JUNEAU, ALASKA — Diagonally, over the bartop, some cruise ship bitches are laughing like it’s their first time outside the fucking mall. Further through, his biker sunglasses diverting a waterfall of grey hair, Bob Cole is playing covers centre stage at the Alaskan Hotel bar, est. 1913.

Besides all the town’s ethnic landmarks (totems, Russian church), it’s a rare and welcome respite from a shopping-strip mainstreet designed entirely to purse-rape everyone with a cruise ship lanyard. I actually heard the sentence, “Money’s for wasting.” Rich. I guess literally. Cole hesitates, tests the waters, before breaking into David Allan Coe’s “I’d Like to Fuck the Shit Right Out of You.” Holy shit: yes. After several days aboard the Good Ship Cottontop, a cruise-ship adventure story too retarded to explain, I’ve finally found my people. Don’t get me wrong — I love small Filipino bartenders looking around before telling George W. Bush jokes. My sanity has basically hinged on pretending I’ve been on an intergalactic cruise and they’re lovable aliens. Still, Cole brings me planetside, as we say in Starfleet.

He’s a big guy, no sleeves except the tattoo ones, hair and beard via Lebowski, and perched onstage in front of him, a conspicuous tip jar. We’re maybe too polite about this kind of thing down in Canada. The stage jar is a bitchin’ great idea, like the busker’s open guitar case except that everyone in attendance gets to see what a hotshot you are dropping a dollar into the coin pitcher.

“I’d like to thank you for putting up with my ass today,” he almost departs with, finally succumbing to an offer of “boobies,” keeping him under the guitar for a final strum. I really like that half the gentlemen here have beards. They sing along to Kenny Rogers’ ”Ruby” as if they too are soon-to-die vet cuckolds, and they too, it seems, are “against the wind” when it comes time to declare their customs.

The cruise ship music, in the meantime, has been a total fucking mess. Darlene and the Hot Cats? Was that their actual name — or did part of my brain just do that to keep me from hip-punching another old person complaining about their tea being the wrong temperature? The funny thing about cruises is they actually spend a lot of time and money failing to make any worthwhile music. In what’s called the Van Gogh Theatre aboard the Statendam where I now somehow fucking live, a bunch of jazz dancers flopped around in front of neon signs signalling the names of places. I imagined myself for a brief instant in a unitard doing the splits in front of a collection of lightbulbs that spelled out LEDUC as my groin area ripped open and, just for fun, losing control of my anus. Which, as it turns out, happens quite often when you feed a bunch of 70-year-olds tacos 24 hours a day.

Dara and I tried to make it to the black and white ball last night, but things take awhile on the ocean, so we ended up hanging out at what felt like some distant cousin’s wedding up in the Crow’s Nest — classic cuts. The long couches are excellent, reminding me of the numerous humpback whales I saw leaping out of the water at each other early this morning. But the music was shit. As usual. My great-aunt spent about 10 minutes complaining when Darlene and the Hate Cats (or whatever they’re called) did a Barbra Streisand cover. “I hate modern music,” she hissed, paying for, well, everything. But compared to songs from A Star Is Born, the night ended horribly, especially as the ocean decided to annoy us all night by shaking us left and right every 10 seconds. Nothing to make us sick, just awake all night.

Anyway, none of this compared to the fact a few days earlier, at a Calgary art party, the DJ played Spirit of the West twice. Honestly, that shit ruined my whole fucking trip.