Perpetual Motion: Day 5

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.

I CAN’T FIGHT THIS FEELING ANYMORE

Face washed. Clothes on. Bags dragging behind us. We were back in Florida. My view of the deep blue expanse and encompassing light that connected all living beings was obscured by towering Jenga stacks of metal industrial shipping containers and a train of Ubers and Lyfts and taxis going round the outdoor pickup area.

Getting off the ship took us back through the same terminal where we’d boarded the Monday prior. The Department of Homeland Security customs check involved another x-ray machine of our bags and a facial recognition scanner. Step forward. Look into the mini iPad. Wait for either a green check or something that means hold for further screening. A woman scurried in front of me in line past the x-rays, cutting me off. I was not in a rush, so I stepped back. She aligned her face with the small tablet’s unblinking mechanical eye, perched atop a black metal pole.

The tablet read ERROR. Her face broke the machine.

She was pulled aside. I stepped up and felt the same net reach out as I had with the moon. The light reflecting off my face into the lens down the wires, through the machine, over the broadband, into the waiting digital arms of the federal government.

Outside in the cement circle, beneath our assigned rideshare pickup number, the four of us waited with our new friend, Richard from Unexplained. We collectively dreamt aloud about a trip for us to visit him in his native Scotland. A sedan pulled up. We saw him into it and loaded ourselves into the SUV that followed.

Riding through the brutal minimalist architecture comprising the Fort Lauderdale port area, I couldn’t help but miss it all. The piña coladas and giggling stories and tiny lights far off across the horizon. How the Moon reached down to touch me. A great poet once sang, “See the line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me.”

It was calling me right then and there in the Hyundai SUV. The boxy cement structures were meant to withstand hurricanes, I mused aloud, but they sure were ugly, too. Looking around this part of South Florida, I had overwhelming urge to tell the driver to turn us around and take us back to the pier.

The radio played another song, this one conveying exactly what was in my heart via words from the great poet, Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon: “I can’t fight this feeling anymore.”

And I couldn’t. I still can’t. I get how people get addicted to cruises. I understand why those people signed up for the year-long cruise. I have looked into cruise-based retirement communities.

In the back of the Uber, a flatscreen once again offered surveys, games, and ads for Uber and local businesses.

“Who is the GOAT?” the screen asked, then offered a list of possible greatest-of-all-times: Kobe, Jordan, LeBron, etc. “Tap your phone to vote.”

I wrote in my notebook, “Things that would blow DFW’s mind.”

Calling shared rides from cell phones. Widespread facial recognition at airports. Hershel Walker, Vampire Hunter as Ambassador to Coco Cay and its fellow islands. The naming of CoCo Cay island and its spelling and pronunciation and the idea of a proprietary island at all. The quest to be the -est-iest: the biggest, tallest, deepest, etc. The woman at the bag check counter this morning being named Donna Bologna. A guy at the airport bar drinking a beer at 9am wearing a red hat backwards embroidered with all-caps white serif letters reading AMERICA FIRST.

Postcards are nice because they capture what was, marking a time that feels permanent when you’re sending it but which has disappeared by the time the missive arrives. I am so glad DFW wrote his postcard so I could write mine.

In line for breakfast inside the airport, a bald guy with a goatee wearing a polo shirt lamented that his job selling college athletic wear is “Neverending! I mean it NEVER ends.” He offered this unprompted to an unrelated older blonde lady who agreed with him.

“It really doesn’t,” she said, united in an alliance against the constant stream of “it” that pervades the average person’s day-to-day.

“Was jetzt?” my therapist taught me. Her family is German. It means, “what’s next?” They say it when faced with a barrage of any kind, and now I hear it in my head at times like these.

The closest breakfast spot to our gate was Jack Nicklaus’s restaurant. The pro golfer is 88 years old and still alive, but you wouldn’t know that from the decor. It looks like a wake in his honor, with black and white photos of various important moments in his life, including his childhood home and sports achievements.

We all sunk into our own peace at the table: me with my notebook, my tablemates to the mounted TVs, people passing by, their phones, or the backs of their eyelids. Even if we had wanted to talk, we could not hear each other over the onslaught of Friday morning airport sounds.

The notes in my notebook:

“Someone over my shoulder was discussing Ruby Ridge?” They walked off before I could hear more. Then I wrote,

“I am achy tired. The spot between my eyes hurts. The upper back area between my shoulder blades. My shoulders aren’t as tense as I’d expected. Neck is sore though. My lower back is tired but not in pain. My hips need stretching but nothing crazy. My feet, however, are throbbing. The Margaritavilla Crocs, though stylish, do not offer the comfort or support my Achilles heel needs at my current age.”

Behind our table, the man whose work was “neverending” paused a conversation on his Bluetooth headphones to answer the server’s inquiry into his drink preference.

“Soda water with lime,” he said, then paused. “And its breakfast?” He considered the air for a moment, adding, “And a Bloody Mary.”

He was practically shouting when he resumed his call. From what I non-consensually gleaned from his work call, Mr. Bloody Mary was set off this Friday morning by an email from someone named Mark.

“SARAH!” he hollered. “Did you see Mark’s email?” I guessed she had because Bloody Mary then said, “Mark needs to figure this out!”

Mark’s antics were drowned out by the announcement that someone had left a jack at the TSA Precheck. Standing beside our table, a woman in her 60s was stuffing her passport into a plastic document bag. In a thick New York accent, she told the woman beside her, “Great bag, Brandy,” as Brandy replied with a sincere, “You are welcome.”

“MARK NEEDS TO FIGURE IT OUT!” Bloody Mary repeated.

Bloody Mary forcibly included us in a team meeting as he rattled off price structures and PGPs and penny spreads on shipments with freights. His margins were too high, contributing to lost sales. Bloody Mary said not to focus on “the ones we lost” and instead look forward to the future.

A round blonde in jeans, probably in her 50s, passed on the way to her gate. Her t-shirt had an arrow pointing to her left with the words, “If I’m drunk, it’s her fault.” She was alone.

“The freight is none of your concern!” Bloody Mary boomed. It’s all of our concerns now, my man. I wasn’t hung over, but he made me feel like I was.

I wondered if I ran really fast if I could make it back to the ship. I’ve been working on my mile time, so probably I could get back before they pulled the gangplank and took off again.

Aboard the plane in 15D, I pulled out my iPad to watch the 1970s game show Tattle Tales. The woman one row up, across the aisle in 14C had the kind of leathered face earned intentionally from decades in the sun. Her dark hair had the sheen of boxed dye. Her gnarled feet were exposed in flip flops. She had no entertainment in front of her. There were no headphones, not a book or sudoku collection or even a neck pillow in sight.

Her in-flight entertainment was doing unsolicted, unauthorized volunteer work for American Airlines. From her seat. Best I could tell, she was the self-designated Personal Items Supervisor for rows 14 and 15.

After settling her husband in the seat in front of me, she manhandled the duffle bags of the stranger beside her in the middle seat. That woman was a retiree on the younger side with one foot in a surgical boot and couldn’t escape or even kick her seatmate in self-defense.

My water bottle, a closed Owala, shifted on my tray. Perhaps mistakenly believing that behind my mirrored dollar store aviators I was asleep, she stared at my face, studying me or maybe watching my show along with me in the reflection of my sunglasses. She turned backwards and adjusted my water bottle on my tray. I touched it in turn, and her arm jerked back.

She bounced her knee from take-off to landing, wringing her hands, mostly looking down. She extended her feet, kicking and sliding a long strap of my backpack with her raw exposed toe.

An object hit the floor multiple rows away from us, and she whipped around. This is out of your jurisdiction, I thought. It’s across the aisle and underneath. You’re halfway into a yoga pose. Just chill out.

Just a guess, but I believed, based on the weathered texture of her skin, that she came off a cruise or a lifetime of Florida vacations, if not a Florida retirement. The anxious pull of the real world once you’re back on land is strong. It’s made stronger still when you’re hurtling back toward the neverending responsibilities that await you with nothing but your fellow passengers to distract you in the meantime.

It’s a funny feeling I am dealing with, from bad mouthing a cruise to missing it here in my seat. That missing turned to yearning once we were back on the ground in Dallas.

While the rest of the gang waited for the bags at the carousel, I headed for the intra-terminal shuttle bus to pick up my parked car. Waiting in the humid muck of a warm Dallas November, a white man in a polo shirt asked if this was the shuttle going to C Terminal. I said I hoped so because that’s where I was headed. He was near retirement age, clearly a solo business traveler. We made small talk about the weather and how often the shuttles pull through.

A bus pulled up, and its diminutive driver hopped out. He was shorter than me with dark skin and a little mustache. He announced he was headed to A and C gates in what I clocked as a South Asian accent. I took my place in line to step aboard.

Polo Shirt misjudged the type of white I am and lamented to my face, “I’ll be glad when English is our only language.”

A different old white man said something similar to me at the post office a few Christmases ago. All old white men receive the same cheerful canned reply I keep on me: “You should try to learn another language. Knowing multiple languages helps stave off dementia.”

“Oh yeah,” this one said, taken a bit aback. “I guess it does.”

It does.

Back in my car, a symphony of alerts greeted me. “Low Tire” came on. I have a cracked wheel with a slow leak so I have to fill it up every few dozen miles. My windshield wiper fluid light dinged, too, the result of a cracked reservoir I keep meaning to fix. My mechanic laughed when I asked why he couldn’t just put a strip of FlexSeal on there. The usual bell alerted me that a spring in my gear shifter is corroded by a Diet Dr Pepper I spilled in there awhile back.

I sighed and cranked the engine.

The aftermath of a cruise with so much to do leaves you with a combined regret, accompanied by guilt for the regret. I should’ve done this or I wish I would’ve done that, too. Then, all of what I did do floods in. All of the friends I met, the listeners and creators and staff. Wayan, who helped me write this, and Bima who took my photos, and Javan, the pulverizer who ran The Pulverizer and who guards of the secret Chamber of Bones, who sends all of my uneaten dishes out to share with the fishies below. The sinister, unfathomable Ocean, who carried us the whole time and brought us back home. The big ol’ Beaver Moon, who let me touch her and who touched me back.

I realize, in a week, what I did is more than some do in lifetimes. I am so very grateful that this is my career and my life.

With my party picked up and our bags Tetris’ed into the trunk, Paris drove us to Christie and Tommy’s house in the Friday afternoon rush hour traffic on the ceaseless machine that eats patience: highway 635.

In the hot, damp wind from a cracked window, I missed the ocean breeze that splayed my hair out like Medusa. Little memories here and there, the small gems I brought back with me. They all leave me with a yearning to return to the sea. Leave the shore, recharge, regroup, get back out there into the neverending “IT” that pervades our day to day. The threat of death now is not the serpentine water filling the depths, but rather the exhaust and taillights and eyes gazing downward at screens in hands. That funny feeling Bo Burnham sang about. The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door.

So what are we to do? I have no grand declaration, only a firsthand confession of how it felt to succumb to the siren’s song. She calls out to me over the waves and naked, entranced, I answer.

***

POST SCRIPT

I just wanted to make it clear that all that stuff I said about moon bathing in the nude on the balcony — even though, in my opinion as a lawyer and someone who did read the policy manual that I didn’t do anything wrong — I just want to clarify: that was a joke. I never did that.

Did I?

I don’t think I did.

No.

Even if I did, I just want to say it’s well within the policy of Royal Caribbean as stated, as well as, I feel like ethically, I was being safe. I checked for people on either side, if I did do it.

But I didn’t.

Maybe.

Probably not.

I’m a comedian, right? I make a lot of jokes.

But were I to do it, I would check on either side that no one was out, and I would make sure that we were only facing the ocean so no one could see.

Now, hypothetically speaking, had I actually done it and then later told my cousin about it, and then she said, “It doesn’t matter if no one was out there. There’s probably cameras. They probably saw you.”

In which case, I would say either, variously, “I am so sorry,” or “You’re welcome” to whomever might have seen any hypothetical footage, which, of course, does not exist because I didn’t do that. I would never. I’m a comedian! I make the jokes!

You guys just have that visual of me in your head now forever. Just me and the Moon.

Or was it just the Moon?

Maybe I was inside. Maybe none of that ever happened. 

Or maybe it did?

I don’t know.

You tell me.

***

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