Ice, Ice Baby

The lack of activity means that, for once in the history of this thing, I’ve been doing daily updates and dumping them online whenever I get the chance. Don’t get any ideas – I fully expect this pattern to stop as soon as I hit land.

Jimmy bumbled in at around 1 A.M. last night, Juneau safely behind us. "I doubled up in Blackjack," he said non chalantly, "forty bucks." I suggest he push his luck and enter the $500 slots tournament tomorrow, but he doesn’t seem to want to sit around elderly ladies pumping coins and pushing buttons for a few hours. I can’t see why not – proximity to folks dumping away hundreds of dollars of their retirement funds or hours of their wages in the space of minutes can be exhilarating. Not exhilarating in the sense that there’s the inherent possibility, however slight, that they’ll nail a jackpot, but exhilarating in the sense that you could be so lucky and find yourself in a room full of so many rich idiots.

I read somewhere that casinos will use chips both out of convenience when it comes to dealing with money, but also to make the very concept of money more abstract – a player is not throwing down a hundred dollars in dollar bills, but five colorful chips, as far removed from the green paper money as physically and metaphorically possible. There’s no chance that a player, perhaps a little woozy under the influence of a few too many Cosmopolitans, would start to hallucinate that Abraham Lincoln and the whole gang of our great nation’s forefathers would lie there on the felt, their faces scrunched into piercing, accusing stares, their lips intoning curses, and eyes seeming to say, "You who would sacrifice your earnings in a heartbeat, you who would act so callously towards the symbols of our capitalistic society, you who would try to exploit that very same system by games of chance, shortcutting your way around hard work and honest labor, you do not deserve freedom, nor do you deserve to even kiss the same ground that your fellow honest citizens walk upon." Lincoln, from the slight weaves of the ten dollar bill, might add, "Listen, bitch ass, I wrote my homework on a motherfucking shovel. You bet your fucking balls I didn’t throw my money around like a prancing ninny."

This morning, we arrived at Hubbard Glacier. The ship’s director told all on board to dress warmly when viewing the glacier, as if mere proximity by several thousand feet to a massive wall of compressed ice would somehow change the fact that we were in motherfucking Alaska and it’s already cold as shit outside. The ship took a leisurely lap in front, allowing for some spectacular views of the glacier. The sea was a blue gray. Chunks of ice broke off infrequently and made massive rumbles as they tumbled into the water. I speculated that Holland America flew in at night and laid explosive charges deep into the ice fissures, and the captain of the ship could detonate these at will, in order to rally wavering attention spans of those on deck, and also ensure that the Holland America cruise goers got a full serving of the Alaska experience. A few explosions later, we had turned around and chugged out of the bay, bound now for Sitka.

My brother and my cousin and I, bored out of our minds, snuck into the exclusive TEENS ONLY area (13-17 according to Holland America), where we were greeted by a table chock inexplicably full of empty water pitchers. The sole attraction of this hip hangout was a touch screen computer which allowed one to cue up songs and music videos that would play on screens scattered around the room. The fact that this room appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be completely devoid of any sort of teenage activity meant that we owned the place, and could cue up whatever nasty ass music videos we wanted. Upon discovering that 90% of the music videos already were sexy and violent hip hop videos, we cursed silently and left. We were too late, it seemed, to corrupt the minds of the nation’s youth.

On the way down to lunch, I passed a Purell hand sanitizing station, an automated Purell dispenser that would squirt one serving of Purell alcoholic gel rub into your eagerly awaiting hands so you could get them dripping and rub them all over themselves. The memo in our cabin noted that there has been an increase of gastrointestinal illness lately (i.e. people be throwin’ up and poopin’ all the time), and these hand sanitizing stations were the first line of defense against unsightly dining room incidents. Employees stationed at the door of all the meals were instructed to let nobody pass without getting Purelled. Whether or not there really is such a risk, or if it’s a brilliant marketing scheme devised by the heads of these two cruise ship and evaporating hand sanitizer giants remains to be seen. One fantastic use the Purell stations have is they dispense just enough Purell to have a good flinging mass, and when the opportunity to brutally sanitize the back of my brother’s neck presented itself, I took it.

Another activity that I’ve begun partaking in, despite how uncharacteristic it must be for me, is running, doing laps around the ship on the Promenade deck, jumping over outstretched lawn chairs and juking out walking snuggling couples. The backdrop of the ocean, and clouds, and mountain peaks in the distance couldn’t be more conducive to exorcize, and it doesn’t hurt that sometimes some morbidly obese moron will squeeze into an elevator to go up one freaking floor. This has happened three times now, all three times from deck eight to deck nine. Deck eight consists of the more expensive staterooms and cabins, and deck nine consists of, surprise surprise, the all-you-can-eat buffet line. One flight of stairs is apparently one flight too many when it stands between them and bottomless pasta.

Needless to say, a cruise ship is probably the worst place when it comes to obesity. Sitting on the promenade deck since starting to write this, I tally a full 90% of the people who passed would probably need to grease up their stateroom door to fit inside. Darkly fitting, perhaps, that today’s activity is sitting around viewing a glacier six miles wide. In the deep blue compacted ice, does the land whale see their own reflection staring back at them? Does that stony wall, silent and towering, cry an ominous warning? Probably not – at least, if it did, it’d be hard to hear over the din of the buffet line.