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04/03/2025 Thursday. Stacked debris. Stateroom 8702. Breakaway. Somewhere near Napoli, Italy.
Well, the life of a drape man is always intriguing. You go to sleep in Rome and wake up in Naples. You go to sleep in Naples and wake up in Sicily. Pork cordon blue? Never heard of it, but then they serve it for lunch. One second your minding your own business watching motorcycle racing on the television at the Irish pub on the boat, the next second some “entrepreneur” is telling you that he wished his employees gave 70% when you tell him you are giving 111%. And then you watch the anger palpably erupt on his face when he realizes you are anti-capitalism. Meaning you are a commie bastard in his eyes. Anti-American dream. Anti-bootstraps. You may as well have just told him you butt-raped baby Jesus. This boat, man, I only started doing this work back in the Fall, but this one seems amiss. I feel like somebody is going to knock on my door at any moment and lead me away in handcuffs. Maybe that is because my room is right next to the Crew Bar, which is so smokey that I can smell it in my room and there is a constant stream of crew folk from all nationalities filing past my door at all times. My door faces the staircase that ushers The Crew from all places below deck to the rich, juicy, smokiness they all seem to crave. Men in chef hats, men in coveralls, women with tight buns wearing tight buns, dishwashers, tradesmen, porters, entertainers, land lubbers, not a one. It’s a big boat, with big promise. And that is why we are here.
A drape man is the epitome of discretion, which in turn is the bridesmaid of valor. A drape man doesn’t gold brick on the high seas for there is no gold bricking to do. The entire job is a gold brick. You’re on call to gold brick. I ran into Dirty D the other day, before I left the City and he told me he couldn’t do it, couldn’t come on the ship anymore, its not worth it, he said, and I told him about the conversation with my brother Luke about it, how he said he thought the work was a “mixed bag” and as I pretended it wasn’t because I think soon we will need more of us, or not, The Orange Douche’s mental illness not, withstanding, for all I know, this is the last job for the foreseeable future, but I did have to concede to Luke that it is, indeed, a mixed bag. I told Dirty D as much. But, I said, the money is good, respectively, and he told me to respectively to go suck a big fat fatty. It is hard work being on call for weeks on end. I said it before, I am saying it now, its like being hungover and jetlagged at the same time, the entire time. You tell time by whether or not the cafetorium is serving food. All day and all night you take periodic sips from your coffee mug filled with coffee that is oddly always too hot to drink. Sleep is painful. Physically. You’re either over-slept or so tired you fall asleep with your eyes open. The showers are so small that you have to ricochet the water off the wall to clean your ass crack. They have a self serve ice cream machine but in order to eat the ice cream cone you have to watch a seventy five year old woman play ping pong in a string bikini while you do it.
Today was funny though. We are working days, for now, and we needed some Velcro because the power supply for the faux speakers we are installing didn’t come with mounting hardware and because this ship is weird, weird, weird, one of us had to stick around and guard our junk from theft and because Scott was doing all of the work, it was up to me to head into Naples to get Velcro. You ever been to Naples? Its an odd and very pretty city/town. Lots of traffic going where, I do not know. They got trains and a castle and a port and what seems like an interstate bisecting the downtown area. The men are creepers and everyone wears a heavy jacket even when its 70F outside. I mean, I was in the town/city for barely an hour and I was also wearing a heavy jacket as well as long johns, so who am I to judge, but I had the decency to remove my jacket when I got hot and carry it on my elbow like a fancy server with champagne, but there was something stubborn about these fools. And they weren’t even that fashionable. They just seemed to have been caught outside in a sudden sunshine deluge. Oh, and the car drivers are dicks and they park on the sidewalk but honk at you when you are forced to walk in the street. But I got to the hardware store my phone found because phones work everywhere now, just fyi, except the high seas, you need internet for that, but I found the hardware store and it was small and I couldn’t find the Velcro, so I asked the two men behind the counter and they were very cute, I think they were brothers, one spoke English very poorly, the other spoke no English at all, but we were able to communicate just using the word Velcro, clapping my hands together to mean both sides and sticking my arms out and saying very loudly, “Two meters!” It was very pleasant. I said, “Chow!” when I left. I know, you may think the word is spelled different, but I will tell you, in my brain the word, “Chow” crossed my verbal cortex, so irregardless of the spelling, that is what I said. They said the correct spelling of chow back to me and I stopped next door to buy some refrigerator magnets and hauled ass back to the boat.
In Civitavecchia a day ago there was a dog hanging out while we waited for a bus that I am positive could read my soul, that, or he and I are related. Here is a picture to prove it.
[Insert soul dog photo proof]
Ciao, bitches!
That dog is a human soul inhabiting a canine body.