The Blockade at Ploppingrad

After sitting at dock in Galveston for almost 2 full days we set sail for Jamaica (presumably) and I have to admit anxiety is already running high. My colleague and I are fine and in relatively good spirits but we still don’t know what our exact job is once we reach our destination. We don’t even know who our client is or what they expect from us. We’ve been doing dawn till dusk ancillary watches to keep our minds active and to give us something to do but nothing prepared us for what was going to happen next.

At the beginning of the previous post I told the long winded story of how I got here in the first place and if you read it you’ll remember the conversation I had with one of my bosses who told me that although he didn’t have any information about the boat itself he did know some people that had been on this boat before and they had nothing but good things to say about it. I have to assume these people he knew were homeless squatters or retarded because we haven’t been at sea more than 24 hours before things on the Ol’ Shatskiy starting breaking down. The local area network or “LAN” as it is referred to by people in “the know” went down cutting our only link with the outside world. Foreigners who come to China or anyplace where they don’t speak the language inevitably talk about their feelings of isolation. How, because they don’t speak the language, they feel very alone even when they are surrounded by people. Now take that linguistic isolation and drop it on a boat in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. You are totally surrounded by water, no land in sight, and you can’t communicate with the people around you, but you have to make it work because they are the only option. It can get a little lonely. When you think about all your friends and family back home it can be deafening like being trapped in a commercial freezer. Or more accurately, because our air conditioning went out and I’ve experienced the following, it’s like being thrown in the sweat box of a Sudanese prison. If I could sleep for the five days it’s going to take us to reach Jamaica I would just so I wouldn’t have to deal with the desires of my awake/conscious mind but unfortunately I cannot because, in the name of science, I must be awake and alert during the daylight hours to document the various forms of aquatic life I see on this voyage of the damned*. I wish I could sleep for five straight days solely because of what happened early in the morning on our second day out to sea. Something I call: The Blockade at Ploppingrad.

I was on the dawn shift for ancillary watch and as I arose shortly before the sun I took my shower and went to the bathroom when it happened. The egg timer-shaped flushing dial broke. It would not reset, it would not budge. There was no more flushing at all to be had. At the time I thought it nothing more than a simple mechanical problem any of the engineers on board could have fixed. Besides I had to get topside to start my watch. Had I known that this was not an isolated incident but a boat-wide embargo on flushing I probably would have done more than urinate. Yes, the toilets (or in Russian, “toilet,” but with a cool Russian accent) were down. Unusable they were until a plumbing problem was fixed.

We were assured they would be up and running by lunch time but that was not meant to be. Was it my free-wheeling capitalist asshole that might have been to blame? Were there Chechen rebels aboard our ship dropping rogue BMs in the dead of the night? Did I warn my colleague about the toilet before he woke up in the morning and took a wicked dump he unknowingly couldn’t flush? The answer to all these was, “No.” It was just a plumbing problem and they assured us after lunch the inconvenience would be over by dinnertime.

I felt okay but the worry was increasing. I’d already eaten breakfast and lunch. Two full meals on top of the ones I consumed but had not passed from the day prior. I could hold out till dinner, but should I eat anything? If I do that’ll be three plus meals inside my body, slowly digesting and pushing on my rectal shelf, increasing in pressure with each passing minute. But if I didn’t eat I would go hungry. My stomach would constrict further pushing down through my system all the food I was trying so hard not to pass. It was a classic Catch Twenty-pooh.

I decided to trust in it being fixed by dinner. After all I wasn’t the only person on board going through this. Everyone else had to be in the same boat…literally. They couldn’t have the toilets down for a full day…could they?

They could.

I cut off all unnecessary movement after dinner as to not encourage any metabolic function. I simply laid in bed and tried to fall asleep. I wish I had brought David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with me. A page and a half of that thousand page piece of shit and I’m out like a light. It’s like a double dose of Valium, except Valium isn’t so pompous. We get it. You’re a good writer. Now try writing something people would enjoy. Anywho, at this point in time it’s been 15 hours since the toilets went down and I’ve resigned myself to an uncomfortable sleep.

The following morning I awoke to start my shift, having just spent the last eight hours dreaming I worked at the Tootsie Roll factory (whatever that means). It has been 24 hours since the toilets went down. I need to shower in the morning because I’m of Italian ancestry and stereotypes are true but I’m worried that the warm water is going to invigorate me a bit too much and get things flowing in the foofy department. I’m torn but decide to risk it because I have got some fuckin’ oily skin. It keeps me looking youthful but the cost is socially embarrassing acne (Does anyone out there know if Proactive really works because I’m at that point when I’ll try just about anything. Plus Vanessa Williams is their spokesperson and she’s no slouch. Anybody see The Eraser?). So I’m showering, lathering up my albeit acne scarred but nonetheless muscular, tone, cut body with Dove’s new Cool Moisture soap which is infused with cucumber and green tea and matches the fragrance of my Estee Lauder Daily Wear Plus facial crème perfectly when it hits.

This question goes out to my male readers because my female readers are not equipped anatomically speaking…and I don’t think I have any female readers (even my mom told me she stopped reading months ago). Okay here goes: Have you ever had to shit so badly your balls hurt? Because that’s the kind of pain that hit me while I was in the shower. I was relaxed, warm and awakening, and then BAM! It just hit. One way or another I was about to hit Ploppingrad Square (The bottom of our toilets are square not elliptical or round like you normally find…hence Ploppingrad Square.) with an unholy maelstrom of Borscht Bombs.

I tried to hold it. Not only because I would be unable to flush it but because my colleague had already thoroughly carpet bombed Ploppingrad the day prior and the havoc he wreaked upon the Square was yet to be swept away. So there I am, still wet from my shower, coming to terms with pooping on another man’s pile of day old pooh when I thought of World War II, and the Allied bombing of Dresden. A gruesome, violent and catastrophic event that, although widely argued was a strategically pointless act of aggression, needed to be done. So I grimaced, thought of the morale bolstering speeches of Winston Churchill, and did what needed to be done. The Blockade at Ploppingrad had been broken.

Join me in a few days when I write of my latest adventure entitled: Where the Fuck Can I Find Some Toilet Paper Because I Sure as Hell Ain’t Using My Hand.

I tell ya, life at sea isn’t for everyone. You have to be tough. You have to be able to, at least in my personal experience, go for at least 24 hours without taking a Scooby. Oh and I know you young mavericks out there think you can hold it forever, but when you get out on that roiling sea and some odd pickled potato salad/coleslaw combination isn’t sitting well with you we’ll see how long you last.

*While on watch I was fortunate enough to see a pod of about 20 Pantropical Spotted Dolphins swim under and alongside our boat for a few minutes. Absolutely beautiful creatures and they were so close you could have reached out and touched them if you didn’t mind falling into the ocean. They were close but not touchable close. Gorgeous though, the way they glided and crested through, into and out of the water. There were even some cute little baby dolphins swimming along in the mix. I must say it’s stuff like that that makes it easy to put up with all the hardships.