03/21/2025 Friday. Mini Fridge. Stateroom 3279. Infinity Boat. Somewhere in the Aegean Sea.
3/21 and SC [321] and on the Infinity and we are supposed to get off this thing tomorrow and fly to Heathrow but that airport is on fire. Rough stuff all around. We’ll see though. I just went to Bonsai, which is this boats name for Mingles, the bartender felt bad for me because last night after working a harrowing shift we tried to get a drink before hitting the sack and were denied so he gave me some free beers tonight. One thing I have learned about this work is that you have to take the small victories. Celebrate them and convince yourself that life is good. Although the plan tonight was supposed to go and see what kind of happenings were going around down there, but I think Scott is sleeping and now I am standing around topless writing a missive, trying to stay positive. Not that I am negative, but this boat feels a little like a prison at the moment. The only thing to do is eat and sleep. I have no porthole so I don’t have any idea what time it is. And I can’t get any exercise aside from doing sit-ups in my room and pacing and maybe walking around in circles on the top deck. Oddly they have a basketball court up there as well. And a communal television that plays A League of Their Own on repeat. I feel like I should get a homemade tattoo to pass the time. Maybe brew some Ticklers in the toilet. Lord knows I know how to now.
This Heathrow thing has me nervous though. We are supposed to fly out of Larnaca which is in Greece and then to Heathrow and then to JFK. But Heathrow is closed and they think it will remain closed until midnight tonight. They say they handle 1,300 flights a day there. They, meaning the computer. Something like 200,000 people have been affected. Scott and I among them. We’ll see. There is nothing we can do about it until we get to the airport tomorrow. I mean, we get kicked off the ship regardless. The few planes that leave Larnaca mostly all go to Heathrow. From there they do all sorts of stuff, but oddly none of them go to Berlin or Rome or Helsinki or whatever. I think we are either going to be stuck in the airport for hours and hours tomorrow doing jack-all or they send us to a hotel and we wait around with our thumbs up our butts. I mean, we are living in a world of limbo. All day, limbo, all week, limbo, the entire operation, limbo.
Last night was quite exceptional. A two hour job that turned into five terrible hours. The kind of five hours that result in taking a shower before going to bed. A hair washing five hours. The kind of five hours that means I have to wear an underlayer when I put my jacket on because my inner sleaves are filled with itchy glass. Maybe not glass exactly, but something that feels like glass. Glass fibers. And a nice little cough to go along with everything. We were on our knees the whole time. On top of a metal catwalk. Working outside the railing. Like half inside the catwalk, half out. Tearing down twenty year old curtains, layered with dust particles made up of sloughed human body skin cells and lord knows what. The curtains themselves were made of itchy fiber. They were torn and disintegrating. Filled with garbage. Chewing gum stuck to everything. It was so very gross. This was the third time we have done this and I thought we were prepared correctly. We had all the right tools. The new drapes were stacked the right way for delivery. We even brought trash bags to put the old drapes into so we didn’t get dusted. Yet nothing helped. Not really. None of the Velcro was where it needed to be. The old drapes were so gross only a team of abators could have processed them properly. The new drapes were measured wrong and the glue we were going to use to re-apply the Velcro wasn’t sticking. It was a nightmare. It was a nightmare mostly because it wasn’t supposed to be a nightmare. It was supposed to be an easy night. Two hours of gross annoyance and then we were going to have a few good times on the boat and then have all of today off lap up the luxury of the high seas.
But this ship has been like this the whole time though. Its an oldy and a moldy, as the bridesmaids say. My shower shoots out a minute of rust water before it runs clear. The toilet seat is so broken that one night I woke up and had to take a piss and when I sat down my fingertip got caught under it in a way that was so painful that I was convinced I was going to lose my fingernail. The comedy show I watched last night was just forty five minutes of rape jokes. I met an Australian in the elevator once that asked me where I was from and I said, NYC and he said, Good on you, bloke. And then I said, for some reason, I have been living there a long time. And the next day I saw him in the cafetorium and he saw me too and instead of saying hi, he pointed me out to his wife and said, New York! That’s him!
We stopped in Turkey one day. It turns out hey have quite a few lazy dogs just logging around on the sidewalks and grassy areas. Some very filthy cats. We saw a two horses in somebodies lawn. That was cool. There were lots of old men playing Turkish dominoes, smoking. I got a Turkish coffee and it was served in a little tiny teacup filled with very bitter coffee water and a teaspoon of fine coffee grounds, but they served it with a very sweet cubed fruit thing on a toothpick that was almost as intense as chewing on tinfoil for how directly it shot unpleasant feelings from my fillings to my brain.
It was the off-season and quite cold and one of the waiters showed us his laminated social security card and told us he had lived in Boston when he was a baby. Then he told us that he was going to give us some things for free. The coffee, the baklava. He did not give us those things for free and although the food was okay, the outing was very expensive but they were glad to have us and said we should come back next time. Scott informed them there would be no next time. That this ship was a done deal. I wasn’t so sure. Not because I don’t think the ship is not a done deal, but because it is kind of looking like all of these ships are in need of some very heavy loving. You can’t just turn a lady on and let her languish. Play with her curtains a little bit and expect her to be satisfied. It doesn’t work that way. This shit is tantric. This business is unfinished. You don’t fly all the way to China and then Greece just to pack up your bags and head back to America. There is a reason she’s named Infinity. There is a reason airports close when you try to get off. Catch on fire and lose electricity. The abyss beacons. The siren calls. The briny deep is a salty mistress who lusts for us all. And only fools resist her soothing lure.
[Insert Turkey horse photo]
