I had booked passage on the Silja Europa from Tallinn to Helsinki. I thought when I bought the ticket that it was just going to be a ferry boat heading across the Gulf of Finland. But, no, it was a full-fledged cruise ship. A full-fledged banana plantation consisting of twelve decks of unfettered capitalism filled with marks playing some big corporation's expensive variation on three-card monte. And, really, that's close to a literal description, because you can gamble on the ship. The only things it lacked for the full experience of rapacious cowboy capitalism were open prostitutes and heroin dealers (likely they were there but under wraps). The powers that own everything have this absolutely Freudian need to separate you from your hard-earned shekels while convincing you that you had a great time with a bunch of smelly, vaguely hostile strangers. There's a sucker born every minute, and, if you're lucky, it could be you.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not completely down on a mode of transportation where someone can kill you, dump your carcass overboard before it stinks or gets stiff, and nobody will notice or give a shit. In a way, that's an art form. I'm just more into good times that cost fifty cents (which, coincidentally, is what most European public bathrooms cost). And there's nothing that meets that criterion on the cruise shit...oops, mistyped...cruise ship. Everything onboard is designed to create a vacuum directly pulling away your cash and/or credit cards. But what about if you bring a date, you ask? Then the two of you can have a special, connected experience together. Hell, no. Then everything would cost twice as much. Actually, it would probably cost more than twice as much, because Date would most likely want to lay out a pile of cash for stupid shit that I wouldn't even vaguely consider worth twitching over, much less going into full bloody convulsions. And I didn't have any out-of-bounds shrieking children to browbeat into shutting the fuck up and forcefully being subjugated into a trembling modicum of simulated frightened peace, though there were others closeby lucky enough to experience that golden nugget of family solidarity and warmth.
On the plus side, if you buy a deck ticket, like I did, it's way cheap. On the minus side, if you buy a deck ticket, there is no place at all for you to park your still-live carcass (at least until someone kills you and dumps you over the side without a trace; then you don't have to worry about it any more). And they don't really tell you that. It seems like what they really want to sell you is a cabin, which can either be a cramped cubby with no windows, a stately suite fit for royalty, or some level of hell somewhere in between. But what the teeming masses want are the cheap seats in the balcony, so they have to oblige if they are to maximize profits.
I luckily boarded early, wandered the decks looking for purpose like a ghost who committed a horrific shipdeck murder, and finally on the top deck, I found an uncomfortable bench to actually even lie down on. Of course, once I staked out my little nap cove, I had to lie down to keep the space free to lie down, while other ghoul marks wandered the decks like zombies, looking for elusive peace. But I couldn't just lie there for hours just to prove a point. After a bit, I got bored and had to get up to roam the decks, just to see the best that horrible cruise capitalist human stripmining had to offer, while fully cognizant of the fact that my premium shithole would get immediately occupied by some other unwashed carbon-based life form (which it did). But I saw people who had crammed themselves into much poorer spaces, people splayed out on the floor, people sitting upright whose eyes pleaded, "is this all there is?" I wandered into a few places I got chased out of by people speaking a language I don't understand; that's always fun and amusing, especially if you grin and act stupid in response to their mercenary, exclusionary power play of annoyance. There was the casino, but I think I'd rather cut my dick off. And it was amusing warching the cigarette junkies get the monkey off their backs in sideways rain on the "sundeck". Overall, the most tempting feature for me was the vastly overpriced popcorn, but not quite tempting enough to actually take the plunge. Nope, I was just doomed to the unenhanced deck ticket. It was my curse as well as my blessing.
And, like I said before, ghost suck commerce buttfuck cruise did have its fully redeeming feature. I wrote this, which was my good time that cost me less than fifty cents. Did I mention it's an ideal place for unsolved murder?
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