lowquality.net

As far away as Boston and the time I spent there feels from where I am now, the neighborhood where I grew up that is only a few miles down the road feels even further away. I was talking with Joe last night about how we grew up in the boonies and didn’t even realize it until we were much older. I have only recently realized how far I was from everything out there, I was just more used to driving! Truthfully, Ocean View is about as far from Norfolk as you can be while still living there and aside from tales about streetcars and rollercoasters weaved by the adults we knew that grew up there and the telling of an occasional, funny, “I saw a transvestite hooker at 7-11″ story, there wasn’t much going on in OV. Actually, the name of the borrough is a misnomer as you can’t even see the ocean from Ocean View, it’s just another stretch of the Chesapeake Bay and, as such, there’s no waves and no one surfs there. Just a beach for fat people.

In recent years a lot of developers have moved in and made luxury neighborhoods where previously no one could imagine there being luxury anythings and now there’s a lot of rich kids living out there. This is hilarious to me, because growing up my family always got glassy stares from people when we said we lived in Ocean View because it had this strange reputation. For people in the rest of Norfolk, Ocean View was like this wasteland of murder and drugs. Honestly, it was never that interesting. There was about as much crime as any other part of Norfolk (or Virginia Beach for that matter). Granted there were (and are) certain places you wouldn’t want to be at night but that is not unlike Ghent or Lafayette, which are probably worse. Well now these suburban kids move out there with their parents and they wear “OV” like a badge of honor because it’s this new up-scale development but it also has this ghetto-chic to it and they posture this thug image like they see the scary black people doing in the rap videos on MTV, but in reality, they’re just living in a boring ass part of the city no one goes to with a bunch of rednecks.

My favorite bumper sticker is “OV, Before it was cool.” Don’t get me wrong, I still feel like Ocean View is home when I drive around out there, I even find myself missing it occasionally, but don’t think I ever thought it was cool. It’s not cool. If you are a 14 year-old kid it’s freaking boring. You don’t have anything nearby to do and in order to get anywhere you need someone with access to a car. Kids smoke a lot of weed in Ocean View and I don’t mean casual teenage experimentation, I’d say they smoke more than average and to the point of excessiveness. It seems to be a similar situation as the people I’ve known from Great Bridge (another suburban development in Chesapeake, VA that boomed in the 90’s) in that boredom is what drives kids to start recreational drug use (and it seems like there’s harder drug use in Great Bridge). This is just based on the experiences I had growing up and the people I’ve known in my life.

So even with all of the fancy new “hot spots” there is not much over there that interests me enough to go hang out. Ocean View is well on it’s way to becoming one gigantic Shore Drive where sad, wealthy, forty-somethings relive their glory days, get drunk and grind on each other and then get pancakes at Mick’s (before you say anything, Drew, I am not dissing Mick’s). I don’t want it to end up this way, but I don’t see any alternate track. This whole city is changing before my very eyes, and I don’t know that it’s for the better. I see things getting more expensive and I see a lot of fancy new million-dollar condos going in places I would never rent a studio apartment in (re: across from Rally’s on Montecello Ave). With these “developments” a lot of new people are moving into old neighborhoods that they would have turned their nose up at ten years ago and crowding out the locals who’ve spent their whole lives loving the community they were a part of.