JADE MOUNTAIN HIGH

Fellas, it is shitty to go on vacation?

MONDAY PLANE THOUGHTS:

The DOJ is investigating the Fed, ICE is shooting unarmed protestors in the fucking face, and I am on a flight to St. Lucia, for a vacation with my boyfriend, a Diamond Medallion status guy. He got upgraded to first class, and I, a mere Platinum, am stuck in “comfort plus,” watching season three of Succession, which once felt like farce and now feels quaint, what with the politically neutral, fully-functioning FBI raiding an ersatz Fox News HQ over matters of sex trafficking, and a president who is still at least marginally beholden to the rule of law.

Upon arrival, we’ll have a one-hour drive from the airport to our hotel, much of it on switchbacking mountain roads, so I have packed over-the-counter motion sickness pills, the taking of which I have been looking forward to for weeks, like an addict. I was never big into pills, but I do love the effect of the first one of anything. I fondly recall getting my wisdom teeth extracted as a 20-year-old, and the groovy wave of the first post-op painkiller. After four hours, I took a double dose, and I puked.

The point is, I feel like a bit of an asshole going to a Caribbean resort, instead of getting out into the streets. Just because we still have commercial air traffic and vacations doesn’t mean shit isn’t falling apart. Will I regret this trip when, in six months, the midterm elections have been cancelled (which is what the most anxious people are predicting on Bluesky) and there’s no more work? Should my work at this time be more serious, or less?

There’s a real midwestern vibe on this plane. The woman across the aisle is reading a full-sized, full-color Caribbean Islands travel guidebook. A clutch of hetero couples in their early 40s boarded ahead of me; the men were wearing custom Hawaiian shirts with each others’ faces on them. Some day in twenty or thirty or more years, one of their kids will find one of those shirts hanging in a closet or jammed into a box, and their dad will be too old or fat to wear it, or he will be dead.

There’s an elderly couple next to me who said they came from Minneapolis and I want to ask them how things are going there, but who knows? As sweet as they seem, they might believe in the rapture and think ICE is doing a good job.

TUESDAY RESORT THOUGHTS:

The road between the hotel and the town is closed today for essential repairs to the electric lines, which means no ins and no outs from 10 am to 1 pm, and also the wifi will be down, according to a letter left in our bed – not on it, in it – and if I ever write a screenplay about a Caribbean resort murder, I will use that detail. Before I closed my eyes last night, I saw seven tiny lizards affixed to the ceiling above the bed, which itself is surrounded by mosquito netting. At about 3 am, the iPad on the nearby desk came alive.

“Welcome to Jade Mountain, I’m Charlie,” an alto voice purred. “How can I help you?” My boyfriend got up and kneecapped her, but about ten minutes later, Charlie again introduced herself and offered her kind assistance. Charlie is now suffocating in my closed suitcase.

We went to a pre-dinner welcome reception last night, on a terrace with stunning sunset views of the Pitons and complimentary beverages and elegant passed apps, among every possible iteration of resort wear, from adult cruise ship prom to Charleston polo club to Jimmy Buffett’s mechanic. The friendly and polished staff made excellent professional small talk, and a few of the couples gave off faint but unmistakable swinger-aspirational vibe.

“We’re not here to make friends,” I growled to my boyfriend, who couldn’t have agreed more.