Perpetual Motion: Day 3

This is a six-part series about my time aboard CrimeWave at Sea 2025. If you want to join us on CrimeWave at Sea 2027, book your cabin now at crimewaveatsea.com/sinister or use SINISTER at checkout.

BEYOND THE WAVES

Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2025 – 12:22 PM

This morning, I got up early to grab breakfast at the Windjammer (WJ) in anticipation of my tour. One of my favorite parts of the whole cruise has been spotting listeners and surprising them. This morning, I saw a couple at a table in the middle of the WJ. The woman had dark hair and was wearing our cartoon crimefighters logo tee, one of my favorites.

“I like your shirt,” I said as she was looking down to take a bite.

When she looked up and recognized me, she said, “It’s you!”

“It’s me!” I replied.

I learned her name was Monica and she was with her husband, David. We chatted for a moment, and I missed the chance at the time, but Go Birds to David in his Eagles tee.

I set my plate down at a table by the window. A man at the table beside me said, “You’re one of the podcasters, right?” I said I was. We exchanged names. Chris and Mariella were there for Last Podcast (in a way, aren’t we all?) They were headed to the boys’ mainstage show starting at 10AM, just an hour or so away. Chris offered me some jerk sauce he’d gotten in Nassau. Thanks to him, I finished my now-spiced-up scrambled eggs in time to catch my tour.

Walking past some folks on my way out of the WJ, I hear a shoeless woman say there is no need for her to wear her sandals inside the buffet here because “the floors are clean.”

Down on Deck Three, I was ready to meet the group outside the Platinum Theatre for our Beyond the Waves tour. People had also begun to gather for Ed and Henry’s Side Stories Live, starting in that same spot at 10AM. Standing close enough to the theatre to be there on purpose but far enough to distance himself from the excited folks on the stairs all wearing matching lanyards, I noticed a young man in a hat and glasses. He was giving Daniel Radcliffe but was from, it turns out, Indiana.

“Are you here for the Last Podcast show or the ship tour?” I asked.

“Ship tour,” he said. He was in a baseball cap and small round glasses. He looked like he’d be the protagonist of an indie movie, with his close-cropped beard and kind eyes.

He asked what LPOTL was, saying he likes podcasts, too. We introduced ourselves. His name was Micah. He noted the lanyards, and as I explained the true crime festival at sea to him, a small woman with white hair materialized beside me. She was shorter than me by nearly a head with her white hair pulled back in a claw clip. Her name was Margaret, and I learned she was from Australia. She showed me the release and ticket info that had been left outside her stateroom door. I’d gotten no such packet, but I also booked late at night, so figured I’d play catch up once inside.

They herded the tour group members inside the theater, closing the doors to the waiting Last Podcast fans on the stairs. The tour guide waiting for us introduced himself as Matt. He had a Disney prince smile and thick-framed black glasses. He had a lush wave of black hair, and… he was cute, all right? Idk how else to say it. He was cute and it’s pertinent to the story.

Matt had us sign our waivers and releases one by one. The release form mentioned something about all liabilities being released throughout the universe in perpetuity forever. Margaret and I wondered whether we could skate by without signing our lives away, but no such luck. I also signed a box next to the selfie that I had taken in Paris’s office and uploaded to the RC app back in Dallas.

On another clipboard Matt handed me, I checked a box promising I had not vomited or diarherraed in 48 hours. I looked at the other signatures on the boxes next to the faces of my tour companions. Going face by face, I was burdened with the knowledge that, among these 20 other humans, we’ve all got real solid bowels. Or we’re willing to lie in print.

Over by some cocktail tables in the theatre lobby, I saw a polite and quiet photographer with a silver nametag reading Bima. I asked him how the photos worked, and he launched into a soft-spoken version of what I am sure was an impeccable recitation of the various photo packages. I said yes to a 4-for-$39.99 deal. Then I pitched him another idea.

“Can you just take multiple photos of me and at the end, I’ll buy them all?” I asked, anticipating their use for the very essay I am writing for you now.

“Yeah, sure, ma’am.”

Deal.

I signed some small slip of paper (what’s one more?), then Matt distributed lanyards for us to wear that were also commemorative “Beyond the Waves” luggage tags. We milled around for a bit, waiting for the tour to start.

Since I was on a cruise ship, I was wearing jean shorts, a tank top, a tropical button-down shirt, and my Nike Zoom Pegasus running shoes. Between the time we signed in and when Matt gathered us to the start the tour, I had time to go to the bathroom and take a photo of the stage setup to get an idea for Christie and my show the next morning.

“One thing to note,” Matt said, right as he was kicking things off. “You cannot wear shorts on the tour.”

I looked down at my bare legs. Uhhhh what?

“Sooooo…” he said, allowing me and the other woman in shorts to fill in the blanks ourselves.

Sometimes my quest for efficiency in speech makes me sound – I believe the terms that have been used include “blunt,” “rude,” and “terse.” I seriously hope I was none of those, but I am also self-aware enough to recognize the possibility.

“So, are you saying we need to change?” I asked. Matt nodded as I asked, “And you couldn’t have told me this 15 minutes ago?”

I KNOW. Jfc, Heather, be cool, but I wondered it so forcefully that that’s how it came out of my mouth.

“Honestly, I didn’t notice,” he said, and you know what? Good for him for not judging us by the clothes we wear. That is, of course, a generous reading of the situation. A more realistic reading, one grounded in my own experience in the travel/tourism industry, is that we all simply look alike. We’re like parades of Sims marching to our destinations, or maybe more the supine, open-mouthed human cattle drive in Wall-E. Either way, given enough time and exposure, masses inevitably become blurs.

But, also as a former tour guide, if there are clothing restrictions, let’s check folks at the same time as the diarrhea declaration, shall we?

Some teacher’s pet in the group pipes up and says, “The printed documents you received outside your cabin said no shorts.”

No one asked her, mind you. Again, my mouth opened on its own: “They didn’t put any packet outside my state room.”

I did stop myself before letting out a “wise guy” or “so put that in your pipe and smoke it,” so I was batting 500.

“Okay,” I said resignedly. “I’ll go change.”

“You’ll only miss the theatre which we’re already in,” Matt said. Thanks, handsome, but I wanted to see the theater.

So, I ran.

I took the elevator to save my sweating and heartrate. I ran past a few listeners, including Kylie and Jaycee. Hi, hello there, pardon me.

I sprinted a good thousand feet forward of the theater. In my Nikes with the hallways clear, I got going at a pretty good clip and made it to my room in record time. Once inside, I kicked off my shoes and pulled down my jean shorts. I pulled on the only pants I brought: black cotton tights, the material no thicker than a t-shirt. Surely this would protect my body from whatever leg-shredding dangers lurked below deck.

Drenched, I slipped back into my shoes. I grabbed my SeaPass, phone, notebook and pen, and took off running again.

I sprinted toward the stairs and descended to the theater. The tour group was gone. Standing on the landing, camera in hand, was Bima, in the same spot he had been before, totally alone.

“Right this way, ma’am,” he said. “They are just backstage.” He walked me up the stairs and around a curtain directly behind the stage where set pieces were stored. I had no makeup on but had done my morning skincare routine, so my face was glowing before. Now it was red and glowing and dripping sweat.

Bima and I passed some crew who were setting the stage for Henry and Ed to start in a few minutes. The tour group was clustered behind another curtain listening to how the musical actors come out from various stage positions. I made it back to the group, drenched in sweat. If I’d had told them I jumped in the shower real quick before changing, they would’ve believed me.

When I made eye contact with cute tour guide Matt, he said only three words, “Oh, you ran.”

“I did,” I said, fanning myself with my 3×5 notebook.

Matt offered me his clipboard to fan myself. I took it and began waving. It had a printout of the small square color photos of each of us. I could see my own face briefly when I took it from him but was fanning too hard to see whether he wrote BAN FROM FUTURE TOURS beside my image. Then I became super self-aware of the attention I was drawing, waving an 8.5”x11” piece of pretty heavy-duty plastic about my melting face, and gave it back.

I stayed toward the back of the group as we got a rundown from one of the actors who plays the villain in the show regarding the big bridge/dance floor that lowers down from above. I listened and fanned with my notebook while a lovely actor whose name I missed during my unplanned 5K explained how the theater seats 1400 people and how they have mandatory rehearsals as part of their ship duties. He told us the cast all lived in the same area of employee rooms adjacent to the stages. Makes for a nice, short commute, I guess. He led us out from backstage, toward some stairs on stage right.

Matt herded us through a landing where I met the eyes of Brett, the CEO and founder of CrimeWave, sitting beside Henry and Ed, waiting for their show to start. I was mid-pack in the tour group, so they politely nodded and smiled at my companions before making eye contact with me.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie bellowed in his warm, booming sing-song voice.

“Heya fellas,” I replied, smiling.

Having discussed the tour price at the prior day’s Side Stories recording, Henry’s unmistakable voice filled the stairwell: “You paaaaaaid?”

I said yes, through laughs, and offered my only defense: “I am a sucker.”

I told them to break a leg before I disappeared down some stairs and beyond another door. We emerged into a walkway, snaked through the seats of the theater, and ended up back where the tour had started.

Bima had me stand and pose with the actor whose name I missed. This gave the guy the unfortunate acting gig of standing unbothered while some strange lady dripped sweat beside him. Panicking that I’d look weird, drenched, and alone in the photo with this actor, I did the rational thing and asked Micah and Margaret to jump in with me. They chuckled and acquiesced as Bima shot our photo on a camera big enough to zoom in on the circumference of a bead of sweat.

Matt then escorted us down to Deck 2. The gangway on that deck, he told us, is where everything that comes onto the ship must pass. They call the singular corridor that runs through that deck I-95. Various stops along the way have their own neighborhood names like Chinatown and Greenwich Village.

The segments are separated by thick doors that could snap your arm off if you got in its way. They’re meant to keep the water from going all throughout the ship if it sprung a leak. It also helps in case of fire, keeping it from spreading beyond its initial ignition point. The doors shut with such force and unstoppableness that it could cut through a human limb like a fishing line through Jell-O.

We took another set of stairs down further to a steamy lower deck where we met Rakesh, the laundry manager. Along with his crew, Rakesh sees 17,000 pounds of laundry per day. It’s all manually folded after coming out of the huge industrial washers and mangler machines. They don’t separate the light-colored items from the dark ones. It all gets washed together.

I am petty, so I had not forgotten the earlier pants comment from Miss “They Said It In The Packet Outside Your Room.” When Rakesh asked if we had any questions, I wanted to drink in the disdain with which he said “No” after that woman asked, “Do you wash everything with sea water?” Yeah, lady. They skip the machines and just drag your stained sheets through the ship’s wake and let nature take its course.

Of all the large machines they had, Rakesh told us they only had one single dry-cleaning machine and a few rows of irons for the whole ship. Rakesh was then stoked to show us his steam mannequin. He pulled a wrinkled garment over a headless dummy form then activated a switch. The mannequin’s form ballooned up with steam and relaxed all the shirt’s wrinkles.

“You like?” he asked the crowd. Everyone grinned, clapped, or murmured approval. “You can get one for yourself.”

He paused for effect.

“Amazon!” He grinned to polite chuckles.

Give it up for Rakesh, everybody!

Our last stop in the laundry area was the combination mangler/dryer/iron where three guys stoop forward, grab the piles of linen, twist around, and stuff the piles into a machine that looks like rows of lawn chair material on conveyor belts. The brutal physicality of it alone gave me pause the next time I went to use a washcloth. Margaret read my mind. She leaned over and remarked on the individual labor that went into every piece of cloth washed. We stood in awe as the rest of the group nodded and disassembled.

We got a photo with Rakesh before heading down to Deck Zero. Waiting for the elevator, someone asked if people or workers ever get off at port and never get back on. For passengers, the fines are outrageous, Matt explained. As for crew, they surrender their passports to RC’s human resources, so they wouldn’t get far.

One guy, who would turn out to be a bit of a know-it-all, asked, “Some workers just abandon ship?”

Matt said that it didn’t happen often, but some workers, like those “from Zimbabwe” sometimes go running loose and get away.

A Black woman behind me said aloud what I was thinking, “Why’d he only say Zimbabwe?”

“Who would want to run off to the Bahamas with no passport?” another passenger asked.

“Depends on what you’re leaving,” I said to the woman behind me.

“Or running from,” she said, nodding.

Micah quietly recommended a podcast to me called The Outlaw Ocean from CBC Podcasts as we continued to wait.

To fill time, Matt explained the employees’ work schedules – six hours on, four hours off. Sometimes with an hour break or one day off. Margaret spoke above the group’s murmur and asked Tour Guide Matt whether compliments to management mean a lot to the crew.

Matt said oh yes, crew are rewarded for guest compliments with a half-day off or a cash bonus.

“They can’t tell you that,” Margaret, a veteran cruiser, explained. “But now you know, so be sure to do that!”

She knew that when she asked, of course. I admired how she piped up when everyone was quiet and listening to make sure we all got the message.

I’d like to go on record now that every employee has been great and please give Wayan and Bima and my cabin steward, Aldon, and Matt the handsome tour guide and everybody else all the bonuses and days off please.

The know-it-all who’d been asking about crew members adjusted his fishing t-shirt and changed the subject back to escape.

“So, is crew members fleeing a real problem?”

Matt didn’t say no. Instead, he explained that the number of folks running away was mathematically insignificant when you consider the 1,300 other crew members on board. Still plenty of people to run the ship.

“One guy?” he said, shaking his head, but didn’t finish his sentence.

I realized Matt, the guy asking, and I all had our own unique definitions of the word “problem” as it applied here.

As we exited the elevators, Matt explained that the more pertinent the job was to the safety of the passengers, the shorter the contract. Captains spend two and a half months at sea. Marine crew can expect to be away for around three months. Hospitality staffers can spend eight to twelve months at sea, depending on their role.

Wayan, the bartender at the Schooner who made my Desert Pear margaritas exactly how I liked them and encouraged my writing, later told me his schedule is seven months on, two months off. He’s done in two more weeks then starts back up early next year. The more sensitive the job, Matt explained, the more time off they get.

“The captain saves lives,” Matt said. “The cast dances.”

When the backup dancers pull drowning passengers onto a lifeboat someday on a 2-4-2 beat, you’ll eat your words, Matt.

He then told us about the different sizes of the ships. Icon class ships, larger than what we were on, hold about 7,500 passengers and 3,000 crew. Ours was a Liberty class ship, holding around 3,000 passengers, of whom just over 500 had been on the pool deck chanting “HAIL SATAN!” I wondered how many of the remaining passengers pulled their children closer when they heard Henry’s call of “We’re not cruising with them,” answered by a rousing, in-unison, “THEY ARE CRUISING WITH US!”

The Restaurant Operations Manager had us take seats in the fifth deck formal dining room around tables covered in white linen and pre-set dishes. He told us that his job was to manage his 376 “children” who work in food service under his watchful eye. In order to work food service for RC, each crew member must have prior experience at five-star resorts. When creating meals, serving up to 6,800 on a Utopia class ship, or up to 7,500 on an Icon class ship, they can get overwhelmed.

In the Windjammer, the upstairs food marketplace aka all-day buffet, fourteen head waiters supervise a staff of attendants, many of whom are first timers on a ship.

“Be gentle,” he implored us, explaining that, with new crew members, “We must peel them like an onion.”

Given the number of guests and volume of food, the staff creates over 16,000 pre-set plates every night inside of LOTS’s galley, the kitchen area.

According to a study by the University of Arizona, the average person’s cell phone is covered in about ten-times more germs than a toilet seat. After the dining room, we were taken to the galley. The Head Chef welcomed us by asking that we wash our hands at one of the conveniently located hand-washing stations on either side of the entryway. We all obliged, then took out our cell phones and started snapping away.

Phones in hand, we traveled through the main food prep areas of the ship. They took us to the Production Galley where fruits and cheeses were plated. Around a corner on a surface about the size of a pool table, there must have been over 50 plates of sliced green apples and a white, hard cheese. We stood in a circle around them, all breathing as we must. I felt a tickle crawl into my throat. With almost no space between myself and the plates, I could think of no worse place to have a cough attack.

This thought riled up the tickle and only made it more persistent. I blanked out at whatever Matt or the lovely pastry-plater was saying. Holding my breath and the cough, I had to get out of there, but with fellow tour attendees surrounding me, I was forced to white-knuckle it until we were taken one station over to the bakery.

Despite its name, “The Bakery” is a 5×15 area fenced in with stainless steel workspaces on all sides. The surfaces furthest from us were coated in flour. Huge wet lumps of dough were pulled into a Kitchenaid-style mixer that looked like large enough to fit all the components of a human body, so long as they were disassembled first.

We learned there is ONE single baker, and all the bread for the whole ship emanates from his ovens, which are running 24/7.

“No other ships offer tours like this,” Margaret told me between stations. A frequent cruiser on Holland America and Princess, she was impressed by the access we were granted. Another, smaller group passed through. They were RC Diamond Members, for whom a galley-only tour is complimentary.

Waiting to head around another corner, Matt told us how the staff members can use the guest areas for fun, but only if there are four or fewer guests present.

“So,” he said, shrugging, and allowed us to finish the sentence in our minds: never. Some crew positions are not allowed in guest areas “at all.”

Probably two and a half million square feet of space, amenities enough to fill a TV channel, and your view is below deck. It reminded me of my college days, watching loads of smiling people zip off in speedboats from my dockside office chair.

We passed by the humongous dishwashing machines. I mentally stacked all the plates I had used by then, one on top of the other, and the stack reached the ceiling.

Chef’s words echoed against the metal surfaces and hard floors. I could barely understand him, but I did hear that the galley workers cannot speak during service time for exactly this reason. It’s loud enough with only our tour group and less than five staffers in there. Full dinner service must be a cacophony.

Chef pointed our attention to the back of the galley where Javan, a man in teal rubber gloves and a white apron, was standing behind a surface in the corner. On a cruise ship, when you don’t finish all the food on your plate, Javan (or someone else in his position) removes the bones, blends up the remainder in a machine called The Pulverizer, lets the mush sit for four hours, and then shoots it into the ocean, Matt explained, “to feed the fish.”

I looked it up later, and this is a real thing. If food is ground down smaller than 25 mm per piece, then commercial vessels are permitted to discharge food waste at sea, outside regulated distance from shore. LOTS and Javan crush up our unfinished cupcakes and steaks then feed the fishies with a slurry pulverized sufficiently to meet MARPOL discharge standards. Other ships, like RC’s newer Oasis and Icon class ships, don’t squirt out the leftovers. Instead, they process food waste through biodigesters and dehydrators that use microbes and heat instead of sea water dilution. So instead of feeding the fishies with our trough slop, they land it ashore for disposal or energy recovery.

The cirrrrrrcle of life.

But Javan, in his white paper stovepipe hat, was there for us, yanking bones and pulverizing. When I shared this fact later with our listeners Erika and Nicole later, they asked astutely, “What do they do with the bones? Is there a big pile of bones down in the ship somewhere?”

I regretted so hard that they were not with me on the tour to ask. I was too distracted trying to get my photo taken with The Pulverizer (Javan) next to The Pulverizer (machine) that I did not ask about the Bone Disposal Policy.

Matt took us back down to I-95, passing an employee time clock and training portal on the way. Tucked back behind doors were hallways that led to more doors behind which the staffers slept.

“Can we go in there?” a tall man asked. “And see where they sleep?”

Matt said no, for crew privacy they don’t allow tour groups full of people into the dormitories.

The crew all sleep in areas with others from their department since most are on the same schedule. This means, in my estimation, you’d be living and working with the same faces, sometimes nonstop for seven months. I may be tempted to run off, too.

We passed mounds of cardboard boxes reading Two Rivers Chophouse and Coleman’s All Natural Meats. Everything is brought on board Day One and sorted. Like bringing home your groceries but the fridge and pantry are way bigger. They put the refrigerated things in cold storage. The grains go in the pantry. The main walkway leads on all sides to a labyrinthian twist of corridors upon corridors. There were stairways and hallways and spots where someone could be slipped sight-unseen to or from everywhere. I am sure cameras are ubiquitous now, but imagining this 30 years ago made me stick tight to the group.

The next area was the Engine Control Room. We weren’t permitted to film or take any bags with us. They also wanded us before letting us on the access elevators, I suppose to make sure we had no unauthorized skeet rifles.

I’ve only ever been an adult in a post-9/11 world. A lot of what we are subjected to with displays like this is security theater. I always question the “why” behind these little rituals. Once inside the ECR, I could kind of see the reasoning.

If someone, let’s say a hypothetical “terrorist” – insert whatever that looks like to you – wanted access to the ECR and took the tour to gain it, he and all the rest of us would’ve been stripped of our possible weapons. Except me. I had a Pilot G-2 0.7 in my hand, ready to pierce a jugular to save the ship from Hans Gruber (I said picture whoever you want!) This means, in a takeover attempt, our motley crew would have to pile on and whoop whomever the undercover terrorist was in order to save the ship.

Not that Prince Matt couldn’t have handled business, but those “everybody’s stripped and searched” checkpoints always make me size up the fellow cattle in the herd and vow to myself that, if any of them were to reveal nefarious intentions, I’m ready to go full blown Mesquite on them. This means a no-holds-barred, nails-out berserker mode named after my hometown.

It’s the same thing when I go on an airplane. Is there an Air Marshal? Can I spot them? How best could I assist them in their sky-bound John McClainery?

Is this a healthy mind frame to travel with? Probably not. Is it the result of only ever being an adult in a post-9/11 world? Yeah, definitely. I read “The Only Plane in the Sky” on an airplane. My mind is not right. Excellent book, though.

Once inside the ECR, they explained that the ship has six engines but only two are used for cruising. It is, after all, a cruise and not a big giant ship race. LOTS’s top speed is 22 knots. 1 knot = 1.8 mph, so like 39 mph-ish, but Matt said if we got it up to that speed, everything would be shaking and we would explode.

They showed us a photo of the ship out of the water, docked on dry land. Also in the photo were two men, mere specks of dust, standing beside the enormous wing-like retractable stabilizers. The crew can extend those to reduce rocking, but their use creates drag and costs additional fuel.

The Chief Engineer then explained from his rolling chair butted up to the controls that the water flushed in the toilets was filtered through a five-stage reverse osmosis system to clear out any waste and reuse.

So yeah.

The water that comes from my sink at home was “treated” at the Dallas wastewater/sewage system, meaning it went through a multi-step municipal treatment process designed to make wastewater safe to release back into the environment. Best I can tell, they usually remove debris, treat it with microbes to break down waste, clarify it, filter it, then chemically disinfect it, usually using chlorine and/or UV, before it reenters the water system.

The RO filter at my house works by forcing water through a semi-permeable membrane under pressure. This physically blocks most chemical contaminants, allowing mostly only water molecules to pass through. The one on the ship is even stronger, using a five-stage system that involves multiple screens to take out dirt, rust, particles, sharks, chlorine, organics, solids, etc.

I washed my hair on the ship. I showered. I washed my face.

If water has been desalinated and purified via reverse osmosis, is it new water?

I mean, chemically speaking, I say yes, but in the literal sense…. no.

The hydrogen and oxygen molecules are not “new,” but the resulting water quality is essentially reset. I guess it’s like getting a coffee stain off my sweater – I can remove the coffee molecules, but my sweater is still the same sweater, same thread.

On a trip once, my sister and I mocked our husbands for drinking stream water through a LifeStraw. That’s basically a weaker form of reverse osmosis-ing on a much smaller basis. Spring water in a bottle marked OZARKA or SARATOGA was touching rocks and ground and dirt and bird shit and what not before being filtered for our consumption.

All water on the planet, at one time or another, had shit in it. Dang, I’m just realizing this.

The air on the ship is scrubbed, too. They wash out the emissions down to 0.5 percent sulfur content equivalent in the exhaust or less (whatever that means). How do you clean air? Using devices called Scrubbers. They inject seawater into the exhaust stream so that the sulfur oxides react with the water and are removed from the gas, leaving dramatically lower sulfur emissions in the air. I nodded at the scientific explanation while imagining huge anthropomorphic scrub brushes like from the old Scrubbing Bubbles commercials, going to town on the air to the tune of the Sabre Dance from the ballet Gayane.

The man who previously asked whether staffers escaping was “a real problem” now asked, “These are diesel engines, right?”

I love taking tours on vacation because I was a tour guide during college in Chicago, and when done right, tours are a real labor of love. It’s professional show-and-tell. It’s the standing-up-interactive version of what we’re doing right now. Tours attract curious people, who are my kind of people. We always have more to learn, and what is a tour if not an efficient way to learn?

On the flip side, tours also attract know-it-alls (KIAs). As a retired KIA myself, we can be insufferable. I try to be cognizant of it, and really, really shut it off, especially on tours. As in life, when I am on a tour, my goal is to adopt a Beginner’s Mind. Forgetting what I know, I accept the info then apply thoughts afterward. This is great for observation, but rotten for follow up questions (see, e.g., above re: the bone pile conundrum).

This guy asking about diesel engines was doing it in a KIA way. And much like when they explained to the woman earlier, no, they don’t wash the laundry in sea water, Matt explained that newer ships like LOTS (built in 2007), run on gasoline. He called it “heavy fuel.”

The ship was all balanced, too, Matt assured us. We needn’t worry about weight distribution of passengers as the enormous ship itself was balanced on its own and humans are the lightest things. Walk and gather wherever you want. The thing won’t tump over. You are like flies to Vigo.

The chillness of Matt and the Chief Engineer was comforting and familiar. In my tour guide days, I worked at a company called Seadog, which operated speedboat tours off Chicago’s Navy Pier. That marine crew was always hilariously chill, even during the most hectic of times. Same vibes here. An alarm blared behind the Second Engineer and he just answered our questions with the calm cool of a man who knows what every alarm sounds like and which ones to ignore.

Margaret shared with me that a family member moved to Oman off the Gulf of Aden due to a job opportunity. I told her we’d be covering the Maersk Alabama hijacking, which occurred in that region, at our show the next morning. She said, not too long after the hijacking, she had done not one, but TWO cruises through that very area. They had to do pirate drills as part of the passenger safety protocol.

For the drill on the first ship, they were instructed to go to their staterooms, close the windows, lock the doors, and pull the curtains shut. They were to stay in their rooms, hide quietly, and await further instructions. Not but twelve months later, on a different cruise through the same area, the passengers were told instead to gather in the hallways to wait for further instructions, and specifically, they were NOT to go to their staterooms.

Sit in the corridors? Why, so it’s easier to shoot us all at once? I don’t think so. Sounds like those pirate drills were written by a pirate. My own, unvetted pirate drill? Throw your shit over the railings so it looks like an empty room, hide under the bed, and wait until the pirates give up. Can’t lose!

Our last stop was Deck 10, the Bridge. Object of my original quest. Where the Captain drives the ship from. To get there, a security supervisor had to use a special card and set the elevator to priority. We flew up to Deck 10 on an express route, no stops. Multiple guests joked that they needed an express key to get to their cabins. Clutching the card, the security supervisor muttered in return that it was really used for medical emergencies.

We walked down an unassuming hallway of staterooms to a door at the end reading CREW ONLY. Behind that sign lie the Bridge.

Once inside, a stanchion separated us from the Bridge-Bridge, like where they keep the actual controls. They let us into a large area with panoramic windows that offered a great view of the bow down at the fifth deck helipad. While the helipad is accessible by passengers any time, I would guess they clear it out when a helicopter is landing. We were able to get close to the controls on the port wing, a part of the bridge that juts out like side mirrors. It lets whoever is in control parallel park this monster. Looking out over the port wing backwards I could see all along the guest rooms. I could see the hot tub on Eleven – the one in the Solarium – and the windows along the side. One of those windows, either on this side or the other, being the window that young man leapt from a year and a half ago.

“You think we could touch these?” Margaret asked, looking at the buttons. I said probably not.

There were some huge binoculars hanging from a hook beside the window.

“Think we could have a look?” she joked.

Bima came over and got a few pics of me with my fake family before we headed for the Captain’s Chair. We put Micah in the seat and stood beside him, pointing at him exactly how professional First Mates do with Captains.

Margaret asked Matt what type of piracy drills they had to do aboard LOTS.

“Pirates NEVER attack cruise ships,” Matt said. “What are they going to do? I mean,” he paused, gesturing around to our tour group and the ship at large. “There are so many of us.”

So… fight? That’s the pirate drill? I looked down at my pen, glad I was prepared.

I pictured each of us, grease smeared on our faces, defending the ship from AK-47 wielding maniacs. I couldn’t prove it, but I know Margaret would disarm them somehow. A former midwife and nurse, mom of 4, and grandma of like a dozen, who has been cruising for 30 years? It’s about to be a long fall and a big splash for any wannabe Hans Grubers.

I got Micah and Margaret’s email addresses and promised to scan and send our photos to them. Here they are! Two hours bound together in the bowels of the ship made Micah feel like an old friend and Margaret like my adopted Australian auntie. I told them that if either wanted to sneak into the show in the morning, let the folks at the door know they were family. I did the math, and even if every single CrimeWave attendee showed up, there would still be like 800 other seats for them to occupy. The Platinum Theatre is huge. To me, this was a victimless crime.

EXISTENTIAL STROLL

Once my tour was done, I sucked down yet another GF vegetable pizza from Sorino’s Café and a refill of Diet Dr Pepper with cherry. I’m sort of torn between this perpetual state of self-flagellation for every little straw that I use and a carpe diem attitude exuded from every service person, every sign on the wall, every sweatshirt on a person or on a hanger for sale telling me to RELAX and LET GO.

I’d guess a right many of us find ourselves in that vacillation, and not just when we’re on the water.

For all our varied lives and experiences, we are united by the one inevitability that never fails to creep up in my mind: death. How that looks is a mystery. Water filling a ship? Gravity from a fall through a window? A pair of hands? One bullet? Three? Ten? An aneurism in the shower? Seventy-five years from now on my quiet deathbed or screaming as I face down a fireball or a robot uprising or a wall of water engulfing my suddenly seaside home?

Walking along the open air deck, unfathomable depths chugging along beside and beneath me, I wonder: if something is going to kill us all, will it be ourselves or the planet or A.I. or some mutual form of all three? A secret fourth thing I can’t even fathom? Earlier this year before the cruise, I read a book by technologist Elizier Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) called If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies. Spoiler alert: a bunch of people are rushing to build the “it” in the title, to varying degrees of success, so plan accordingly. Soares himself boiled it down in an interview on Breaking Points, “My bet is that a child born today has a greater chance of dying from AI than of graduating high school.”

Neat!

The questions I always carry didn’t get left behind on shore, but thinking about them where I am at least makes me feel smaller. And that makes me feel better somehow.

Brain scrambled with existential dread, wandering a cruise ship, where does one go? The casino.

Earlier that morning, my hometown buddy messaged the group chat that his wife had given birth to a beautiful daughter. We had been on baby watch and were thrilled to virtually celebrate her arrival. I offered to take one of the $20s ill-fated for yet another slot machine’s hungry maw and instead throw it down on the roulette table in her honor. Whatever I earned (or lost) would be the gift.

The group chat settled on red, and I approached the table around noon with just a single guy sitting alone, piles of chips before him.

“I’m new to this so I don’t really know…” I started.

The woman behind the wheel couldn’t have been kinder. She exchanged my cash for a chip and directed me when to place my bet. With my chip on red and the man’s on 1-15, we were both thrilled when the white ball clattered to a halt on Red 14. Pleased, and knowing when to quit, I went to the cashier and exchanged the two chips for two paper twenties. I put them in my left pocket. In my right pocket was two other twenties, some “just in case money” that now felt heavy.

Passing the machines, I thought about the web of us all – how each one of us is a point connecting strings of the web, and the very strings themselves are beautiful but so very fragile, too. How the connections morph and shape and pull at us over time. How this trip – the fun and people and magic – is, like everything else, destined to end. It can never, ever happen again either, not exactly like this. How the next time I go on a cruise, it will not be the first time. It maybe won’t be this exact ship. What ships looked like in 1975 and 1995 and 2025. What they’ll look like in 2035 and beyond. I thought of the future when we will no longer have paper cash to slip into a slot so quickly and easily like this twenty from my right pocket.

What will that look like? What will happen? I don’t have the answer. In the meantime, I push the button, again and again, and watch the numbers on the screen before me tick down to zero.

Outside the casino, I returned to the Schooner and sat at the bar to do some writing with another delicious Desert Pear Margarita courtesy of Wayan. Having been aboard for seven months, he told me this cruise was his second to last before break. After the next week’s sailing, he’d be headed home to Indonesia where he’d be off for a few months before starting again in the new year. That close to freedom, it probably made the last two weeks feel like one giant Friday. And still he was warm, gentle, and welcoming. He asked me about my writing and told me to have fun, don’t work too much. When I told him this – sitting with a spiral notebook and pen at the bar – was my definition of fun, he gave me a small smile, nodded, and made sure I always had what I needed.

I pulled out my laptop and worked on the visual component of the live show, formatting pics and double-checking their cues in the script. We made it to the recording of A Paranormal Chicks that afternoon. They’ve got such original voices and such big hearts. We laughed out loud multiple times, until suddenly it was time to get dressed for dinner.

“THAT’S THE PULVERIZER”

The four of us met Brett, Henry, Natalie, Ed, and Julie at the restaurant called Giovanni’s Table. Before ordering, the staff typically ask if there are any allergies or dietary restrictions. I always have to say yes, and explain. The waiter, Nick, a kind-faced man with thick, black hair and frameless glasses noted down my issues and asked the table, “Everyone else is healthy then?”

Yesterday at dinner, we joked that I often say ridiculous things out of context at just the right time. As if on cue, barely 24-hours later, I proved us right. Context now lost, I said “….and they ended up having a three way,” just as Nick bent low to deliver my drink. His ear ended up directly in line to receive that soundwave, though in an industry where upside down pineapples abound, he’s probably heard worse.

During dinner, Brett let us know that, because our RC accounts were all linked to his, he was able to see any photos attached to our account. He had kindly sent out a few to the group chat earlier. He and I were seated side by side as he scrolled through the photos on his RC app.

Quietly, I asked, “So that means you saw….”

“All the photos of you with those two people?” He finished with a laugh, scrolling to the images. “Yes, I did.”

I watched him swipe through image after image of me with two randos he’d never seen.

“That’s Micah and Margaret,” I said, as if that would explain anything. “I met them on the tour and we got a bunch of pictures together.” None of what I was saying offered any context because how could it? He got to the photo of us posing with Javan.

“That’s The Pulverizer,” I said, and began explaining how the bones are stripped from the old food.

You are at a work dinner, I thought.

Luckily, working in the comedy industry means everyone has a sense of humor, especially folks like Brett who work with comedians. He and the crew made the whole festival organized, fun, silly, and high-vibes. Sitting beside him that night, hearing about his life, his journey, his experiences on prior cruises: it all made sense. End results are the sum total of the energy put into them, and the CrimeWave energy was bright and kind and high-quality because that is Brett’s energy and the kind of folks he attracts.

CAW-CAW, CAW-CAW 

After dinner, we donned our costumes for the CrimeWave theme night – Murder at the Met Gala. On land, Christie had the brilliant idea that we should be a murder of crows. We brought some feathered accessories and black cocktail wear. As a dumb bit, I got a full-face rubber crow mask, but only used it to surprise Christie. I could barely breathe in it.

Our real costumes were handheld feathered masquerade masks. The guys put on their feathered masks, secured with elastic straps. Tommy added a feathered collar over his shirt, which gave him a menacing gangster bird look. It was nightmarish and uncanny in the way of  the human/animals in weird 90s kid movies like Mother Goose Rock ’n Rhyme.

Upon arrival in the casino, it became apparent that the theme “Murder at the Met Gala” meant something a little different to everyone. Some emphasized the Met Gala part, like our listener Anna, whose costume made me glow with envy. She came in a stunning red dress carrying a papier mache duplicate of her own head, just like Jared Leto in 2019.

“Do you get the reference?” she asked. I said not only did we get it, we wanted to do it. Paris suggested that only a few days before we set sail, so alas, we didn’t have time for the full execution.

Others put more emphasis on the Murder part, like our listeners Kylie and her husband, Chris. Their special effects makeup was so realistic, I found myself studying it, mesmerized, while we chatted near the slot machines.

Another listener, Melanie, introduced us to her lovely mom, Karen. The four of us chatted over the dings of machines while waiting for our cocktails to be delivered. We also met Clay, a fellow East Dallas resident in a fantastic sparkly suit with a wide-brimmed black hat. We had a ball catching up with him and learning that he is familiar with the Albertson’s grocery store of episode 13 fame.

We ran into CEO Brett as this exchange was taking place.

“The Albertson’s where what happened?” Brett asked.

“Christie had an unfortunate fecal incident in the parking lot there,” I offered.

We all then agreed that “unfortunate fecal incident” is infinitely worse than what actually happened (see Sinisterhood Episode 13 for more) and to all who were present and all who are reading this, I am ever so sorry.

The group started heading down to the karaoke stage on Deck Three. On the way, we ran into our on-the-ground story time besties, Becky and Christine, also dressed like crows. When the two of them came face to face with the two of us, we all four squealed. A man playing slots nearby offered to take a photo. He both offered and seemed a touch impatient, but the result is a fire photo of the four of us. Great job, sir. We wished him good slot luck as we greeted our listener Mandy from Pennsylvania on her way through the casino.

We made it downstairs just in time for the karaoke DJ to announce that Ed was taking the stage. After a rousing rendition of “Blueberry Hill,” much more suave than the crowd even deserved, the KJ called Henry up next, who also wowed us. Other highlights included our photog friend, Austin, crushing Panic! At the Disco and The Lion King. The crowd generated a big, unifying feeling each time as we all chanted the name of whoever was next, whether we knew them or not.

At the back of the crowd, I reminisced about my legal aid days with Victoria, our listener from Rhode Island, a fellow attorney who works in the public sector. Our conversation zigzagged easily from legal services to community involvement to the importance of art, talking like old friends.

In a flash, it was time for our crew to adjourn for our early start the next day.

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Stay tuned for Day 4

Learn more and join us at CrimeWave 2.0

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