Austin Meakim’s Reviews > A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments > Status Update

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.