Ah…what can I say dear readers? I know I promised a veritable cornucopia of textual riches, a flowering of my writerly soul bared for all to see. I also know that I promised this once before after a similar failure to produce amusing copy in a timely fashion. The only thing that is more broken than my word is my very soul kind readers; the never-ending parade of human meanness and blubber that is the clientele of the ms Adventure* has ripped the still-beating heart from out my chest and left me a desiccated husk of a pirate!**
You see, dear readers, we have just reached the half-way point of a 28-day cruise to Hawaii and the South Pacific. That means 28 days with the same whiny zombies—only they read and use my library twice as much as the regular whiny zombies I am used to do! And we have sea days. Endless, endless sea days. In fact, just for fun the other day, *** our wonderful captain cancelled a port—the sole port in a stretch of 5 days sailing from Hawaii to Bora Bora thus creating a five-day stretch of lovely days spent cooped up with 1200 of my closest friends.
So here I am sitting at my desk looking at the notes from people requesting holds on certain books. With a collection of over 4000 books, someone who, after searching high and low for a book and telling me, “there’s not much I haven’t read here,” has asked me to hold the latest of Nickolas Spark’s saccharine works. I thought I had made my peace with the brainless reading habits of your average cruise ship patron, but right now, at the nadir of sea-faring career, the fact that someone just checked out Patterson’s foray into Harry Potteresque fantasy**** when a mere 10 inches to this apparently-literate patron’s left sat a wonderfully-haunting collection of short stories from Joyce Carol Oates. Similarly, I sometimes used to chuckle inwardly when a guest took such immense pride in his or her ability to read a book a day: yes, I would snigger; it must be hard to plow through all those Debbie Macomber tales so quickly! What a smart person you must be! And yes, dear reader, usually this taste of bitter sarcasm is just the nectar to sooth my poor, battered sense of personal integrity, but today? Today it was all I could do to keep from reaching for my scimitar and sending this tottering mass of stupidity to the briny depths of the boundless main!
And this, dear readers, is why I have not been writing as of late: every time I lift the pen to scribble some witticism to tantalize your mental taste buds, all that pours forth is the rankest bile. And who of you has the patience or desire to explore the dark reaches of this pirate’s soul? My only hope is that the upcoming string of port days will provide the respite from the churning torrent of willful ignorance that rages through these hallways like so many rascal driving ghouls!***** Is there, I ask, balm in Gilead?***** My very soul needs this succor, but I fear that all I shall find upon these sun-kissed shores are hordes of elderly French Polynesians clambering for crispy bacon, Sudoku, and the latest mental pabulum to help them through the long cold days of their decline! Tomorrow we make land, and we shall see. We shall see.
*The beautiful and elegant Adventure, according to our captain—more on him later.
**Not literally. These people can barely lift their own body weight up from a chair.
***Although our captain is, objectively speaking, a sadist, he cancelled this port because the conditions would not allow us to ferry old people over to the atoll we were meant to visit. This was, however, not a huge loss: this atoll has 2000 inhabitants, no electricity, no running water, and a lagoon unsafe for swimming as they use it as a toilet. Yes, I missed seeing a shit lagoon.
****Seriously. It’s called Warlocks and Wizards or Witches and Wangs or whatever.
*****My other hope is that the ships supply of Bombay Sapphire holds out…
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