A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

stomachs, motionless, the classic Dead Man’s Float, looking like the (Location 4653)

have seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced and a tropical moon that looked more like a sort of obscenely large and dangling lemon than like the good old stony U.S. moon I’m used to. (Location 3947)

They keep saying—on the phone, Ship-to-Shore, very patiently—not to fret about it. They are sort of disingenuous, I believe, these magazine people. They say all they want is a sort of really big experiential postcard—go, plow the Caribbean in style, come back, say what you’ve seen. (Location 3955)

have learned that there are actually intensities of blue beyond very, very bright blue. (Location 3964)

The ship was so clean and so white it looked boiled. (Location 3998)

This one incident made the Chicago news. Some weeks before I underwent my own Luxury Cruise, a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship—I think a Carnival or Crystal ship—a suicide. The news version was that it had been an unhappy adolescent love thing, a shipboard romance gone bad, etc. I think part of it was something else, something there’s no way a real news story could cover. There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. (Location 4010)

capstan a fresh coat of paint and walked away with a nod.” Here’s the thing. A vacation is a respite from unpleasantness, and since consciousness of death and decay are unpleasant, it may seem weird that Americans’ ultimate fantasy vacation involves being plunked down in an enormous primordial engine of death and decay. But on a 7NC Luxury Cruise, we are skillfully enabled in the construction of various fantasies of triumph over just this death and decay. One way to “triumph” is via the rigors of self-improvement; and the crew’s amphetaminic upkeep of the Nadir is an unsubtle analogue to personal titivation: diet, exercise, megavitamin supplements, (Location 4046)

There’s an Ellis Island/pre-Auschwitz aspect to the massed and anxious waiting, but I’m uncomfortable trying to extend the analogy. (Location 4166)

Death and Conroy notwithstanding, we’re maybe now in a position to appreciate the lie at the dark heart of Celebrity’s brochure. For this—the promise to sate the part of me that always and only WANTS—is the central fantasy the brochure is selling. (Location 4715)

Michael Joyce says rarely has any kind of spin or slant on it; he mostly just reports what he sees, rather like a camera. You couldn’t even call him sincere, because it’s not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or nonsincere. For a while I thought that Joyce’s rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright. This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn’t go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics (stuff I know because he told me it right away). 24 What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole, and that Michael Joyce’s affectless openness is a sign not of stupidity but of something else. (Location 3608)