Status Updates From A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll...

Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship—I think a Carnival or Crystal ship—a suicide.

it’s supposed to be produced in you, this feeling: a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb “to pamper.”

All of the Megalines offer the same basic product. This product is not a service or a set of services. It’s not even so much a good time... It’s more like a feeling. But it’s also still a bona fide product—

The crewto-passenger ratio was 1.2 to 2. It was a Luxury Cruise

The ship was so clean and so white it looked boiled.

The food was superb, the service impeccable, the shore excursions and shipboard activities organized for maximal stimulation down to the tiniest detail.

Petra, she of the dimples and broad candid brow, who always wore a nurse’s starched and rustling whites and smelled of the cedary Norwegian disinfectant she swabbed bathrooms down with, and who cleaned my cabin within a cm of its life at least ten times a day but could never be caught in the actual act of cleaning—a figure of magical and abiding charm, and well worth a postcard all her own

—i.e. I have seen nearly naked a lot of people I would prefer not to have seen nearly naked. I have felt as bleak as I’ve felt since puberty, and have filled almost three Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.
(interesting to note that the skin is what is really being watched when one commodifies themselves to become more suitable to be viewed as if there were no viewing occurring)

I have, in dark moods, viewed and logged every type of erythema, keratinosis, pre-melanomic lesion, liver spot, eczema, wart, papular cyst, potbelly, femoral cellulite, varicosity, collagen and silicone enhancement, bad tint, hair transplants that have not taken

I have now heard—and am powerless to describe—reggae elevator music.

I have bitten my lip and declined Jamaican pot from an actual Jamaican.

Is thisenough? At the time it didn’t seem like enough.

have heard upscale adult U.S. citizens ask the GuestRelations Desk whether snorkeling necessitates getting wet, whether the skeetshootingwill be held outside, whether the crew sleeps on board, and what time the Midnight Buffetis.

I have seen professional blackjackdealers so lovely they make you want to run over to their table and spend every last nickelyou’ve got playing blackjack.
(Clive Owen in Croupier)

I have pointed rhythmically at the ceiling to the 2:4 beat of the exact samedisco music I hated pointing at the ceiling to in 1977

hey are sort of disingenuous, I believe, thesemagazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go,plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen.

But this time there’s this new feeling of pressure: total expenses for the State Fair were $27 excluding games of chance. This time Harper’s has shelled out over 3K U.S. before seeing pithy sensuous description one.

A certain swanky East-Coast magazine approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essayish thing. So now I get offered this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of direction or angle.