[319] Screed City

[319]

03/11/2025 Tuesday? Efficiency cubby. Stateroom 2352. Celebrity Millennium. Somewhere near Taipei, Taiwan.

Happy Birthday, Agustin!!!

I have a porthole. They mixed up the cabins and instead of putting me down on the poop deck, I got the good one and Scott got the double-bunk delight. And because of the nature of how things operate on the high seas, out in international waters, switching rooms is punishable by firing squad. So, chips ahoy to me. I get to know if it is day or night and whether or not the waters are wavy.

Its been quite a wild ride thus far. The travel alone has caused a sense of time dysmorphia that even with a porthole, even knowing it is night now, I have no real sense of what my body should be doing. I mean, we left Lebanon, Newham last Thursday at 5a. Took a bus for three hours. Waited at the airport for three hours. Flew on a single flight for sixteen hours. Waited in South Korea for three hours. Flew another four hours to Hong Kong. Took a taxi to the airport and slept for six hours. Ate breakfast at the hotel and then got on a ship and have been working overnight, 10p-8a ever since. Although, yesterday was the first sea-day. [Sea-days nuts, as the bridesmaids and the teenagers say.] And then this morning we had a special electric curtain to hang, as well as a very complicated vallance, and since we were in port, Taipei, Scott and I went ashore to get some noodles and long tall beers.

[insert Taipei beer and street photo]

Aside from the noodles we also had a leek salad, some pork jowl and fried oysters. They served the meal with a little bowl of seasoned salt. Everything had cilantro. The pork jowls had hot peppers. The streets were crowded with scooters and for once, in my entire life of travel, the locals didn’t speak a lick of English. That part I found refreshing. Even none of the signs were in English. Even one place we tried to eat they just ignored us because we didn’t speak the language. Although, for all I know, it wasn’t a noodle shop and was instead somebodies outdoor kitchen. We just happened to be dumb tourists barging in, hoping to get a picture of Taiwanese daily life. It was really quite funny, they wanted nothing to do with us. We stood there looking stupid for long enough that we embarrassed ourselves and moved on.

The place we did eat at was great. The food was delish deluxe as Professor Curly would say. A man sat down with a mouthful of beechnut. That was cool. He then spit it out and started smoking. Oh, we sat outside. On the sidewalk. It was quite warm, but not hot. The beechnutter had a friend that showed up with teeth so obnoxious that I wanted to take a picture. I didn’t. That would have been quite rude. But I wanted to. This table behind us were really pulling a tantric lunch. They ate for a little while. Drinking beer. Yacking. Then they would stop, smoke a cigarette, drink some more beer, then start eating some more. Then a few moments later they would stop. Smoke a cigarette. Drink more beer. Yack it up. It was good.

Eventually the sun moved in a way that made sitting outside too hot and we had to get back on the ship to lower the electric drape a few inches, so we hauled ass back to port.

Tonight we have the night off due to technical difficulties. We need scaffold to hang the movie screen and that won’t be available to us until very far in the future. In Tokyo of all places. Which, if I am to understand it correctly, means flying for an entire day to do ten hours of work. I mean, it could be more than ten hours, because that is the nature of the work we do, sometimes two hours of work can take a week to finish, even when I am not goldbricking, but that is not the point. The point is; I think we are going to have to fly to Tokyo to hang a drape. One drape. Well, technically a movie screen, but it is all the same. This job is obnoxious.

On Thursday we get off the boat somewhere in Japan and fart around looking for noodles and beer until we have to get to the airport and fly a million hours and three different planes to Greece. Then we spend two days soaking in the Parthenon and the decaying, crumbling artifacts of democracy, [apropos, am I right? O’ America, you dirty slut!], and then I think we float around the Mediterranean for a few days, hanging danglers until we eventually fly to London and then back to the US where I will be greeted with a hero’s welcome by the original American slut, the Red Menace, Professor Curly.

Hong Kong [Honky Kong] was cool. We got some noodles there and it was funny. Scott made a funny face apparently when he was eating them because they were so spicy and that caused the cook to come out of the kitchen to look and laugh and then apparently they were being such jerks that a woman who was eating lunch with her kid, who spoke English, the woman, not the kid, although the kid may have spoken English, who knows, but that is not the point, the woman who spoken English felt bad for Scott and came over and asked if he wanted to return the bowl of spicy noodles, Scott told her that he liked the noodles, that they were just kind of spicy, and after that everyone stopped gawking at us. I don’t know, those Commie bastards can suck it. Not the English speaking one, she was nice. Typical, right?

[insert Mingles porthole photo]