness.

Dragonfly The Marquis has been trying to languish pulchritudinously on the beach in his ultra-über-skimpy leopard print bathing utensil (send $5 for the photo you depraved pervs) while trying to erase his tan lines, and that bitch Mama Nature has been sending her barrage of asentient soldiers upon him.

Jellyfish a foot in diametre that squoosh their way past you as you splish about in the waves. Little crablets that hide under the sand begging to be stepped upon then pinching with surprising force when you oblige them. Biting horseflies that remove small patches of skin from one's anatomy. And innocuous yet still-really-creepy-lookin’ dragonflies that just … are.

If life were literature, one could have fortold the fury and psychosis of Rehoboth Beach merely by reading the foreshadowing signs on the 100 mile drive from Philadelphia. Here are some exits off the highway on your merry way to Rehoboth …

  1. Slaughter Beach
  2. Killen Pond
  3. Slaughter Neck
  4. Broadkill Beach
  5. Henlopen Acres

Okay, the last isn’t too ominous but it’s one of those words that once it’s out of your mouth, it’s stuck in your head for the next week. I want to use it in every sentence.

SOME PERSON: Hey Marquis, wassup? Where ya goin’?
MARQUIS: Henlopen Acres.
SOME PERSON: Oh yah? Where’s that?
MARQUIS: Henlopen Acres.
SOME PERSON: Why are there bits of flesh missing from your body?
MARQUIS: Henlopen Acres.
SOME PERSON: Wow. That didn’t make much sense.
MARQUIS: Henlopen Acres.
SOME PERSON: Okay, I go away now.
 Try it and see if you don’t get hooked.

Anyway, I’m pleased about the preying animal life and poisonous fauna because, although aggravating to me personally, it gives me great joy to see small children stung, bitten, poisoned and drowned.

Okay, not really.

They’re so noisy when it happens, after all.