Thoughts I Had on the Creed Cruise

notes from a Cruise Journalism™ plus-one

Creed (and me, somewhere!)

Against my better judgment, in mid-April I boarded a cruise whose theme was the “Summer of ‘99.” My main memory from the actual summer of 1999 was that two of the ice dancers at my rink were learning a program to “Smooth” by Santana featuring Rob Thomas, which had just come out, and so I had to listen to that song roughly one hundred times per day. At age seven my musical tastes were more in line with the Spice Girls–Britney–Backstreet Boys contingent of factory-churned bubblegum pop, but this cruise was not for me. This cruise was for people who spent the summer of 1999 listening to Creed.

The reason I was on this cruise was because my fiancé is an extremely talented journalist who was writing an article about the Creed cruise, and the Creed cruise was kind enough to give him a plus-one. At first when he asked if I wanted to go on the Creed cruise I laughed and said “no thank you” and then I realized I have but one precious life and also unlimited PTO and so I said “I think I would like to go on the Creed cruise.”

Cruise Journalism™ is sort of a fraught concept in a post-David Foster Wallace world, and I truly believe only Luke could pull off such a perfect piece (go read it!!!!), in part because it’s less about the cruise and more about Creed, which remains a fascinating cultural object. And because I am too cowardly to do Cruise Journalism™ myself, instead I spent my four days aboard the Norwegian Pearl making a Notes app list of every thought I had while on a cruise with a writer who was doing Cruise Journalism™.

This is that list.

Day One

• We’ve left shore and Creed has started playing on the pool deck. They rock. The man next to me has torn off his shirt and yelled, “SCOTT FUCKING STAPP!!!!!!!!”¹

• Demographics-wise, it’s about 70 percent fiftysomething hetero white couples with sunburns. I would alternatively describe it as “the kinds of people who make custom T-shirts to go to Disneyworld.”

• That thing people say about how white people don’t move their bodies at concerts is true for Creed fans, with the exception of Shirtless Scott Stapp Yeller.

• Shirtless Scott Stapp Yeller yells something else, and this time there’s some emotion in it. The other big pink men in front of him don’t turn around, almost as a sign of respect. They’re letting him have his moment in private. It’s sort of beautiful.

• This silent kindness between men has reminded me that I don’t really belong here and that I’m kind of intruding on other people’s vacations, and this makes me embarrassed for both me and them. Like walking in on somebody in the bathroom and nobody’s sure who it’s worse for.

• We’ve acquired the inaugural Creed cruise margarita. Luke says, “How blessed are we to call this a job?” and I’m like, “I know!” and he’s like “Just think of the stories we’ll tell our future kids someday" and I am like 💘😇💋💝💗🥰💘

• Scott Stapp says “God is good,” almost like he heard him.

  

• After the show I’m dipping my feet in the pool and a woman asks the lifeguard his name. He says “Jeffrey.” She says, “Wow, I would have guessed ‘Juan.’” Jeffrey brushes off this encounter with a suaveness that demonstrates he has lots of experience with racist cruise passengers. I hope he gets paid one million dollars per year.²

• In the sake bar we meet a woman who within sixty seconds has told us that she cheated on her first husband with her current husband who also cheated on his first wife to be with her. Whatever that gene is that makes strangers immediately tell you their secrets, I think I have been blessed with it.

Day Two

• I’ve been sort of ambiently fascinated by the semi-ironic mullet renaissance of the past few years, which has a decent-sized presence among the Norwegian Pearl’s twenty- and thirty-something men. Like, what does having a mullet signify in 2024? I think in a lot of cases³, it’s men trying to communicate that they, to use the despised Hinge phrase, “don’t take themselves too seriously” by essentially creating a joke out of their appearance. But because mullets are trendy now and also require a fair amount of upkeep, it’s like, well clearly you do care about your appearance, so it’s skirting that line in an admittedly quite clever way. I also think mullets attempt to say, “Yes, I’m poking fun at the historically redneck conservative connotations of this haircut but only to show just how not-conservative I am,” which is why I think a lot of women find it sexy in a sort of aspirational-relatable way and why it’s still possible to get your feelings hurt by a situationship with a guy with a mullet.

• There’s another demographic here, mostly older folks, who love to sprinkle the words “positivity” and “healing” into normal conversation. I have come to understand that using these words means you have experienced extreme tragedy, and when they talk I nod along and say “yeah” even though I haven’t.

• The participants of the belly-flop contest are exactly the people you’re envisioning.

• In the pool I meet a 67-year-old who, upon learning my name, tells me that Rebecca is also the name of his partner’s alter ego when they have sex. The partner is wearing a rhinestone visor and is extremely embarrassed by this, but I am laughing because I’m pretty sure this is what cruises are all about.

• Next to us is a solo-traveling millennial who announces that she started watching hentai porn when she was 10. The 67-year-old tells us he has worked in Vegas and Atlantic City and says that he could, if requested, get any porn star’s number we want. I continue to laugh and laugh.

• A woman hands us homemade bracelets that say “Rock The Boat With Creed, 3 Doors Down, and Buckcherry!” Her friend’s arm is covered in dozens of celebrity autograph tattoos.

• By far the freakiest thing I see today is someone putting milk and cereal into a water glass and drinking it.

• At dinner there is an extremely annoying and very loud table near us. I remind myself that, having been publicly shushed a lot in life, I must stand in solidarity with my fellow Loud People. The more I think about this the more I have convinced myself that actually everyone should be Loud, and that there’s nothing uglier than silently watching and judging other people be Loud and fun.

Day Three

• We dock in the Bahamas, directly next to several other cruise ships that are bigger and fancier than ours.⁴ One of them is a Disney cruise from which families and children are pouring out. The song the Creed cruise has decided to blast for all to hear is “She Fucking Hates Me.”

• Looking up at all the cruise ships from the dock is terrifying.⁵ How are they that big? They should not be that big. Nothing should be that big.

• We have a day to ourselves in Nassau. One thing I love about Luke is he’s very fun to travel with, but sometimes he likes to pretend he’s Anthony Bourdain and so instead of going to the beach that’s conveniently right near where the cruise ship docks, he’s found a cute little non-touristy beach only a 45 minute walk away that has great Google Reviews. What Luke does not realize is that the 45 minute walk is on the side of a highway and deeply unpleasant, and that once we get there there is no food besides a gas station, no shade, nowhere to get an ice cream or one of those drinks in coconuts, nothing to do outside of “being at a beach.” By the time we get there I am (rightfully, in my opinion) pissed off, and so Luke is pissed off that I’m pissed off, and I can’t help but wonder why we always need to pretend so badly that we’re not tourists when we’re literally on a cruise.

• We go back to the tourist beach : )

• For $30 at the tourist beach you and a friend can ride on the water in an oversized bicycle thing with giant wheels. I say it looks sort of fun. Luke says it looks stupid. We both agree that they’re annoying to swim next to. I ask the girls in the giant water bike if it was worth the $30. They say “lowkey no.”

• After the somewhat disastrous day in the Bahamas I start to understand the appeal of cruises. A cruise is the opposite of the standard millennial mode of travel: On a cruise there’s no dealing with Ubers or figuring out how to get into your Airbnb or painstakingly comparing the Eater map to the Infatuation map or seeing which attraction has the best Google Reviews, no walking 45 minutes on the highway in 90 degrees. You’re on vacation every second you’re on the boat. The boat, of course, is tacky and not even pretending to be “authentic” and objectively evil in many ways, but what it does do quite effectively is free you from the burden of decision-making. For four glorious days, you get to be a baby again.

• Every nice thought I have about cruises become null and void when I eat some of the buffet mac and cheese for dinner. It’s kind of amazing how bad it is. I’ve never had bad mac and cheese in my life. I didn’t even think that was possible.

• While showering I realize I’m very sunburnt. Nothing makes me feel stupider than a sunburn. I am the sort of pale where people love to make smug little comments to me about remembering to wear my sunscreen but every once in a while I forget to reapply and end up with a massive fucking burn and then I have to walk around like the world’s hugest idiot while those same people give me pitying looks and say, “Ouch!!!!” as if I was delusional enough to think that maybe this time my skin would magically become Italian, although of course this delusional thought has crossed my brain many times, to no avail.

• Creed plays again. When Scott Stapp performs he looks like someone doing tai chi or a particularly rhythmic kind of yoga— he stands with his legs apart, one in front of the other, rocking back and forth, and often lifts his hands to the sky as if he’s singing to God.

• In bed that night, for the first time I am hit with the despair that David Foster Wallace warned was endemic to cruises. To be fair, he was famously prone to this way of thinking and remains the ur-"despair" guy, but still. Said despair can basically be boiled down to “I am in the middle of the ocean, an unswimmable distance from civilization, and should this vessel sink or catch on fire there is a high chance of death, but also I am supposed to be having fun and therefore every second I’m not proves there’s something deeply wrong with me.”

Day Four

• Luke interviews two mid-fifties sisters with matching smokey eyes and crunchy blonde curls. They have just returned from the Scott Stapp meet-and-greet and are disappointed he didn’t even bother to take off his sunglasses or speak to them at all. Watching Luke work is fascinating. He’s very good at interviewing. One of the women starts to cry, and I wish Scott Stapp had been nicer to her.

• Due to my growing cruise despair, I am also feeling a bit agoraphobic, and I realize how difficult it is to find a shady outdoor spot on a cruise ship and whether that’s intentional.

• The water is beautiful in this part of the ocean, almost pool-colored. I stare at it and think a lot about what would happen if I fell overboard and whether I could swim to the nearest boat or shore. I am convinced that I could even though I know I couldn’t.

• A strange thing: On every bar there are multiple signs that say “ASK ABOUT OUR CRAFT BEER,” but the only thing they have on tap is Stella Artois.

• Luke and I have spent basically all our downtime playing giant chess. I’d always thought of giant chess as one of those dumbass cheap amenities that landlords will put in an apartment complex or bar to appeal to millennials or whatever, but that was before I learned how to play chess. Now giant chess is my best friend. Every time we play, our fellow cruisers will walk by and make a cute comment, like “Check mate!” or “She’s got ya!” I eat it up every time.

  

• A woman is wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Scott Stapp that says “STAPP INFEXION.” By this point I am kind of over being on the Creed cruise but this T-shirt has greatly revived my spirits. I frantically make sure Luke has also seen it so it can be memorialized in journalism.

• The band Buckcherry performs a cover of Charli XCX’s “I LOVE IT.” If Charli XCX ever does a cruise, I vow that will be onboard.

• We attend karaoke that night⁶ and our seats are surrounded by a bunch of dudes. It’s one of those situations where I play the role of the Silent Idiot Wife because I’m too tired and sunburnt to really give it my all, socially, and anyway a lot of times in these scenarios what the group of men want is a Silent Idiot Wife to smile at them and laugh at their jokes, which is sort of fine because really that’s what most people want from anyone regardless of gender. I’m not even presupposing these guys are like, particularly sexist or whatever, it’s just a social phenomenon I’ve noticed in extremely hetero and/or conservative spaces. Plus, there’s something nice about it being the last night of the cruise, knowing that tomorrow I will no longer be the Silent Idiot Wife and go back to being the Loud Idiot Fiancée.

Day Five

• We spend the day waiting for our return flight at a nondescript Hilton where the only food option is from a market called “Herb’n Kitchen.” Perhaps it’s because of the sun or the exhaustion or the euphoria of finally being off the Creed cruise but we both find this hysterical.

• Another funny element here is that the ship’s wifi was so shitty that they blocked any app that uses audio or video, which meant that I couldn’t listen to the new Taylor Swift album until we got back on land. After four days of exclusively late nineties butt rock, I listen to all two hours and two minutes of The Tortured Poets Department. It’s fine. But none of it is as good as “One Last Breath.”

The End!

1. Scott Fucking Stapp is the lead singer of Creed. He used to be extremely hot. He’s still hot now, but in kind of an uncanny way.

2. Here is a reminder that all cruise lines are extremely evil and avoid paying fair wages by recruiting heavily from countries with few economic opportunities (in the case of our ship, the Philippines) and registering their companies in countries with shitty labor laws.

3. E.g. Kyle from Summer House and the now-cancelled big beefy guy from Love Is Blind.

4. “Like muscle cars lined up at a stoplight,” as DFW puts it in “Shipping Out.” On the jealousy he feels upon seeing a fancier cruise ship than his own (which itself was much fancier than the Norwegian Pearl): “I am suffering here from a delusion, and I know it's a delusion, this envy of another ship, but still it's painful. It's also representative of a psychological syndrome that I notice has gotten steadily worse as my' Luxury Cruise wears on, a mental list of dissatisfactions that started off picayune but has quickly become despair-grade.”

5. The lede of the Atlantic’s recent entrée into Cruise Journalism™ describes this very terror: “My first glimpse … brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again. The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots.”

6. They tragically do not play the Shania Twain song I requested, and Luke can’t even perform his classic (Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive") because some lady does it first!!!!