Ketchit if you Kan

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The chime of the onboard P.A. system and the sonorous voice of the cruise director jolted me rudely awake at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. I didn’t hear what he said – it was slightly muffled through the door, as well as two pillows I strategically placed between it and my ear.

Ketchitkan is a fishing town meets massive cruise tourist industry, something like a bastard child of Juneau and Sitka. The sprawling main city center was chock full of a smorgasbord of conflicting architectural styles and designs, as if, speculated my dad, the architectural firms were all in some other city and they designed each building at random without ever coming to Ketchitkan to see the environment. And like every other city we’ve hit, the seaside roads were full of jewelry shops and even more Alaska themed items. Just beyond the edges of the streets by the water layed a sleepy fishing town, the harbor chock full of ships, and the houses drab and standing guard in a row.

After some speculation and deep thought, I’ve finally come up with the ultimate Alaska themed t-shirt. It is a lone wolf on a snowy crag, howling at the moon which sits atop the flowing Aurora Borealis. In the background, a gold panner looks on as a majestic bald eagle, despite not normally being a noctural beast, swoops in and grabs a jumping salmon in its razor sharp talons. Ideally, we would use the latest in thin LCD technology to animate the eagle on the shirt, as it swoops in majestically, as it grabs its prey heroically, as it flys away victoriously, and as it poops into the eye of a black bear in the forest freedomly. Upon closer examination, the gold panner is wearing a large tanzanite spinner pendant, as well as diamond encrusted rings. You wonder why you didn’t notice this detail before, but before you can give it further thought, an unstoppable stampede of the elderly crushes you as they rush to buy the items which bear this awe inspiring design, your cries of pain falling on literally deaf ears.

I stole a few minutes away to get on the internet, and had a brief conversation with G, who told me that Ketchitkan was "tight" and he had come here to do salmon fishing before. I was incredulous. I promised him a sweet Alaska sweatshirt, but I had to return to the ship before I could pick out a suitable one. Truth be told, once I had my ultimate design in mind, every other design fell short and failed to move me in any way, shape, or form. We left at 12 noon, spending a scant five hours in town. Jimmy told me, as we walked to the boat, that we must’ve lucked out because we arrived on one of sixty days in the year where it didn’t rain.

Jimmy is one to talk about luck: he’s made another $30 playing Blackjack, turning his initial $40 investment into a fairly respectable $110. In fact, as I type this, he’s at the tables tonight once again, for one last hurrah, plopping $30 on the table. I started to watch him, but left as soon as the first few hands of his busted. "I’m a bad luck magnet," I tell him, leaving him to his de-vices (hah hah).

One game I cannot get enough enjoyment out of in the casino is "Hi-Roller," which is of the coin pushing variety. I’m sure many of you are already familiar, or have at least seen one of these casino coin pushing machines before – there are three slots where one can drop twenty-five cent tokens. The tokens are subsequently launched up into the machine, falling in front of cycling metal pusher blades, which add your modest sum to a pile of tokens, in the hopes that your coin will push a few over the threshhold into the lower level, where you hope those coins in turn push more coins into the return slot. Holland America, in a stroke of greedy genius, added a twist – a fat stack of dollah dollah bills, what looks to be a hundred dollars in singles, sitting tantalizingly close to the edge of the return slot.

But if you’ve watched anybody play the game for any amount of time, it becomes immediately obvious that appearances are deceiving. I’ve seen old ladies (and so far, it’s been only old ladies) plop in a hundred dollars in coinage without moving the stack of bills so much as a centimeter. The stack sits atop a layer of tokens which, although appearing to be on the edge of tumbling over and taking the stack of bills in turn along with it, are surprisingly resiliant to the advances of flat cylinders of metal. Rather than drop, they’d rather layer, much to the chagrin of the players. The stack of bills has in fact dropped once this trip, to a young man who watched countless old ladies prime the machine for him, and then dropped about ten bucks in coins before getting it. He was either very lucky, or smart enough to know when to play.

Later on the afternoon, Jimmy egged me on to participate in the shuffleboard tournament, which consisted of four people, meaning it was 50% dominated by the Wongs. With my few minutes of curling experience, as well as the cold, keenly calculating mind of a brilliant tactician, I won, and got a mug (they didn’t have any ones with lone wolves, unfortunately). Right afterwards, we rushed all the way to the first deck, to participate in a putting tournament. Holland America, it seems, has a whole lot of ridiculous time wasting activities scheduled. Jimmy and I unfortunately lose this one, as well – a few days earlier we tried another putting tournament, with the same results.

A long blonde haired girl, looking around her mid twenties, was running the competition. She seemed clearly bored to be there, and the first tournament was full of unbelievable dickheads. These portly assholes surrounded the putting pad, leaning back and cocky as all hell, and were quick to loudly correct the poor girl if she made any sort of tabulation mistake. "No," they would say with clear derision, "That was only ten points, not twenty." These were the same kind of abusive dickweeds that were competing in the Blackjack tournament. They were being impolite, cocky douchebags to some hapless employee over a fucking coffee mug and hat. These competitions seem to bring out the most ridiculous attempts to justify one’s masculinity among the over-the-hill crowd. I nearly delivered a set of devastating elbows to faces. The only saving grace is that the girl didn’t seem to care enough to be offended. Seriously though, some of these guys need to chill the fuck out. If they’re acting like this over a coffee mug, I’d hate to see what kind of assholes they are in day-to-day life.

Speaking of assholes, there is one lady in particular I wish to hand deliver an ovary punch to. She sits next to us in the formal dining room. One night, the sea was particularly shakey, and halfway through dinner, my grandma started throwing up. She insisted she was fine, but threw up again. This lady sat at the other table glaring at her. Afterwards, she made a vocal complaint to the waitstaff about our table, and has glared at us ever since.

At first, I thought she did have a point – it’s disgusting to see someone else throw up, and maybe we should’ve took my grandma back to her room immediately. I talked to my dad about it, who changed my mind in a few sentences: "Freddie," he sighed, "I’ve been a doctor for many years, and I’ve seen every kind of suffering. What this amounts to is a complete lack of compassion – yes, sure, that woman may have been disgusted by grandma throwing up, but whatever discomfort she experienced paled to what grandma must have went through. Instead of showing human decency and compassion at another’s misfortune, she could only think of herself, and her own discomfort."

I need to vent a little bit. Some of these people on this cruise are really beginning to get on my nerves, and some of them, from what I’ve seen, just straight up aren’t decent people.
I know I should leave them be, and just let it go, but its hard when you’re on a freaking boat. There’s a reason Buddha sat under a tree and went for the enlightenment thing rather than paddled out with a bunch of other dudes into the middle of the ocean. Maybe even several reasons.

Great. Just now Jimmy flashed me a toothy smile as he strut out of the corridor leading to the casino. "I made another $70," he tells me. Just great.