6.23

a supposedly fun thing i'll likely do again

getting away from pretty much being away from it all

it's been a while since i’ve gone on a trip with my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis, or any trip at all for that matter. despite having few interests in common, our trips together somehow always end up going great, except for that one weird spontaneous road trip to phoenix. i've mentioned this before but it’s good to have a more “normie” friend to stay grounded, and he did not disappoint by insisting that we go on a caribbean cruise, the excuse being that it's the annual "corporate retreat" for our christmas light company (which for financial and legal purposes is not actually a company). i was a little skeptical of the idea, dragging my feet with planning enough that we ended up rescheduling at least once, but in the end i succumbed to the pressure and reluctantly signed on for a 4-day bahamas cruise on carnival cruise line leaving from miami, the cheapest available option.

i also further offset the cost by deploying my substantial stash of alaska air miles to book the flight, which i was surprised to discover was SIX hours longthe worst part of ANY transcontinental flight going west-to-east though is that there's no way to avoid at least a little sleep deprivation, the flights either leave really early in the morning to account for the time change that adds three hours, or they're overnight red-eye flights that aren't long enough to get more than three hours of sleep on at best.. i guess i've just had "four hours" suck in my head as the "standard" length of a transcon flight, then again it does make sense that seattle to miami would take longer, they're in opposing corners of the country, it's probably one of the longest flights you can take within the contiguous united states. as is typical at outstations on the east coast, my flight arrived at one of the airport's smallest and most rundown terminals, though it does have the benefit of being out-of-the-way and thus pretty cozy. i was the first to arrive, so i stayed airside (i had no checked bags anyway) and tried to surprise my friends by meeting them at their arrival gate. little did i know that this would turn into an epic expedition, as their gate was at the complete opposite end of the airport, close to the furthest distance you could travel through it without having to exit and go back through security. miami international airport is sprawling, mainly because it seems to serve as the de facto airline hub for all of latin america, despite technically not being located within the region. i saw planes representing dozens of exotic airlines i've never heard of before, and even the flights on good old american airlines all seemed to be heading places like quito or san domingo. among the crowds in the airport, i barely heard a word of english, and over the PA system boarding announcements would be first given in halting accented english before swapping over to rapid-fire fluent spanish.

miami nice

technically this image is facing the town of miami beach, but whatever

we had to stay one night in miami before the cruise, so we used some chase ultimate rewards points we'd racked up buying christmas lights at home depot to book a hotel room, falling back on our cost-saving measure of cramming four guys in one room with two queen beds. when we first started doing it five years ago i thought by now we would be in a position to put that strategy to bed, but alasin that time all we've done is come up with even more cost-cutting techniques, like the "megabed" maneuver we used in new orleans. our hotel was in brickell, which appears to be miami's financial district, and is also one of america's rare walkable neighborhoods thanks to its high population density. brickell houses a large cluster of the high-rise condo buildings that contribute to miami's impressively-lengthy skyline along the edge of biscayne bay, it reminded me a bit of waikiki in honolulu but stretched out in all directions. all the high-rises in miami are located in a narrow strip by the shore of the bay even though there doesn't seem to be much of a point in being close to the water, there's no beaches or easy access points for swimming, i guess people must just like looking at the water from high above.

miami was a bright city, full of contrasting colors intensified by the sunlight: the white of the buildings, the green of the lush vegetation, the blue of the water and the sky. the people on the streets were so fashionable it was almost intimidating, women who looked like models walked tiny dogs and business guys talking on phones passed by wearing white linen suits straight out of miami vice. what stood out to me the most, though, was the cute automated people mover systemfor whatever reason florida is OBSESSED with people mover systems, there’s a little one in downtown jacksonville too, miami airport has three, and both tampa and orlando airports are basically built around them, you can’t get to any gates without riding one. running through downtown miami that you could ride around for free, like in a theme park. i wish i had more to say but we weren't in town very long, if i come out again i'll definitely try to stay in the city longer instead of jumping ship to a cruise immediately.

also, i need to mention this, portion sizes at the miami restaurants we went to were GARGANTUAN, restaurants had typical expensive big city prices but i couldn't even be mad about it because at least it felt like i was getting my money's worth. at brunch my friend ordered french toast and got the biggest piece of toast i've ever seen, the size of a shoe, and there were TWO of them stacked. admittedly this impression is based off just two restaurants, it could easily be a coincidence, but the restaurants were on opposite sides of downtown and offered pretty different menus so it might really be a miami thing.

onboard the "fun ships"

during the cruise, i decided to be a smart aleck and re-read the definitive (and perhaps sole) work in the cruiselit canon: david foster wallace'si really want to hate him now that he’s considered cringe and unfashionable, the other day i happened to mention him in connection with the cruise to a vaguely literary girl and her facial expression visibly soured the second i said his name. but then i go back and actually read some of his work again and take it all back immediately, getting down on my knees begging for forgiveness, i’m sorry for ever turning my back on you dfw famous essay a supposedly fun thing i'll never do again, a work that simultaneously created and capped off the genre, to the extent that i debated whether i should even bother writing this. in fact, if you haven't read it maybe you should just read it instead, it has aged surprisingly well after 30 years, the fundamentals of the cruise experience and industry haven't changed that much. here's all you need to bring a supposedly fun thing up to date:

as you might be able to guess from the title, dfw did not offer a glowing recommendation of the overall cruise experience in his essay. there wasn't much wrong with his cruise per se, it seems like the main issue is that he was a bit of a fish out of water at sea as a self-professed "semi-agoraphobe" cruising alone. cruising is a highly social experience, you're trapped on a boat with several thousand people after all. solo travelers are very rare, cruise room prices are based on double occupancy and almost everyone comes in a group, some get quite elaborate with it by making matching shirts for their whole party or bringing walkie-talkies so they can stay in touch across the ship. the whole cruise i don't think i was alone for no more than a couple hours, and turns out part of that time everyone else was scouring the ship looking for me.

OUR CREW:

going into the cruise my expectations were pretty low, and it wasn't entirely from having read that dfw essay a while back. cruising has a, er, “reputation”dfw mocked how cruises always advertise how "fun" they are, which carnival seems to have responded to by doubling down and making "fun" their entire brand: they call themselves "the fun ships", the ship's daily newsletter is called the "fun times", etc., and we were on the absolute cheapest cruise we could find, on presumably the fleet's smallest and shabbiest ship. i think my expectations were also shaped by my last experience on a boat, which i believe was visiting the uss midway museum in san diego, where they open up a room the size of a closet and say "this berth used to sleep twenty stinking snoring men!", then at the end you come to a room a bit bigger than your childhood bedroom where they say "this huge luxurious suite was the captain's quarters!" it actually wouldn't be my first cruise either, i'd gone on one for a family trip during elementary school, but i had been pretty young so i heavily discounted my impressions from it. basically all i remember anyway is the agonizing wait to play mariokart wii in the ship's "kid's club" (daycare), and loving the unlimited soft serve and waterslide.

perhaps in part because my expectations were so low, i ended up being pleasantly surprised by the whole experience, my ecstatic recounting upon my return was enough to convince almost everyone i know to try going on a cruise. first off, the ship was not as small or shabby as i'd expected, it was very well-maintainedi guess this might not be entirely accurate because starting on the second day, we started jokingly calling this one area the “poop deck” due to the horrific stench developing there, like a sewage pipe had burst or something. it gradually worsened and passengers started actively avoiding the area, while crew members ran around trying in vain to paper it over spraying industrial-grade cleaning chemicals and plugging in some kind of heavy-duty essential oil diffuser. on one of the last days we saw a bunch of guys in biohazardesque outfits tearing up the carpet in one area, after that it seemed to get a lot better, though a little bit of the miasma still lingered in the air there for the remainder of the cruise.
also, one lazy afternoon in my stateroom my friend was lounging on the floor between the two beds when suddenly a huge droplet of some fluid leaked from the overhead light and landed right on him. we investigated the light and it looked like it had just been a freak accident, no more water came out, but he still insisted on calling maintenance even though it wasn’t even his room. eventually a crew member came, investigated the light in the exact same manner we had (wiggling it a bunch), saw nothing come out, then told us to call back if it leaked again. for reasons that are still obscure to me, directly after that my friend decided to undertake a more thorough investigation of the light and succeeded in yanking it off the ceiling, thus unleashing a small shower of disgusting water of uncertain origin that i suppose had been collecting up there in the mysterious interior region of the ship for who knows how long. he stood rooted there slightly wet, arm elevated holding the light up to keep it from catastrophically detaching, yelling “GET A TOWEL!”, while my other friend ran into the hall to catch the departing maintenance guy. i think customer service eventually gave him a $50 credit for ruining his “favorite shirt”, though i’m not entirely convinced the stain wouldn’t have come out after a good wash cycle., albeit styled in that sort of extravagant glitzy aesthetic that's been out of fashion for a long time among tastemakers and the upper classes, primarily indulged in only by the global nouveau riche (e.g. dubai) and the lower classes who haven't gotten the message yet. the interior design theme was this vague pastiche of fin de siècle paris plus new orleans and the carnival chief designer's signature quirky designs. the walls were covered in poor-quality reproductions of impressionist paintings and the restaurants were all named after famous impressionist painters. this probably won't help clarify things for anybody but the aesthetic was almost identical to the one inside the beau rivage casino in biloxi.

then there was the food, my god, the sickening decadence, it's a taste of the post-scarcity utopia some people dream of. now that i think about it, i think WALL-E was quite clearly based off some pixar guy going on a cruise. almost all food was included in the cost of the cruise which made getting food dangerously smooth, there was no payment step to worry about and they didn't bother recording anything at all, you'd just grab and go. there was a main buffet that was completely open and you could just stroll in for a quick snack, there were windows at which you could get a pizza or a sandwich or a burger whenever you wanted, drink stations with unlimited juices or tea or coffee (soda cost extra, though). there was of course the unlimited soft serve ice cream too, which was just as good as i remembered it being from when i was kid. then there were crew members hovering around everywhere to instantly whisk away dirty dishes and clean up messes. it was a little unsettling at first how servile and deferent the service crew was, in america we tend to treat service staff as temporarily-embarrassed social peers, but on a cruise it's more like a traditional master-servant dynamic.

the craziest part is that the free food also included three-course sit down dinners every night in one of the ship's extravagant dining rooms. i thought they were mostly going to serve boring stuff, but i was surprised, they got pretty whimsical with it and served some "fancy" foods you'd never expect would come included in the price of Literally The Cheapest Cruise We Could Find, stuff like frog legs, duck, chilean sea bass (maiden name: patagonian toothfish). now, i'm not saying any of it tasted particularly amazing, for the most part it was decidedly mid, coming off like a larp catering to an extremely outdated popular perception of what fancy food looks like. if they served the exact same thing to me at a high-end restaurant on land for $20-30 a plate i'd be a little mad (and it's happened to me before, though don't get me wrong i'm happy to pay high prices if the food is actually good). but, on the ship i was delighted, because it felt like this unexpected free bonus that they way overdelivered on. i came in knowing there would be included food, however i had been under the impression that it was only going to be some shitty buffet and had already resigned myself to eating all my meals at it. so, discovering that sit down dinners were included every night was an pleasant surprise, and then on top of it they even got a little adventurous with the dishes when they could have easily played it safe.

cheapskate cruising

i think a large part of my satisfaction with the cruise came from the fact that it felt like a great deal, i got way more than my money's worth for the meager amount i put in. although we had the worst windowless interior roomon board i discovered why our corner room in particular is the cheapest of all: it's right by the elevators so you hear dinging and people passing by all night, not to mention pulses beating like the heart of the ship from the nightclub right below. there was also the random rattling in the room, i think it's just a normal cruise thing and not a maintenance issue because dfw mentioned the exact same thing in his essay. ear plugs are a must next time., for similar prices of $111 a night i've stayed in hotels on land that were significantly worse in every other way besides having more space and a window. the staterooms were kept well-maintained, cleaned daily top-to-bottom by housekeeping, and of course if they feel cramped you can spend most of the day hanging out in the ship's many public areas anyway.

but what really elevates the $111/day price to one of the Deals of All Time is that that sum also includes all the food: the buffet, the grab-and-go sandwich window, the unlimited soft serve, the three course sit-down dinners. it's such an absurdly good deal that there is simply no way they can be making money off passengers at that price, the profits have got to be coming from somewhere else. figuring out the business model isn't too hard: lure people onto a boat with low prices and turn them into a captive audience, then squeeze them dry at sea aggressively selling bonuses and add-ons. for the professional cheapskate, this turns the cruise into a fun PvE game where you're constantly trying to dodge attempts to extract extra money from you, with the goal being to remain as close as possible to the original price you paid for the cruise when they deliver a printout with your score final bill to your room on the last nightfor those curious, the only additional charge i incurred was the $50 gratuity for the service staff, you can get it removed by asking customer service which my friends did, but i chose not to because i read in the dfw essay that the majority of the pay for the cruise crew comes from that. not sure if that’s still true 30 years later but i don’t really care, they deserve it anyway. i also had a $12.50 stateroom credit from booking through costco travel, so my final total was +$37.50. here's a field guide to some of the traps i spotted during my playthrough:

i know what you're thinking: "wait, why are you ending there? you're forgetting a huge one!" don't worry, i didn't forget, it's just so important that it needs way more than just an entry in a list. i'm speaking, of course, about ALCOHOL. i mean, what is there to do on a boat for a couple days besides get drunk? at the very least, it was a huge concern for me, and this was the only part of the cruise experience i researched thoroughly in advance. on the cruise you can buy drinks normally at the bar and the prices aren't super jacked up, around the same you'd pay at the average bar on landwhich to me still feels overpriced, pretty much the ONLY bar i've ever been to that felt like it had decent prices was the "chart room", a cash-only divebar in the new orleans french quarter that had $2 draft miller high life and $7 cocktails. maybe my standards are a little unrealistic..., but a lot of passengers instead opt to purchase the "unlimited drinks package" add-on. it costs around $90 a day and everyone in your stateroom needs to purchase it for the whole cruise, so it would've close to doubled the cost of the cruise. what's lame is that it's not really unlimited, the maximum is 15 drinks per day, and the days roll over at like 7am instead of midnight. i don't think they're entirely trying to be money-grubbing dicks with the limitation, it's probably just as much a safety consideration, but having the same limit across the board sucks a bit for people like 250lbs+ dudes fresh from stuffing themselves at the buffet who can pound ten shots in a row without feeling a thing.

there is one other option, you're obviously not allowed to bring your own beer or liquor with you onboard, but for truly stupendous prices you can preorder a few beers or a bottle of liquor that will be waiting for you in your cabin when you board. how expensive are we talking? $35 for a 4-pack of coors banquet tallboys, or $150 for bottom shelf liquor that's usually less than $20 at the store. HOWEVER, there is one exception: carnival cruises allow each adult (21+) passenger to bring one (1) unopened 750ml (seven-hundred fifty milliliter) bottle of wine not exceeding 15% ABV onboard in their carry-on baggage. so, right before we went to the cruise terminal, i walked to CVS pharmacy and bought four bottles of their cheapest red wine (total: $42.76) after waiting around for about seven minutes, because apparently in miami you can't sell alcohol before 11am. then, i realized i would also need a corkscrew or something to avoid the bullshit $20 corkage fee they charge, so then we walked to a liquor storealong the way there, a lady gave us four free boxes of some kind of “all natural organic energy shot” she was promoting, saying that her bosses instructed her to get it into the hands of “gen z”. the benefits of being a fashionable youth on the street in a hip city. when we returned to the hotel room, we told the two that had stayed behind that we’d bought them for $18 a box for everyone to share and acted like they were being ungrateful when they said that was an idiotic idea. i had a bunch of them on the cruise and didn’t feel much of an effect, i think one day i feel asleep right after having one. i don’t even remember what they were called, i’ve been a bad shill. and i bought one for $5 (5 days later, it was confiscated by TSA at the MIA south terminal checkpoint).

back at the hotel, i distributed one wine bottle to each member of our crew to carry on board, and that was that. i got pretty lucky because it turns out nobody else wanted to drink any wine, they all thought it was gross, so i had all four bottles to myself for a ration of one per day and ended up not spending a dime on drinks. i guess i shouldn'tve been to surprised this happened since my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis is the pickiest eater i've ever met, as far as i know the only alcohol he can stand is smirnoff ice. that doesn't stop him from trying to order random fruity cocktails everywhere we go, most of which he rejects and hands off to me to finish. unfortunately, the problem with this scheme is that it's only replicable if i go again with the exact same group, not sure i know anyone else totally unwilling to touch wine besides this one muslim dude. however, now that i've gone through the cruise boarding process once, i know they don't check the wine bottles for alcohol percentage or tampering too closely, i think you could easily smuggle in fortified wine or repackage liquor in a wine bottle.

cruise confidential


wait, the blurb on the cover was written by the author of WHAT?much like dfw in his essay, i found myself very curious about the inner workings of the cruise ship. unfortunately, dfw was limited in his ability to sate his curiosity (and mine), he wasn't able to get much access because he was socially offputting and the cruise crew were guarded, on the lookout for investigative reporters out to expose the industry's dirty secrets. but doing some research, i discovered there's a behind-the-scenes confessional memoir (i'm a sucker for this genre) called "cruise confidential", written by a guy who worked on the EXACT SAME SHIP we were on, the carnival conquest, albeit way back during its glory days twenty years ago when it was the newest and shiniest ship in the fleet (and to some extent the world).

the author brian david bruns is a somewhat eccentric guy in his late twenties who on the rebound from a divorce and the failure of his dot com startup falls in love with a transylvanian girl that works on cruise ships. he's so crazy about her that he gets a job working on one too, making waves onboard because americans NEVER work on cruise ships. the cruise lines do their best to avoid hiring them because they never last more than a week in the sweatshop-like conditions onboard, and in order to get hired brian basically has to beg a carnival executive to give him a chance. a typical cruise contract is eight months working an average of 14 hours per day for far below minimum wagebrian said carnival paid waiters only $60 a month back then, it's not as terrible as it sounds though because the vast majority of their pay actually comes from automatic gratuities charged to passengers at the end of a cruise, it's only worth it for people who live places where the typical working conditions are so bad that it makes that the better option. the challenge of it only seems to spur brian on as if he's got something to prove, and he ends up becoming the first american in carnival's 30-year history to finish a full eight month contract as a cruise waiter, and i wouldn't be surprised if he's still the only one almost twenty years later.

working conditions aside, what do crew members get up to behind the scenes? apparently it's a "work hard, play hard" situation, crew members spend their meager free time doing the same sorts of things passengers do: partying hard, drinking a ton, having lots of sex. many crew members are young and in peak physical condition, more than happy to sacrifice their limited sleep time to party. they also really let loose because they're a long way from home. carnival is known as the "party" cruise line and the crew doesn't get left out, there are at least two official crew parties per month, temporarily closing down parts of the ship to host them. for the rest of the month, there's the crew bar below deck in the staff section of the ship, it doesn't look like much compared but offers drinks at prices so low that if passengers saw them they'd faint. there's even a secret crew hot tub at the prow of the ship, a space that would normally go unused because maritime regulations prohibit lighting it sufficiently for passenger use. also, the crew mess is a buffet that serves pretty much the same food as the buffet for passengers, except they have some extra options the crew would appreciate like curries and stir-fries, i feel a little bit less guilty about indulging in the decadence above deck knowing that they're aren't also forcing the staff to eat some sort of miserable slop after spending all day dishing out fancy food.

anyways, those are pretty much all the cruise "secrets" i found in "cruise confidential", because 90% of the book is just a recounting of brian's craziest crew party stories, which aren't all that exceptional except for the fact that they happen to take place below deck on a cruise ship. it's basically like if tucker max (anybody remember this guy?) had worked on a cruise, the book even takes place during the noughties vulgarwave era max was active. it's also one of THE horniest books i've read in a while (and if you knew some of the stuff i've read lately, that's saying something), brian is like the lecherous protagonist of some harem ecchi anime who's constantly getting into risqué situations but somehow nothing ever actually happens, in this case because brian is trying to stay loyal to his romanian girlfriend. he spends most of the book fending off advances from a nonstop parade of what he always describes as THE most beautiful and stunning [insert exotic ethnicity] girls. supposedly he never lapses a single time, however i have to admit i don't entirely believe him, there's simply no way somebody THIS horny put into all those situations with women as hot as he claims could have possibly resisted.

the big ongoing conflict of the book besides "can brian maintain his chastity amidst extreme temptation" is whether or not brian finally gets the promotion to maitre d' he's been promised after he finishes a tour of duty in the trenches as a lowly waiter. originally he was only supposed to be doing a brief "training" rotation as a waiter before being promoted to a management role more befitting his status, however his evil and incompetent superiors keep screwing him over, doing things like promoting the drunken and extremely inexperienced (but handsome) south african bartender instead of him. maybe there was a genuinely a conspiracy against him, stemming from a kind of "who does this outspoken american think he is" complex, but i dunno, these "i'm being persecuted for no reason" tales always reek strongly to me of "there's something i'm either not aware of or not telling you that completely justifies their actions". all i'm saying is that brian does seem to have a bit of an... attitude in some of the dialogues with bosses he reproduces in the book. in the end, he jumps ship to work for, get this, the company that does the cruise ship art auctions...

shore excursion: nassau's famous bfp restaurant

incidentally, you can see our ship docked in the nassau cruiseport on google maps, it's the bottom onein accordance with the Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886, our cruise had to stop at one foreign port before returning to miami, in this case the capital of the bahamas, nassau. nassau's premier tourist attraction is the gargantuan atlantis resort, a casino-restaurants-shopping-dining-waterpark-hotel agglomeration on a las vegan scale. they also have a chihuly, if you know what that is. in one of those real-life “well that’s a little bit on the nose, isn’t it” moments, it’s located on a whole separate island named “paradise island” that also houses a bunch of other expensive luxury developments (condos, golf courses, etc.) and is connected to nassau only by two spindly bridges. we considered buying a daypass to its lavish waterpark, which has that famous slide going down the side of a mayan pyramid and into a glass tube through a shark tank that has haunted my dreams ever since i saw it in an ad on the disney channel as a kid, but the price was a whopping $240 per person, over half the cost of the cruise and around the same price as a disneyland one-day parkhopper ticket.

there were no other shore excursions we might be into on offerfor example, a “sam bankman-fried in the bahamas” tour, “COME SEE THE RUINS OF THE FORMER FTX HEADQUARTERS! CARESS THE TUNGSTEN CUBE! SEE THE INFAMOUS LUXURY CONDO THAT HOUSED THE DRUG-FUELED POLYCULE!”, so we just got off the boat to bum around for a while in downtown nassau right by the cruise port. conclusion: nassau sucks, not really in any particularly exceptional way, just the same way that every place where hordes of tourists are routinely discharged en masse suck. once you get beyond the big gates of the carefully-curated mall that serves as the entrance to the cruise port (in the same way that some airports funnel everyone through duty free stores), it turns into a hustler free-for-all. there's guys shouting at you trying to sell off-brand discount shore excursions, rentals of every sort of vehicle, drugs, etc. because i have long hair, there were a bunch of these ladies sitting around who'd always call out "hey buddy, braid your hair?", annoying enough that i was just about ready to shave it all off and go bald right there. every single storefront in the area is a souvenir store selling the exact same products: authentic local made-in-china t-shirts and knick-knacksinstead of buying souvenirs to "remember trips", i write indulgent blog posts instead, a "local delicacy" called rum cake, cuban cigars and rum.

we got a bit of respite popping into starbucks, where the door was defended by a security guard who seemed to be there primarily to keep hustlers from disturbing cruisers who stepped off the boat to get their frappe fix. we made a token purchase so that mustassy could use the internet to book his flight home (don't ask), then went back outside to wander around some more. we finally acquired a vague goal when my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis declared he was hungry, mostly his fault because he rushed us off the boat with only like five minutes for breakfast so that we could spend as much time as possible in nassau. i was still doing fine on food because in that limited time i'd still managed to wolf down four mid eggs bennies from the breakfast buffet before we left, so i let him take the lead and guide us towards "junkanoo beach", where he said there were supposed to be a bunch of good restaurants.

when we finally reached junkanoo beach (which wasn't even that far away honestly), it was immediately clearly that there were not really any restaurants around. making light of the situation, i pointed ahead at nothing in particular and said "hey look, it's the bfp restaurant!" bfp, i explained, stood for "burger, french fries, pizza", the holy trinity of my friend/business partner/former minecraft arch-nemesis' extraordinarily picky diet (he won't even eat tendies), the joke being that the bfp restaurant would be the ideal dining establishment for him. possibly under the effects of mild heatstroke from the oppressive humidity, i was in an odd state of mind and kept repeating "bfp" while laughing hysterically, which made him angry because he thought i was making fun of him even though "bfp" had already long since transcended its original meaning and become an abstract concept, but him getting angry only made it funnier and made me laugh harder which made him angrier, and so we fed off each other and spiralled until i found myself in a laughing fit that lasted almost an hour, i only had to think the letters "bfp" and it would trigger another attack of laughter. meanwhile, my friend stopped talking to me, eyewitnesses at the scene reported that he was "totally crashing out". relations were finally normalized after we cooled off for a bit by sneaking into the margaritaville resort lobby (with AC) and attached waterpark.

from the secret files of the poontang patrol

a recurring gag during trips with my former minecraft-archnemesis/business partner/friend are his chronically-unsuccessful attempts to pick up girls, whether it’s leaving his phone number on receipts at restaurants with cute waitresses, or dragging everyone to some lame bar or club and then treating girls there like museum exhibits (appreciate from afar, but don’t interact in any way), or most often, spending his free time swiping on tinder. a couple times he did get some nibbles on the line and asked me to vacate our hotel room and hang out in the hot tub for a bit, but he'd always text me i could come back after ten minutes because the girls inevitably flaked.

since he's gotten a girlfriend recently he's laid off trying to get laid on trips, but due to that long and sordid history i initially didn’t bat much of an eye when he immediately downloaded tinder and revealed a full box of condoms in his suitcase upon arriving at our miami hotel room. no need to worry, though, he had no plans for any sort of “what happens at sea stays at sea” situation, at dinner i found out that he and his girlfriend had recently broken up. as a result he was down BAD, the worst any of us had ever seen, especially surprising considering that HE had been the one to break up with her, she was desperate to get him back and had even sent him a gigantic essay to try and convince him (though it was quite clearly AI-generated).

in any case, he spent a lot of time onboard the cruise prowling around leering at girls, doing crazy things like cold messaging random people using the carnival appthe app had an onboard messaging feature you could pay $5 for, the intention presumably to help families/friends stay in contact on a large ship with no cell service, but he discovered that there was absolutely nothing stopping you from messaging anybody onboard who’d paid for it. many people were confused by the random messages from a stranger and thought he was a carnival staff member checking in with them., he even stayed up late and went on brave solo expeditions into the nightclub. the rest of us watched this behavior from a distance and commented on it with detached amusement, i said he was the “poontang patrol”, repeating it to an obnoxious extent because that word is fun to say. we also teased him by saying “so when are you gonna go up and actually talk to a girl for once”, positive it would never happen based on our prior experiences going to bars and clubs with him.

to our collective astonishment, we were completely wrong. on the third night of the cruise after an eighties dance party on the lido deck, he disappeared for a few minutes and then reappeared with a group of three girls in tow, one of them a cute blonde that’s exactly his type. what was even more amazing was that it was an incredible find, they were some of the only other people in our age group on the cruise, new grads from georgia on a celebratory cruisethen again, the fact that they were the only others our age may have actually made things easier, as apparently they had spotted us around the cruise and had been curious about us beforehand. though there’s presumably several thousand passengers on board, among the faceless masses you eventually start recognizing a handful of characters you seem to run into improbably often, “oh look it’s that guy again”, there's some kind of mysterious magnetism drawing you together even if you never interact with them. one such character was “gamblin’ gary”, we never found out his real name but we kept encountering him around and chatted with him a bit, mostly in the casino, where he was always either up or down dizzying sums of money, more than we’d each paid for the cruise. at one point he told us he'd gambled so much carnival comped him an entire cruise, at another point he sat down at a slot machine next to us and discovered his account had been locked for unspecified reasons.. my friend executed a masterful maneuver where he introduced them all to us before taking the cute blonde away to the bar, leaving us to distract her two homelier companions. the three of us ended up hitting it off with them pretty well, and before long we reabsorbed my friend and his date from the bar to head down to the comedy club.

by this point i had already downed my entire wine ration for the night and had a little audience (including girls!), so i was on an absolute heater riffing off the comedian’s bits standing way in the back and making everyone laugh, it’s lucky for him i wasn’t anywhere close to the heckling range in the front rows. it was already fairly clear to me that none of the girls were that interested in mecan't say i blame them because i looked like a mess, i'd completely destroyed my hair using some mystery shampoo at the miami hotel, got a horrible sunburn on my face because i forgot to put on sunscreen there, and i had deep bags under my eyes from lack of sleep. i wasn't that broken up about it because the lack of interest was mutualaudience heckler:
"COPE!", the odds of finding the kind of girls i’m into on a carnival cruise are astronomically low, why do i keep doing these things? it's good practice i guess and i think it went alright... reports were that they said i was, uhhhh, “one of a kind” or “unique”, which kind of sounds like they're trying to say “weird” politely. NB: there are also things girls can say about you that sound bad but are actually good, e.g. if she says you’re “annoying”, plus one of us would get left out no matter what since there were three of them and four of us, so i decided to withdraw and shift into wingman mode. it looked like the rest of the boys still had a good chance, one of the girls even BOUGHT clay a drink, i have never heard of that happening in history. after the comedy show ended, we lingered around aimlessly before i proposed something that was later hailed was "salvaging the entire night": i decided to heroically sacrifice my final bottle of wine (and thus forgoing my final night's wine ration) by inviting the girls over to our stateroom to have some. they readily agreed, and even brought along a bottle of their own champagne.

the seven of us basically had a miniature party in our cramped stateroom, i got exceedingly drunk and provided most of the entertainment for the night, regaling everyone with the thrilling tale of the dj house party, including the dramatic epilogue exclusive to live recitals. the party lasted until 2:30 am, when a burly security goon showed up at the door and kicked everyone out, apparently the boomers across the hall had made a noise complaint, something that hadn't even occurred to me might happen on carnival, the "party" cruise line.

the next day in nassau, lightning struck the same place again. after crashing the margaritaville resort water park, we went to senor frog’s, a dubious south-of-the-border chain of tourist trap restaurants that tend to spring up in warm climates on land fertilized by plenty of foot traffic from idiot tourists, like the immediate vicinity of the nassau cruise terminal. everything there was monstrously overpriced, plus i was not about to pay for food when as much free food as i could want was waiting for me back on the cruise ship within sight, so instead i ordered a margarita that cost roughly the same amount as a meal. my former minecraft-archnemesis/business partner/friend's eyes were roaming as always, and it wasn’t long before he said “wow, check out that hottie in the blue dress at the bar”. we turned to look and by the time we turned back he was already gone. we turned back towards the bar and there he was as if he'd teleported, casually chatting them up. once again, everyone was impressed, "look at our boy go", "none of this would have been possible if we hadn't bullied him into actually approaching girls". he followed that up by coming in second in a restaurant-wide scavenger hunt competition (it’s that kind of establishment), with the girls cheering him onthe second place prize was a free drink in a souvenir cup, i honestly think it may have been better than the first place prize, a t-shirt (and both probably cost around the same amount). then he brought them over to our table and introduced us to them, when they asked what we do for work i promptly answered "we're restaurateurs planning to open a new establishment called the 'bfp restaurant'", to which he reacted with an exasperated facepalm but otherwise managed to stay composed. we hung around with the girls for the next hour wandering around random shops in nassau before we had to board the ship again.

the final night of the cruise, the boys dispersed, off on dates with the respective girls they had fallen in with. the only ones left out were me and my former minecraft-archnemesis/business partner/friend, who had been the boldest of all and perhaps deserved it the most, but had ultimately shot too high and failed to lock things down with the blonde girl. instead, we went on our own date up in a quiet corner of the top deck, where we got out the notebook and drew up plans for our new business venture. once that was settled, he got up and conducted a thorough sweep of the whole ship trying to find the boys and get a status update, for lack of anything better to do i followed him a few steps behind, barely keeping up with his frenetic pace in my blistered feet and kirkland signature slides.

we finally caught up with them laying on lounge chairs for movie night on the lido deck and sat down alongside. but by that point it was clear that hadn't been any need of additional wingmanning for a long time, so after a bit i quietly withdrew to give them some privacy. i strolled over to the smoking deck and had a cigarette, gazing wistfully out at the ocean's dark lonely expanse...

...well, that had been my intention at least. instead, i discovered that the crappy lighter i brought was extraordinarily weak and couldn't withstand even the light breeze on deck, and i rubbed my thumb raw trying to get a strong enough flame to light the cigarette. it didn't work at all so i stepped indoors briefly, lit the cigarette inside良い子はマネしないで！, then went back outside to smoke it. also, the ocean was neither dark nor particularly lonely, at any given time the lights from at least three other cruise ships were visible nearby and we probably passed by ten or fifteen other cruise ships total, as though we were cruising the superhighway of the seas...