I’m on a boat! I’m on a boat!
Everybody look at me, ’cause I’m sailing on a boat!
— The Lonely Island (ft. T-Pain), “I’m on a Boat”
For years, it was an inside joke.
If anyone at dinner mentioned a boat, a beach, a cruise, or even a puddle, I knew what was coming: the Poop Cruise story. Parisa would describe a Carnival cruise she took where, on the way back to port, the ship’s engines caught on fire and they ended up drifting — turning a four-day vacation into a ten-day nightmare. She’d talk about the toilets not working, the biohazard bags, the tent cities on deck, and the general unraveling of civilization. She’d even describe how she spent days wearing a hotel bathrobe because they had no clean clothes left, a detail so iconic that it actually made The New York Times. (“Parisa Safarzadeh … packed mostly bikinis and sarongs,” the reporter wrote, “anticipating sunny Cozumel, Mexico. Instead, she found herself wrapped tightly in a bathrobe as night temperatures dropped below 40 degrees.”) It became one of her greatest hits, told with the same rhythm and detail every time. At this point, I’d heard the story so often I felt like an honorary survivor minus the trauma and the bathrobe.
Admittedly, I always thought it was strange that she called it the Poop Cruise. I figured it was just her nickname for the story. A little gross-out flourish added for dramatic effect. Then, this summer, the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Poop Cruise dropped, and I realized everyone called it that. Apparently, “Poop Cruise” wasn’t her invention; it was the official, crowd-sourced title of the whole ordeal. Which, in hindsight, says a lot about both humanity and branding. Suddenly, it wasn’t just one of Parisa’s dinner-party stories; it was part of the national dialogue. Everyone was talking about it. Even Bill Simmons devoted a segment to it on The Rewatchables (“You couldn’t script this — it’s Titanic meets Survivor meets Jackass”). That’s when it hit me: she hadn’t been embellishing; she’d been under-selling it.
For those of you that didn’t watch the Netflix documentary, the story still boggles the mind. The Carnival Triumph left Galveston in February 2013 for a four-day pleasure cruise to Mexico. But when an engine fire knocked out the ship’s power, everything collapsed — air conditioning, plumbing, refrigeration, navigation. The vessel drifted for nearly a week, turning into a slow-motion sociology experiment: 4,200 people marooned in the Gulf of Mexico, improvising new rules for hygiene and sanity. The show captures it all: the gallows humor, the on-deck tent cities (no AC), and the Coast Guard patrolling the waters for submarine pirates. It’s grotesque and human and oddly moving.
For the inaugural watch party, we invited a dozen or so friends over for the viewing, and in honor of the occasion, everyone showed up wearing bathrobes and captain’s hats. It started as a bit — a kitschy watch party for the story I’d heard a hundred times — but within minutes I was riveted. And then, there was Parisa on the lido deck of the ship wearing the infamous bathrobe, hair blowing in the wind as she and the other passengers stared at the smoke billowing from the back of the ship. A reluctant extra in a real-life disaster movie. Her friend Nick, apparently the only person aboard with both foresight and a GoPro, had filmed everything once the power went out. His footage of the crowds camping on deck, the dark hallways, and the surreal camaraderie, became the backbone of the film. Which means the story I’d heard a hundred times was suddenly playing out on my TV, but this time, the ending came with closing credits.
We’re all in the same boat, stayin’ afloat, for the moment.
— Ben Harper, “Same Boat Now”
As we watched the chaos unfold, I realized there was a Pulitzer novel hiding in there somewhere. Not a Titanic-style tragedy, but something messier and more philosophical. Something like Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s 1976 Pulitzer Prize winner — a novel that begins with an artist’s death and unravels into a meditation on spiritual decay, ego, and the desperate human need to find meaning amid absurdity. It’s part satire, part elegy, and part existential meltdown which is, also, a fair description of the Poop Cruise.
At its core, Humboldt’s Gift follows Charlie Citrine, a middle-aged writer who’s somehow both successful and falling apart. His mentor, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Von Humboldt Fleisher, has died broke and bitter, leaving Charlie with a box of letters and a lifetime of guilt. Charlie’s rich from a Broadway play he wrote about Humboldt — the kind of commercial hit that would’ve made his old friend roll over in his grave — but he’s stuck in lawsuits, alimony battles, and a relationship with a girlfriend who treats affection like a business transaction. Meanwhile, a wannabe gangster named Cantabile keeps showing up, dragging Charlie into situations that would be funny if they weren’t also slightly terrifying. Through it all, Charlie can’t stop philosophizing about art, death, and the possibility of a soul, trying to find meaning while his life (and his checking account) steadily collapse around him.
Charlie wanders through this collapsing world with a kind of wounded idealism, trying to honor Humboldt’s belief that art could rescue civilization even as everything around him suggests otherwise. Bellow’s writing mirrors that tension and at times can be exasperating with long, restless paragraphs that bounce between humor, frustration, philosophy, and slapstick. Chicago in the mid-1970s becomes a carnival of lawsuits, hustlers, gangsters, and spiritual noise, and Charlie can’t decide whether to rise above it or sink into it. The novel jumps from metaphysics to mobsters, from art theory to alimony payments, all driven by the same underlying question: what if genius, beauty, and moral seriousness no longer matter in a world increasingly shaped by convenience and spectacle? It’s funny and exhausting and very American. Swap the Midwest for the Gulf of Mexico and you’ve got the Carnival Triumph: a floating microcosm of people trying to maintain dignity while the civilized world, quite literally, breaks down around them.
When the power died, the Triumph became a Bellowesque metaphor come to life — a luxury liner stripped to its existential core. The air stopped circulating, the toilets overflowed, and the hierarchy of comfort collapsed. The same people who had argued over dinner reservations on Day One were sharing cigarettes and rations by flashlight on Day Five. Civilization, it turns out, is mostly plumbing and Wi-Fi.
In Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow writes, “Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos.” By that definition, it’s hard to argue that finding humor in the horror of the Poop Cruise — the actual event, not just the documentary — doesn’t qualify as art. It’s the instinct to impose meaning, to spin narrative, to salvage a little dignity from disaster. And as I often joke with my daughter Macy, that’s the beauty of art — the way it gives shape to the messy, the absurd, and the unmanageable. Nick’s GoPro footage is chaotic, gross, and occasionally beautiful, an unintentional masterpiece of American absurdity.
If Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries found grace in the quiet, ordinary patterns of life, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift chases meaning through chaos — talking faster, thinking harder, and refusing to accept that “ordinary” might be enough. The Triumph may have lost power, but it generated the one thing Bellow believed would outlast decay: story.
By the time the credits rolled at the viewing party, we were laughing and a little awed. Not because the story was funny (though it is, in a dark, Kafka-at-sea sort of way) but because she’d lived through it and still told it with humor. And maybe that’s the real Humboldt’s Gift: the ability to stand ankle-deep in chaos, recognize the absurdity, and still find something worth writing down.
Because sometimes, the only thing separating tragedy from comedy — or art from sewage — is a GoPro and a good Wi-Fi signal.
