Here and there across America, retirement homes will set you back upwards of $6,000 to $9,000 a month. I am not talking about a full-on nursing home, I am talking about an assisted living situation where people who can’t cook or clean for themselves get a little daily help. In most other ways, these seniors are pretty self-sufficient. $9,000 is a boatload of money. And in that statement is the answer to this unpleasant time of life.

A cruise can be purchased for about $1,000 a week. No, it is not cheap. But still, think about that for a moment – a nice room with a view that is always more exciting than looking at a parking lot and a gazebo no one ever uses.

The housekeeping on a cruise is better than you can get at many 5-star hotels. If you leave for breakfast, when you get back an hour later, your room is perfect. The cruise also offers all you can eat from a buffet that is usually pretty impressive (elephant and whale-shaped ice sculptures surrounded by radishes carved to look like flowers). And your unstable gait won’t be noticed because half the people on onboard may be drunk at any given time.

You can hang out at the pool and see half-naked women (or men, if that is your fancy) for free. You can gamble in the casino. They have bingo. We all know retirement homes have bingo. So do cruises.

You can visit exotic locales almost every day. And, if you choose the Caribbean, it is even warmer than Florida, so those blood thinners will be no problem unless you get cut playing shuffleboard. All of this can be yours for about $4,000 a month – that is four smackers versus nine chumps. It this looking genius yet?

It doesn’t take a CPA to grasp the concept that this is a hell of a lot cheaper option than one of those retirement places where they treat you like you have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. The crew on a cruise will treat you like a king or queen, whichever you prefer. They have a doctor and a little hospital on board. And the staff at Adios Acres Retirement Village damned sure won’t fold your towels into animal shapes while you are out for a stroll.

Should you not wake up one morning, your friends can wheel you over to starboard and treat you like a pirate, slipping your leftovers over the rail and into the arms of Neptune – which is a pretty awesome way to exit this world if you have seen pirate movies. Actually, I suppose you have already exited, so this is just a disposal formality. It is, however, far cheaper than a $9,000 funeral. Okay, it is free. Your survivors can buy a lot of fruity, umbrella-topped drinks with nine grand, and think fondly of you with each sip. Or they can buy a good, used Honda Civic at Car Max. Or pay for nine more weeks of cruising. The options are endless.

Thank you, Ricardo, for this awesome idea. I hear there are even bigger discounts if you book early. I’m booking 20 years early. See you all in Grand Cayman.

The sky dropped like a liquid metal blanket. It rained horizontal for two straight days. Water Street earned its name. Winds topped out near fifty mph. It deterred neither the Marines nor us from doing what we came to do.

The recently renovated Hilton downtown, its bunker-like fortress bathed in purple light, its thick walls hugging the Cape Fear, was home to our small crew and the larger force of Marines most of the week. The management and staff of the hotel seamlessly accommodated every request and were so helpful to our shoot, not even Los Angeles could have matched their understanding of shooting schedules and the sometimes extreme customer service required. The same can be said of Wilmington in general. No one looks oddly at you when you pull out a camera and start cranking shots. They smile at you. Perhaps it’s because 11% of their economy is fueled by film. Or just maybe it’s their wonderful attitude that fueled the film business to begin with.

The reflections of window lights, lamp posts and neon glowing across water-sluiced streets interrupted by hurrying patrons dipping in and out of the businesses leave a holiday-like memory that stays longer than the soaking grayness of the weather. Some rain is an intrusion. Some, however, we wear like a coat that embraces us, and while it doesn’t keep us warm, we desire its company.

The Frangista Motel sat sandwiched in cinderblock splendor beside Highway 98, pushing hard against the oyster-shelled two-lane in the front and the squeaky, white sand fronting the Gulf of Mexico in the back. The Frangista was no five-star resort. To my elementary mind at the time, it was a ten-star resort. It was pure, undiluted summer during a time when America was straddling a netherworld between dead soldiers in black and white and Technicolor, stoned hippies.

The place smelled like coconut suntan lotion laced with sea salt and the window units blew steaming air into the walkways outside, turning the inside into my Freon romance because we didn’t have an air conditioner at home.

The Frangista was alone and far away from the tourists in Panama City or Fort Walton. Mr. Woodall ran the motel and I remember him in the tiny office next to the postcard tree. I thought he had the best job in the world. He got to live in the place that I spent 51 weeks of the year wanting to be. Into this idyllic world came the dead dolphin.

Every afternoon when the sun went to Pensacola, we walked down the beach, poking at jellyfish and bothering sand crabs. There were no condo towers then, just sea oats and sand for miles. One afternoon, my cousin and I met a couple of older girls whom we tried to impress with our fearless jellyfish and crab grabbing (they were in 7th grade, we were in the 6th). It was a big deal. These girls were from Canada, a foreign country so removed from our rural routines, they might as well have been Russians. One wore a Canadian flag on the seat of her bikini. I felt like saluting. We were working our manly mojo when the wind shifted and the smell of death chased the girls’ coconut aroma into the ocean.

Up ahead a torpedo-sized lump lay beached by the low tide. My cousin looked at me. We both knew it was something big and something not alive, perhaps a large redneck that had washed up after falling off a deep-sea fishing boat in the wake of 16 beers. If there is one thing growing up in Alabama teaches you, it is the gift of dead animal-sniffing.

It was a chance to impress these Canucks, however, with our tough, Southern upbringing. Barfing in the sugary sand was not part of the plan. Sometimes, there are things even Alabamians can’t stomach. A dead dolphin the size of a sofa is one of them.

The porpoise was putrid and swollen and tangled in mats of seaweed. Gulls had gouged chunks out of the puffy head. Hundreds of little crabs scurried around the wrecked beast. Our eyes burned. The stink was thick in our noses. The girls stood in hands-over-mouth horror. My cousin found a broken chunk of bamboo, a remnant of a fisherman’s pole, and we pushed at the engorged side of the corpse. Mistake.

An angry vileness of maggots and crabs and goo rushed out. It reminded me of my uncle after eating a pound of barbecue and drinking six Schlitz. Instant nausea. We spewed our shrimp dinners into the emerald waves. Canadians are not impressed by vomit. It was not my proudest moment.

We never saw the girls again. Their families packed in the night and drove back to sanity. My cousin and I revised the story to be that of a stranded shark we pushed back into the surf as it ungratefully chomped at us both, our queasiness turning to Cousteau-ness in the retelling.

When I see the maple leaf Canadian flag now, I think about that girl’s butt and dead dolphins.

Light ceased in all forms, both artificial and natural, as if the ability to see was sucked away to a deep place. The floor tilted at a 45-degree angle; the television leaped from the cabinet and into my chest, throwing me back onto the bed. A wicked sound moaned through the building. Rumbling,
screaming shimmers quivered the concrete substructure and then heaved grinding concrete against metal, breaking glass all around me. In the vortex of sound it was difficult to tell where the evil symphony came from. It came from everywhere. My mind tried to grasp my situation rationally, but emotions urged me to do one thing: Open the glass door and jump out the hotel window.

I did.

Outside, I could see. The gray morning haze seemed peaceful as calm air met turbulent earth. I fell one story and landed perfectly on a narrow wall below. Glass fell around me as the world rocked. The building lurched back and forth and a wave of water from the pool two stories above me
broke over the roof and crashed into the street below. I ran down the thin wall and leaped or was thrown into the upturned barbs of a palm tree and slid painfully to the wet grass another story below. Directly behind the hotel, a beach cottage chimney fell into a jumbled pile of bricks. To my
right, a parking lot filled with cars rolled like a waterbed, knocking the mirrors off in the bumping as light poles swayed like pines in a hurricane. To my left, an elevator shaft fell into the street in a tangle of concrete, I-beams and steel cables. Sparks exploded atop transformers and everywhere
broken glass bounced as the ground shook. The sound of billions of glass objects breaking all at once across hundreds of square miles is not easily forgotten.

Before I could get to my feet, a large, muscled man with long hair, wearing nothing but his underwear, landed on top of me, having leaped from the third floor. Pain shot through my back as we hit the ground. He was screaming in a language I could not make out – and, oddly, his breath smelled like, of all things, Old Spice aftershave. Very strange even for 4:30 a.m.

In the chaos, all I could think about was one of my friends seeing this half-naked guy and me, rolling in the grass. If I died there, what would this look like to my family? I pushed the shaken man away and tried to run on the rolling ground. I landed on my knees not three steps away. More
broken glass.

The Northridge Earthquake had sliced through the Los Angeles basin in destructive, dry waves, collapsing freeways and buildings, injuring more than two thousand people and killing several dozen more – a fortunate miracle due to the early morning hour when most people were asleep. Had it
come at rush hour, the death toll would have been horrendous.

I found Robin and Tom and Roni, my traveling companions, walking in the dark looking stunned. The hotel did a name count and gave us white bathrobes to keep warm. This was pre-cell phone and I needed to find a way to call home, back in Gaithersburg, Maryland, so I walked in the cold, dark morning toward the Santa Monica Pier. The predawn sky was stunning. Sirens wailed all over the city and dogs howled in harmony. People roamed about in a catastrophic daze.

I checked each phone. No service. As I was about to turn around, I checked the last phone and got a dial tone. I called my wife and she described on TV what I could not see – L.A. in flames, bridges and buildings crumbled. She said it looked like the entire city was destroyed, and yet, as I
looked around me, I saw little damage to match the images on CNN back home. I saw that later as we drove around the humbled city.

Over the next few days we stayed in several hotels, finished our shoot amid large aftershocks and finally left LAX on a 747 headed back to the East Coast five days later. About an hour into the flight, the plane rumbled and shook and the right side dipped as the pilot calmly told us we would be
making an emergency landing. We lost an engine, then another, then another. Apparently, by the time we touched down in Denver between dozens of emergency vehicles, we were flying on one engine. Me – 2. Grim Reaper – 0.

I looked out the airplane window into the cold Colorado sunshine as the sirens wailed around us. I felt no emotions. After surfing the carpet of my inclined hotel room and being hit in the chest by a TV and jumping out of my hotel window and tight-roping a wall into a palm tree and jumping a few
stories down and landing on a vibrating street and being bronco’d by a semi-naked Fabio lookalike who’d swilled some Old Spice on his escape from under the sloshing pool water raining down in tune with elevators falling and parking lots dancing – a simple near-plane crash seemed almost
normal.

In my twisted tour of hotelry (some were technically motels at the time), I have become acutely aware of the random behavior patterns of hotel room transients, having walked down a lot of funkily carpeted hallways in these human file cabinets.

Why is the toilet paper so thin in a room that costs $320 a night? Are they trying to match the thin sheets on the rock-hard bed with the neck-breaking pillows? Why are there cigarettes burns in the no smoking rooms? Why do hotel towels feel like number 2 sandpaper?

What are those stains on the carpet? Does the same person buy those hideous, flowery-looking bedspreads for every interstate hotel in America? What are those stains on the bedspread? Does anyone ever sit in that lonely chair in the corner, or is that just used to toss clothes on? What is that stain on the chair? Why is the TV circa 1989? What is that stain on the screen? And what exactly is that smell? The “hotel smell?” Is it like “new car smell” with stains?

My family checked into a hotel in Tulsa where someone had been cleaning fish in the tub. Brim. There was the hotel east of Calgary that flooded in the middle of the night, causing all of the balconies to pour like waterfalls. There was the Miami hotel with the humidity so thick water dripped from the ceiling like a cave. There was the Boston hotel with the amorously loud couple in the next room who sounded like the same amorously loud couple in hotels in New York, Dallas, Kansas City, Myrtle Beach, Atlanta, Virginia Beach, Cleveland, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Baltimore, Destin, Houston, New Orleans – these moaners were clearly following me.

I lived for a year in a room the size of a closet, at the Paramount Hotel in Manhattan. I have leaped from hotel windows in earthquakes, but have never tossed a TV from one, although I did stay in a room on Sunset Boulevard where Led Zeppelin tossed TVs onto the beautifully drugged people below while their friends roared down the halls on choppers. My stay was tame. In San Francisco, there was a dangerous looking hair in the tub that seemed like a leftover from the summer of love?

Christopher Walken, asked to see my watch during breakfast in a Hollywood hotel (yes, I thought of the scene in “Pulp Fiction”). I have shared elevators or breakfast proximity in that same hotel with Peter Boyle, Hall & Oats, Boy George, The Fine Young Cannibals (yeah, the 80′s), Gabriel Byrne, Terry Bradshaw, Britney Spears (I think) and about a dozen actors and musicians that I knew were famous but not famous enough for me to attach a name to the face.

At Shutters on the Beach, in the lobby, I had one of my shoes snagged by one of the children of Sean Penn and Robin Wright, and Penn brought back my shoe and apologized profusely. Sean Penn bringing me my shoe ranks up there with Arnold Schwarzenegger nearly ramming me with his Hummer in Venice Beach.

At 5 a.m. in an LA hotel, I got a call from a sultry woman who dialed room 515 and talked really nasty – for an hour. A friend told me that the mysterious woman has been making these random calls to hotels for years. Oddly, no stains in that room. Go figure.

The Moon Winx Lodge sign, erected in 1957 (on then – U.S. 11), gets more press than the motel gets patrons. Although the road is now called Alabama 215 and the busy travelers have long gone to interstate accommodations, the old place still stands in Alberta City against the industrial leftovers around it. The lodge itself has fallen into a state several levels below disrepair but the neon noir sign out front gleams fresh and inspires more than its share of verbiage by Southern writers.

You don’t just look at it, like a normal sign. It looks at you too. The moon has an eye out for anyone passing by. And like George Bush looking at Putin in Russia, it sees your soul. I shutter to think of what the old Moonface has witnessed. Generations of mental patients from Bryce Hospital stop to ponder its glare. Homeless people stop to inspect the classic neon. College students know it well and writers particularly are attracted to its Eisenhowerish old-schoolishness.

My wife and I, like so many people – including, obviously, the author of the Oxford American story – were college transients at the Capstone, which gave us our historical connection to the Moon Winx Lodge and its famous sign that shines a few miles west of Tuscaloosa and the University of Alabama. We passed that sign many times in my grunt-brown Vega or her fire-red VW Bug, traveling over to Arby’s or IHOP in the late 1970s. From the picture I am looking at accompanying the wonderfully written article , the old Moon Winx sign is still as uniquely beautiful as ever.

Like the first time I drove past it in 1976 and turned around and parked and ogled it up close, my eye kept drifting from the words in the story back to the picture of the hypnotic sign, which. Darned nice piece of well-tended neon. Even though the joint has gone to seed and kudzu has apparently checked into a few rooms, the sign has held its own. Maybe there are vacancies inside, but there are none for the sign. Hotel California may have had its own song, but the Moon Winx Lodge has its own religion – and the magnificent neon is its symbolic, glowing talisman.

An Ode To The Moon Winx Lodge Sign weaves a tale about how that sign is one of the Best Things About the South. While I have my own list of Southern favorites like cathead biscuits wrapping south Alabama link sausage, Autumn football, late afternoon thunderstorm mist and dammed up rivers that give you an urge to fish and ski, I agree with Mr. Martone. The Moon Winx is up there on the list. Southerners have no shortage of Odes (like my Ode To The Smell Of Lighter Fluid Burning On Charcoal in the last blog).

If you’re ever down in Tuscaloosa (worth an Ode in itself), go by Dreamland and eat some ribs; walk the columned campus of the University and climb the balconies of Woods Hall; check out the geyser at Lake Tuscaloosa; then, around nightfall, take University Drive east toward Alberta City and look to your left. The Moon will be looking out for you.

“What is this?” says the man in the dark suit, looking over his friend’s shoulder.

“I watched a movie,” says the light-suited associate who is checking out.

“Regular movies are $8. That’s $11,” says the dark suit man.

“What?” says light suit man. He turns to the clerk, a small, very Southern older woman.  “Why is this movie $11?”

Before she can answer, his friend starts laughing. “You watched porn!”  says his friend loudly. Another woman in the lobby shakes her head and walks away.

“Hey, I watched a movie.” says light suit in a high-pitched voice. “Doesn’t say what it was on here.”

“You watched porn! ” continues the dark-suited man loudly. The clerk looks at them, expressionless. Dark suit smacks the bill with his hand. “This isn’t ‘Syriana’ here. This is ‘Skanky Bimbos From Hell’ or something, pal. Regular movies are $8. Porn is $11. You watched porn! On the company dime, too! Man!”

Light suit is flustered. His brow furrows and he slides the bill across the counter to the clerk.

“Look, I didn’t watch porn,” he says, shaking his head and handing the clerk his credit card.

The little old Southern lady behind the counter looks sternly over her glasses directly into his face and leans in as she takes his card with hesitation, holding it gingerly, pinched between two fingers. She looks just like the woman who plays piano at church.

“The name of the movie is not on the bills.” She uses his credit card to point at the $11 charge.  “I don’t know what you watched here.” She rubs the card across the number with a righteous scratch. But I know one thing.” She taps his credit card on the amount of the movie. ” $11 is a naaasty movie.”

She drags the word “naaasty” out to bring her disgust home. She drops the bill on the counter like it’s a dirty Kleenex that the guy just blew his nose on. Silence hangs in the hotel lobby air. Dark suit man walks away laughing to himself. Light suit man wants to disappear. I slide my plastic hotel key card across the counter toward the clerk, who is busy doing whatever clerks do behind counters in hotel lobbies. Light suit man looks at me, his eyes filled with pleading.

“I didn’t watch porn,” he says tersely.

I just nod and walk toward the door. Two other business associates have joined dark suit and they look at light suit alone at the counter in his shame. Dark suit spreads the story.

“Wait until accounting sees that Jim watched a bunch of naaasty movies last night.”

A bald man who looks like Larry David quickly jerks his bill up and looks at it. “The $11 ones?”