Pass The Dutchie ‘Pon The Left Hand Side

There’s an interesting fucking paradox about being drunk as shit all the time.  On the one hand, eating makes you sick, and on the other hand, not eating makes you sick.

My mind is truly going nuts now.  I just cannot get “Pass The Dutchie” out of my head.  It’s a really fucked up song to get stuck in your mind on repeat.  We’re doing it to ourselves deliberately because it is funny.  But I’m ready for it to be done. 

In general, this whole cruise idea is truly absurd.  I am wondering why I am on a Rick Springfield cruise.  I’m fucking stuck here, which is the 500 pound elephant in the room that I totally missed when I came up with this idea: What exactly am I going to do?  Laugh at everything?  I could do that at home for free.  What did I even think I’d want to do?  Watch stupid Rick Springfield concerts?  We haven’t even been doing that.  It’s not that interesting, believe it or fucking not.  Me and Jordan caught the tail end of Jessie’s girl and one other song the first night and we did not do Jack Shit for Springfield events yesterday.

The only way I can justify this experience to myself now that I am here, outside the Hallmark sentiment of “living life to its fullest” (which is a cop-out, by the way, if you want to get technical) is if me and Jordan make some money off of this.

Like the fucking asshole street cons everywhere in Jamaica, I want to be able to use this opportunity to my advantage and milk some fucking dough out of normal, good-hearted, hard-working people.

Because I’m now wasted.  My mind is looping in circles.  My body is falling apart at the seams.  I can’t keep down any food.  I’m in hilarious mode even when I’m asleep. 

I’m in a weird fucking land where you can sense danger everywhere you go.  It seems that everyone talks out the corner of their mouth here like they’re lying to you, and they are lying to you, and they aren’t even trying to appear honest, and they know you know they’re trying to fuck you over, and you know that they know that they know.  And it’s just too complex for me to take in within the space of only 6 short hours.  I like mental chess, but not in a place where the murder rate is off the charts.

You walk into a store and things suddenly get quiet because you’re from America and goddammit I just can’t live like that.

I don’t like being in a land where the main source of economic activity it seems is watching foreigners like a hawk and waiting for them to do something stupid.  I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

The fucking street smarts required to get by here are just too much for me, and I’m at least wise enough to know when I’m already beat, and since there are no record stores anymore apparently, and even if there were they would be evil con-artist record stores, and since I don’t smoke marijuana, and since I don’t know what the fuck else I would do here other than be in Jamaica simply because it is Jamaica, I am back on the boat.

But I’ll say this:  I’ve just got a sixth sense about danger.  I know when I’m beat and I know when the odds are too high to even risk playing.  I like to play, but right now I’m not out here to prove anything to anyone.  All I really want to do, like I said, is keep doing funny shit so I can laugh and make some easy money off of this thing.  I’ve already had a pretty insane trip.

But I will say this, too: the Jamaican people we talked to definitely were cool people.  You know? 

Everyone has to make a buck, and probably no one wakes up and decides that they’re going to rip people off for a living, rather than say, help people for a living, if they weren’t desperate.  It fucking sucks, but at least Jamaicans have got a rad sense of style, and they’ve got a laid-back attitude, and even though I couldn’t figure out what games they were running, that still says something about their intelligence.

Jordan made the comment that he thinks he could live in (handle the harshness of) Jamaica.  At his first impression even though he was drunk and exhausted and irritated, not to mention insulted by an asshole rastamon, he still dug the place.

It is pretty impossible for me to have a good time and relax here.  I seriously hope Grand Cayman is not this fucking severe.

“Pass The Dutchie” played over and over again is a potent, legal psychedelic.

The more time I get away from “Pass The Dutchie” the better and saner I feel.  Good fucking Christ if you only knew.

But as far as actual shit you would care about knowing, i.e., a trip report: we got off the boat, went to the beach to take a requisite quick dip in the ocean, took a taxi to a “record store” that was just a cell phone store with a few shitty used reggae cds, ate jerk chicken and pork (habanero heaven), and I got bugged so we bought some goofy souvenirs and came back to the boat to enjoy the sights and sounds of Jamaica from the comfort of the ship.