first word from the high seas

Attention from the high seas!

So this is the first test of my new portable keyboard. Out on the airy deserted deck 4 (teak wood decks but plastic lawn chairs), Lucy and I have found a secluded place to lounge. Here we may have a dream setup for writing or sleeping or staring at the ocean. And I may have found an ideal work setup: a ThinkOutside keyboard and a Treo 650 and a $700 million cruise ship.. I'm willing to give it a try.

Okay, let’s have a look at this cruise thing: First, the bad. Carnival ain't Holland-America (my only other cruise experience), despite being owned, I believe by the same parent company. There's fat, there’s plastic, there’s “for the masses,” it seems like to me. HA had teakwood furniture, more peaceful settings (at least I remember them that way) and less of a rock and roll mentality. there are a lot of people on this boat. A LOT. I Don’t know how many, but I'm guessing over 2000. i try to find sort of forgotten corners (right now I’m watching a lady walk and walk and walk down the breezeway, maybe looking for the same thing as me; and and and.... there—she got to the end and turned around. I was kind of hoping that she would have disappeared around some hidden corner. I'm looking for hidden corners. Still, our vantage point today is one of tucked-away-edness. The ocean rolls by, there's no Jamaica-mon music or extremely aggressive drink servers trying quite as hard to hand you an umbrella drink as a Hari Krishna tries to hand you a daisy (the Hare Krishna doesn’t want 8.50 charged to you room though). Now some of the good stuff: It’s pretty damned relaxing by any human measure. The room, like a kind of cocoon, has no windows and that's just fine. Aside from not knowing even remotely what time of day it is or what the weather is like, it's a dream dream dream land of quietude and calm. Of course, it's not advised to stay in the cabin the duration of a cruise, I guess. What else—they have this egg thing that I've got to get into. I mean literally, get into. It's in the spa area. (I will not—I repeat, not—be getting on a treadmill or doing any sort of exercise based on this one rule: If there are exercise shoes involved, I will not do it. Simple enough, right? In other words, if sandals are involved, it's okay. I guess I'm really talking about yoga here. I'll do yoga, but only if I can decide to get up at 8am. And why exactly would I do that? I'm trying to underachieve here. Thus, writing may seem like a contradiction, but the way it's laid out, i just have a keyboard in my lap and I just type. A sort of stream of consciousness. maybe you could call it a typing meditation. Live update: Just now, Lucy and I have taken notice of a guy that I first called "Tai Chi Man," who is down the breezeway about 50 yards and is doing some exercises in his street clothes. He's Asian, so I decide that it's Tai Chi, but I don't really know that. I've never actually done Tai Chi before, but I sometimes pretend to do it. This fellow has gone into this one routine that might be called "the Tai Chi ritualistic smoothing of the hair.” I don't think there's any vanity involved; it might be more of meditative scalp massage, I think. repeatedly running both hands through the hair from front to back, over and over. Now that's my kid of exercise. I think it's about time for an umbrella drink. Today’s special looked milky and delicious and deeply steeped in alcohol. Kind of a Strawberry Quik with booze. Also, more than likely, there’s a nap in my near future. Really that’s a basic truth of the cruise experience. There see this writing has reminded me of what I already knew to be important: napping, drinking and, um, what was the third thing?

Pictures are coming. Captions are unlikely, due to some technical limitations...