[312] Screed City

[312]

01/18/2025, Friday. Clothing nook on top of a copy of The Border Trilogy on top of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on top of Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates. Crew Bunk 60624. SS Getaway, somewhere on the high seas.

We did it! I guess. Mostly. I would like to say it has been a wild ride, but mostly it has just been a long slog. It's 2a at the moment, 3a if you don't set your clocks back to New Orleans time. Which I have done, mostly because for the last five days we have been chasing an hour back and forth causing me great confusion. Instead of setting my alarm clock I have been instead setting a timer to go off ten hours later than whatever time it is we quit working. It is a dumb system, but it has worked.

Maybe it has been a wild ride? Scott got sick the day after we boarded. I feel for him greatly, but the timing could not be worse. He is the only lynchpin in this entire operation. Without him the work literally could not have been finished. I, personally, can not solder. I know nothing of electrics, especially LED shit and the only knowledge of the set I have is from what we built. Where it goes, how it goes up, what the outcome needed to be, I do not know. I mean, I can easily gold brick anywhere, especially on a cruise ship out to sea, but I was in no way prepared to take over the operation.

We brought in a third hand for this job. Call her F. She is Brazilian via Canada. Quite literally a work horse. She seemed to think she could have run operations, which, maybe she could have, but she seemed to have differing priorities from Scott that makes me think she was merely using hubris as a coping mechanism. This job was no sort of wet paper bag that we could work ourselves out of, as the bridesmaids would say. No American 111% could fix the ignorance we both shared. Even if we worked twenty three hours a day we wouldn't have succeeded. Alas, we did not need to. Scott forced his way back to health and as tortuous as it was to watch somebody sick forcing themselves to do a job that I couldn't do at peak health, it was more absurd than it was tragic. Like pre-Pandemic-style American politic. Except for once it was almost, ALMOST, necessary. I say almost because, its a fucking juke box musical on a cruise ship. A last minute set built over the holidays. The stakes, although slightly expensive, were not in any way high. In fact it probably would have been a good thing to let the operation crash and burn. A lesson might have been gleaned. Instead, like always, the assholes with the most shit on them get wiped the hardest.

I wasn't sick, but every moment free I have had since boarding this vessel I have either used to sleep or read or eat. Sleep mostly. I feel like I am in rehab. The room I am staying in is so small I can flip the light switch off with my feet and flush the toilet all while laying down on the bed. The shower head points directly at the toilet and there is a shower curtain to keep the toilet from getting wet. The ventilation is truly amazing. You can [redacted] broccoli au gratin in the [redacted] and the [redacted] moves so quickly the [redacted] never hits your [redacted].

But rehab. Or a miserable vacation. The food is not good. The hours I am not working I am worried about eating. And its not that complicated, but because the time keeps changing, the time zone, kind of, I think Mexico has a different time zone than Honduras or something? We did not go very far west. Just down and along the east coast of Central America? I don't know, I should maybe look at a map. It doesn't matter. There is no reason to change the time on a cruise like this. Not in general. Not on the ship at least. Maybe the people leaving for a shore excursion need to know that information, you know, so they can get back to the boat on time, but even then, most people that leave the ship just go to places like Senor Frogs or Margaritaville in the Tourist Ghetto, as Scott calls it. And it is truly a ghetto. And, you're right, that shirt I saw today was quite good and I should have bought it, it said:

"Its not a beer belly its a fuel tank for a sex machine."

But rehab or a miserable vacation. Aside from sleeping and reading when I am not working, my time has been spent making sure I make it to the cafetorium in time. And the food is awful and it is very rich and there is lots of it. And because you can never tell what will be worth eating, you get a sampler every time and that entirely backfires because, if you are like me, a fool that has starved too many times in life, you can't just throw the food away, so suddenly your 1,200 calorie sampler is expanding your gut to an uncomfortable level and guess what happens after that? You suddenly get hungrier, quicker and you can eat more.

At first it was great. Sleeping intensely. Working intensely. Eating intensely. It was a corrective or a balancing act, but by three days in when you realize you have eaten three full meals a day, not healthy, you know, pyramid scheme meals, but vacation-style pipeline-pigs duct taped to a plastic frisbee, it gets gross pretty damn quick. And the best and worst part was, because it is also rehab, the sweet treats start to taste pretty good. Who am I to deny myself a twist cone after lunch? Sure, I'll work it off. After dinner? Sure, I'll sleep it off. After breakfast? Sure, the coffee will cut the fat, that's how it works right?

The premiere is tomorrow night. I was asking the Technical Director if they called the showing tomorrow night a premiere. She said she didn't think so. I said, but it was, She agreed, but she said, it doesn't work that way. I asked her if anyone ever reviewed the shows. She said, Not that I know of, but there are forms you can fill out after the show to give comments. And I thought, well, that is great. That is how all reviews should be. It is very democratic. Because, really it does not matter. It hasn't mattered for a very long time, but the truth is, almost 99% of all "Art" that people see does not need to be viewed through some sort of elitist lens. And the actual Art, nobody is seeing anyway, so who the fuck cares what the Yale/Harvard Harold has to say about that? Let us talk about it amongst ourselves and keep your grubby meat hooks out of our weird pies.

I guess we did do a good job in the end. We pulled it off, if that is success. Totally unnecessary, but it is a job well, done. [sic] See, I can learn! My Scrabble lessons are really paying off. Someone should invent a grammer game for authers. Its the only whey where going to get bettor.

[insert set photo]