vegas. baby. vegas.
So. Tired.
First of all, I completely suck at gambling. Or Vegas is just really good at it. Other things Vegas is really good at: feeding a zillion people at once, decorating, hospitality, drinks mixing. At first I thought I had been completely lied to about Vegas when I saw the kinds of people that were there. Expecting the beautiful people, it looked like these ham and eggers were just really happy they didn't have to do the dishes that day. Or comb their hair. Then I left the hotel and realized that we were staying at the Vegas equivalent of Lyle's liquor bar, the Circus circus, memorialized in Terry Gilliam's adaptation of Fear and Loathing. We hit Bellagio and Bally's and almost every other place.
The scale of the strip is way off. You can see something right there, and so you walk toward it. And walk, and walk, but it grows no closer. It just stays the same size, far, far away. I spent the whole time trying to figure it out, but all I learned was that confusion obeys simple addition. Many layers of it sealed tightly together and teaming up, they obfuscated and then totally eclipsed reality. If the "dude" of "the big lebowski" was the perfect person for L.A. at his time, then Hunter Thompson was the guy for Vegas at his. The essential energy of that's all gone now, the shapes are rounded and the colors are washed out and tauped pottery-barn style for the most part. The neon cowboy on Fremont street's bulbs are conspicuously half burnt-out and going ignored, and the overall feel is that the grit has been marginalized, the audacity that is taking place has been converted from a flamboyant, individual style-driven one to a homogeneous, size-driven, and less interesting-looking though equally impressive study in maximizing the numbers. That or I subscribed too enthusiatically to begin with to the myth of Vegas as recounted by the doctor of gonzo. Preposition, anyone? Sorry about that.
It may have always been this way for a someone of my disposition, a stupefying extravagance intoxicating enough in its own right. My greenbacked soldiers went dumbly and bravely into battle with the one-armed bandits, and against blackjack dealers, and one by one, and in larger groups (ouch), they all fell to the mighty and insurmountable enemy of statistics. You win some, you lose some, but over time, you always lose. An employee of the Krispy kreme doughnut shop unfamiliar with the nomenclature of standard deviation was nevertheless light-years from my conceptualization: "Never. I never gamble." As long as it's fun to trade money for pipe dreams, Vegas will prosper, and the world ain't too busy getting smarter.
I have to get some sleep, and there will be moe to come, but the first thought I had looking over the thousands and thousands of gamblers was: You know why gambling is a hit? Because work sucks. That thought had a brother: Work sucks. Where do I get chips?
And in closing, if my girlfriend and I break up (not an immediate likelihood, had to get that out of the way), I recommend you date her and are nice to her and appreciate her, and for god's sake just give her your money and make haste to the nearest blackjack table, because she is good, good, good.
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