Sunday, April 28, 2013

"Ice Machine! Dead Ahead!" - Cruising Route 66 (Sort of)


Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Cruising Route 66

“Come aboard; we’re inspecting you…” 

-      Paraphrasing a line from the Love Boat theme

Foreign-owned bulk carriers of humans have permitted a number of those humans to come to grief the last few years, tragedies which apparently seldom interrupt the clinking of the coins in the counting-houses of the owners.

Neither do those appointed to protect American interests and lives seem much interested in the seaworthiness of flag-of-convenience ships; in this they are not unlike their fellow civil servants who pretend to oversee slaughterhouses in the middle west.  The democratically-elected government of the United States is no more concerned with lives than was the board of directors of the White Star Line.

Until the MV Lyubov Orlova phase of cruising is over, vacationers might want to reconsider the Great American Highway, the ownership of which has not yet been surrendered to our masters in China.  To advance the cause of stayin’ alive by stayin’ in the USA, a few conspirators recently gathered around a battered table in a dank cellar illuminated only by a dripping candle and drew up a manifesto on why a motel room along Route 66 is far superior to a prettily-decorated cell lost somewhere along a confusing corridor of identical cubes on Deck 14C:

1.   A motel never needs lifeboats.

2.   Motel toilets not only flush, they flush into a functioning waste disposal system, not into the hallways.

3.   There is no possibility of a motel sinking at sea.

4.   Motel guests don’t all suffer the same sickness at the same time.

5.   Beneath the motel there are no hot, noisy caves of Nibelungs toiling anonymously.

6.   Raw sewage isn’t likely to flood the motel, but if it does you can step outside and walk away from it.

7.   Pirates don’t hijack motels.

8.   “My Pancreas Must Go On” – no one ever inflicted onto the world an insta-emo song about the persistence of body parts after the destruction of a motel.

9.   The night manager cannot possibly run the motel onto rocks.

10. No one ever fell off the porch of a motel and drowned in an asphalt parking lot.

11. Motion sickness is not a problem in a motel.

12. The desk clerk doesn’t search through all your stuff and confiscate your beverages, your snacks, your Swiss Army Knife, and your dignity.

13. No buffets of food fermenting at room temperature.

14. No tipping the caretakers.

15. Your motel room does not sit atop 700,000 gallons of fuel.

16. Finally, there is no seaman on watch atop the roof of a motel along a desert highway crying down to the office “Iceberg!  Dead ahead!”   

“Ice machine!  Dead ahead!”  Now that’s much better.


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