My Vision of Hell

As a card carrying introvert, the very last thing I want to do is get on a cruise ship, unless, of course, I can get right back off again. The biggest ships are four football fields long with almost 7,000 guests and 2,000 crew. That’s a lot of bodies. The average human produces about a pound of poop per day. That’s 9,000 pounds of excrement every 24 hours. Remember though, 7,000 of these folks are under 24-7 all-you-can-eat-get your-money’s-worth pressure, so it’s probably close to double that amount of sphincter sausage.

Your average cruise ship produces between 140,000 to 210,000 gallons of sewage per week.

I can’t help but think of all those people, 98.6 degree food processors, working on a daily average of 8,260 cups of coffee, 5,000 eggs for breakfast, 2,000 steaks, 1,000 baked potatoes, and 1,150 pounds of bananas Those are just some basics. God knows the endless cheese and appetizer buffets and the all-day fruit and rum drinks don’t help any of it.

The goal is to eat and drink until you drop.

Most cruise ships come equipped with a morgue, which, in light of that, is a pretty good idea.

So anyway, all I see when I look at these floating sardine cities, is too many bodies in way too small a space, everyone in a feeding frenzy as if they will never have a chance to eat again. Each day, they produce new mountains from yesterday’s semi-digested buffet offerings.

All those people make me really love dogs.

Obviously many people don’t share my cruise line aversion. They see fun in the sun with a Coppertone glaze, drinks crowded with fruit, umbrellas, and cherries that can’t even begin to remember if they ever actually grew on a tree, all of it rolling blissfully to a Jimmy Buffett soundtrack.

It’s not like I haven’t tried. Carla won a free cruse at her work as a travel agent many years ago. I went along because she made me. Hugging the ballroom bar at night like a kid with his bankie, I was happy enough to try to blend in and look like just another bar-stool as I watched the dancing. It was an older ship, still featuring a mirror ball hanging from the center of the room. The MC, looking like an overweight John Travolta in a suit that hadn’t visited the dry cleaner since his Staying Alive days, worked the room. He whipped the housewives into a frenzy, spinning like dervishes under a mirror ball spell. Reflected lights did their own mini dance moves on pancake makeup applied with a trowel in cabins below deck. Rooms now strewn with the contents of exploded suitcases.

All of it pure cornball, I thought, but I was happy enough to watch, drinking undisturbed.

Then Mr. Travolta got personal. He made the mistake of coming over to me and trying to pull me into the revelry. I turned down his advances the first time and made sure he understood my adamant refusal. When he started in my direction a second time, I told the bartender that if Travolta put his hands on me again, I was going to break his nose. Luckily, even though the bartender really perked up when I told him my plan, the bartender waved Travolta off. Certainly, watching that guy night after night had caused the bartender to share my fantasy.

There is no universe in which I would willingly do the Macarena, group or solo. That’s not going to happen.

It’s not just cruise ships that send me running in the opposite direction though, all crowds do. I’ve always had strong concert avoidance systems as well. Eric Clapton and Jackson Browne managed to lure me out years ago but I still carry the trauma of caught-in-a-crowd claustrophobic nightmares from both of those lapses. Jostling bodies passing gas and smelling of sweat, gingivitis and FDS? I have to pass. 

You see, it’s not only about my introversion, it’s also the down side of being around living, human beings with functioning systems that take in energy and give off waste.

So I’ve always been happiest at home, in the woods, maybe out walking the dogs at night. You know, not around people. As we’ve already established, they smell bad. Me too. I stink, but I can’t escape it. My dear wife? Carla and I don’t even share a bathroom. His and hers works for us. I choose to believe that she doesn’t poop at all., I don’t want to know.

She always smells great.

I’m not a robot though, there are plenty of times when I’m pretty damn happy for her to crowd me. That’s a crowd of two I can get behind…and no comments from the peanut gallery about that last part, please.

Oh, and if I win free cruse or concert tickets? You can have mine. I’ll pass.