A heavy breeze blew, making the 75-degree air seem closer to 60, as I stood, air-drying, on an outcropping of rocks that jutted into the Atlantic Ocean. I stood watching a mammoth cruise ship sail upon the turquoise waters that surround the southernmost port in the continental United States.

This day actually brought five of these gigantic cruise ships, along with their occupants, that would nearly double the population of the island I stood upon.

"You know they only get six inches to the gallon," my friend, Jeff Paradise, said, as we watched the cruise ship dock. After another minute, he added, "That is why we went to war."

For some reason, this statement hit me pretty hard. As I watched the thousand or so people standing on the deck, waiting for their few hours on the beaches of Key West, I realized the irony of this statement.

For the past week or so, I've been going crazy trying to find out the fuel efficiency of a cruise ship. Six inches to the gallon is just ridiculous -- there is no way that a gallon could be burned for so little real estate.

However, there are usually between 1,000 to 2,500 people on board. This means that these six inches go a much longer way, as many people are traveling on the same vessel. For the sake of argument, I'll use 2,000 as the number of people on a cruise vessel in all of my comparisons.

Just using the average Caribbean cruise, which travels somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 nautical miles, each person burns up about 63 gallons of fuel, or about $113 worth at the pumps.

This may not seem like much; yet, this is also a relatively short trip. A cruise from London to New York would roughly burn 36.7 million gallons of fuel, inflating these numbers greatly. For an easy comparison, I'll stick with the Caribbean scenario.

On this make-believe trip, 126,720 gallons are burned on the 400-mile trip.

I decided to compare the distance traveled on the same amount of fuel with a Chevrolet Suburban and a Honda Civic Hybrid. If the passengers of the cruise ship were to instead take their 63 gallons of fuel and use it to drive, they would get much, much farther.

If they chose to drive a Suburban in city conditions the entire trip, they would travel 882 miles -- more than double the length of the cruise. If they were to drive the Civic Hybrid, also in city conditions, they would travel 2,835 miles -- almost coast to coast, if the entire country were one huge city.

Enough with the theoretical math problems that are making my head explode.

I understand that cruise ships use a completely different fuel than cars; it's much heavier and burns less clean. I also understand that cars, except maybe the Pope-mobile, do not yet have the ability to drive over water. Really, these two variables are not too important in this equation. I'm just trying to show how stupid cruises are.

I mean, six inches to the gallon? Let's be real here. On the same note, Chevy Suburbans are pretty stupid, too -- unless of course you have four sets of quintuplets and a commercial drivers license.

I'm not an envirofreak; my heart doesn't bleed when a tree gets cut down or when a squirrel gets run over by a moped on campus.

That's just it though; you don't have to be an envirofreak to be mystified by the aforementioned numbers.

I'll have to admit, I hate cruises. I see nothing in this world more pointless and annoying than floating around on the ocean, stopping for two hours on a random beach (so you can say you've been there), and then loading back onto the boat. I'm not sure where this disdain for cruises comes from, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it has to do with Speed 2 -- a horrific hour and a half that I still struggle to wipe out of my memory.

I really don't like old people, and that may be a large reason I don't mesh so well with cruises. I'm not too fancy with the idea of floating around the Caribbean with a bunch of grandmas in bathing suits, and a bunch of grandpas calling me "sonny" and lecturing me because my generation has no appreciation for the lost art of shuffleboard.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'm not too crazy about hanging out with a bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds who are celebrating the fact that they can drink in international waters by getting trashed off one Corona and a piña colada.

The thing that pisses me off the most about these cruise ships though, is this: We are in Iraq because of these people who take their six inches to the gallon with little thought. We are at war with al-Qaida so that these people can float around in luxury. These aren't the people sweating in the 120-degree desert. The closest these people will get to war is the TV tuned into CNN at the pool bar.

Such is the nature of our society. Let the rich make the choices and relax while the poor go off to fight the battles.

I just hope the captain's keeping an eye out for the Bermuda Triangle -- wouldn't want you all to just disappear.