Sea Cruise '02 (Part 1) - The Search for Fun

This is an unfinished piece of drivel I began shortly after Simone and I took our first dip into the waters of "cruising" back in 2002. A vacation choice that actually turned out to be nowhere near as intolerable as we imagined. I would even recommend it, once, just for the experience. I said once. Anyway, I got bogged down with the travelogue after about 5000 words and never picked it up again. Until now. Much of the prose is embarrassingly mediocre but there is some fun humor in it as well. I think my voice as the ugly American (which will surface in part two) is quite enjoyable and indefensible. Needless to say, the piece should and will remain incomplete. To no worthy end I present it to you now:

                                              So be my guest, you got nothing to lose

                                               Won't you let me take you on a sea cruise?

                                                                            - Frankie Ford

I am lying down and drinking. As I am prone to do. Or am I drinking, prone and lying? The lines become blurred. Especially when you're drinking.

I'll tell you one thing. Nobody knows what fun is anymore.

It's a lost entity. 

I used to know its parameters. I could even recognize it when it happened. I washed myself in its savage beauty when times were easy and less judgmental. But, now, the very idea of it has become a cardinal sin. And one that can get you incarcerated  for a very long time in forty eight of the fifty states in the good old U. S. of A.

The pursuit of fun is not something to take lightly these days. There are too many vigilant cops, Jesus freaks and armed moralists walking our streets to consider hedonism in its purest form. I haven't learned the hard way but I've known many people who have. And you can pour what remains of their hubris into a small soda can and redeem it for a nickel.

They were the die-hard. Too smart to obey and too dumb to show cowardice and retreat when the big boot of responsibility and straightness stormed through the door and began relentlessly kicking their teeth in.

Danger looms for the freakish fun lovers of this nation. The free spirit, the bon vivant, the gadfly - all live on a very precarious edge nowadays. America no longer tolerates the pursuit of "kicks"; unless wealth or celebrity and a crack legal team can bring the charge down to "community service".

Quite frankly, there is no fun in being an American anymore. And that is not only a shame but a contradiction of our ideal toward the individual with a fresh take on spirited monkeyshines and a penchant for the frolic. Freedom's good name has been forfeited to so many caveats that any provocateur of ebullience might as well bar the windows and doors and call the warden for their attorney.

Now, few of us ask for more than our 52" television, broadband connections and a car bigger than most WWII tanks. We thank our stars for our prison and our guards.

I'd been looking for fun. Go abroad, I thought. Fun must actually be waiting in some exotic, foreign land. Then the reality hit me. To travel as an American now is desperate folly. As dangerous as driving through Alabama in a SAAB with a "Dale Earnhardt Rots In Hell" bumper sticker on your tail end.

Either way, you're going to be filleted or exploded into a cloud of pink dust by "foreign" entities unsympathetic to your world view.

A sea cruise, perhaps. Safe on the boat. Friendly, touristy Virgin Isles still ruled by the big names in colonization and a cold tolerance for Yankees with the dollars. Quite unlike Europe, the Middle East, or the southern U.S. for that matter. A possibility for a vacation. A chance for fun. I pondered it. And like any decent American, I left it to the democratic ideal.  

I spoke to my confidante, lover, life partner, lessee of my scrotum, Simone, about this concept of "fun".

She had little input either. We remembered having "fun". It seemed mostly to be an occasion born of youthful enthusiasm. Or an eightball of coke.  

The Oxford American Dictionary  defines it as "lighthearted amusement" or "a source thereof".

Well, we'd had plenty moments of that. But most of it came laughing at the expense of others. A pratfall here, a certain celebrity death there, the tortured face of Michael Jackson, defense lawyers in financial trouble, poets who are still alive, a Larry King film review, "compassionate conservatism" and the promise of Rosie O'Donnell's mortality had given us years of titters and joy.

For me however, in my late thirties, the pleasures are fleeting. "Fun" becomes a good morning dump, a bottle of Grey Goose in the afternoon and the hope that Simone had morphed into Jennifer Love Hewitt overnight.

Aging is a hard road. But I've kept my humor on most things and I've been looking for a good time. I'm not saying fun was unattainable at this point in my life. I was  just saying, without liquor, television or a DVD of anything Bergman, it would be a tough sell.  

I am not a grim man, despite what you've read so far. Simone and I had seen fun times. When pressed, we did not struggle to recall the moments. There was the Elvis Costello show. The tactile evening with Mumenschantz. The Russian exchange student with the lisp who continued to mispronounce "Trotsky". The time a prick named Jimbo walked into our sliding glass doors claiming he was Claude Rains- confusing invisibility with the ability to pass through solids. A midnight howling ritual brought about at a stiff's party who unknowingly had a copy of Robert Redford's The Cry of the Western Wolf in his otherwise proud LP collection. 

Yes, we had plenty of guffaws and hoots. We simply realized that the concept of "fun" had shifted on us.

The game had changed. The rules of our youth were no longer applicable. We didn't know what to do anymore. An evening with shitty crank and a quality recording of Iggy and The Stooges Raw Power had become passe. Getting high before an episode of Small Wonder was no longer de rigeur. Our ability to deconstruct everything from Nabakov to Jennifer Lopez's unfounded stardom had put a chink in the armor of our raison d'etre. Using pretentious French phrases to shamelessly show a cynical post-modern affectation was becoming tiresome.

"Fun" had become an ideal better suited for those who either appreciated:

       A) The love of money, big business, children, low property taxes and voting Republican

       OR

       B) Rap or house music, severe genital or facial piercing and a unilateral acceptance of everything in the last  twenty years that had really pissed my fucking ass off.   

Namely, youthful enthusiasm without any ethical, political or intellectual feet on which to stand. The radical, fun loving element was still out there, they simply traded generational validity for financial comfort, numerous bad tattoos and an obnoxiously loud and repetitive bass beat.

I suppose, when your parents have trodden the real road of social rebellion, there's little left to do except nail gun jewelry to your face. Or get a job with Microsoft. Or both.

So, when it was mentioned that we had a free ocean cruise coming on Simone's company's dime, I took it like a marlin hungry for the hook. And, as any angler will tell you, when a fish gets a taste for the metal, there is little to stop it from biting again and again and again.

This was Simone's nightmare. She would have to work the cruise, performing like a drugged seal. I would exist carte blanche. Running freely, spewing venom, drinking like an English Lord and generally behaving  in the manner of Jim Morrison days prior to his untimely demise. Or so it would seem.

When you tie yourself into a corporate endeavor, even on the high seas, leisurely and for free, duties claim a significant price. My excursion would not be without a fee. The price of admission was...

San Juan, Puerto Rico.