My blogging career started on Livejournal, oh so many moons ago. I no longer use Livejournal, but I have archived all of my entries and occasionally check them out. This is a post I wrote in November of 2013, ago after a trip to las Vegas, a city that everyone has to visit at least once in their lifetime.
“Las Vegas is the expression, in glitter and concrete, of America’s brittle and mutating id.”
– John Burdett
“Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run, but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.”
– Hunter S Thompson, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
“Life springs eternal
On a gaudy neon street
Not that I care at all
I spent the best part of my losing streak”
– Sheryl Crow, from the song Leaving Las Vegas
I enjoy visiting Las Vegas, where you can get a really nice hotel room for a less than forty dollars, a sum that couldn’t get you a night in a crack motel in most California cities. Vegas is a place where you can be endlessly entertained just by walking around and looking at all of the crazy sites.
One of the reasons I like to visit Las Vegas is just because it is so over the top. A Disneyland for adults it surely is, and I can appreciate certain forms of extremism. It’s like a crazy drug trip that you would never forget or live down without having to actually take any drugs. I do enjoy some gambling, but I only do penny ante gambling, so even if I lose I don’t lose very much. During my last trip I made my first ever sports book bet, in which I made a straight up bet on the San Francisco 49es to beat Carolina. Because of a good Carolina defense and a languid Niners offense I ending up losing all of twenty dollars, which is a lot less than the other sports book patrons who were generally throwing hundreds of dollars at multiple bets.
Las Vegas is America on three or four recreational drugs at once. It’s that weird and scary relative that you could hardly understand as a child, and understood all too well as an adult. The dichotomies go all over the place. Wandering through a casino, you can find wrung out salt of the Earth people who’ve been to hell and back so many times that they’ve lost count, and can barely afford to buy a new t-shirt to replace the old faded one. And in the very same casino you can find spoiled rotten grew-up-behind-the-gates-of-a-closed-community slick yuppie scum who are dripping with money even though they’ve never completed one good honest hard day of work in their entire lives.
But most of the non-stop tourists are the meat and potatoes people of the United States. Las Vegas is the place where your Fox News watching aunt and uncle go for a vacation, the ones who keep grumbling about that Kenyan in the White House, and they end up sitting next to a coked-out homosexual at the blackjack table, the one who’s going to a fetish-specific orgy later that evening. It’s the kind of place where you see people in sports jackets and jeans dining in expensive restaurants, and see people with real diamond rings sitting next to the handicapped homeless guy at the Casino’s sports book.
Walking down the strip, you’re assaulted by audial and visual images all along the way. Walking by the fashion show is particularly ear and eye piercing. One of my favorite activities is to walk around Caesar’s Palace, what with all of its gaudy statues and frescoes. Then you get to the Forum Shops, where some of the hoity toitiest of shops are to be found, the kind of places you can’t even think of purchasing products from unless you’re at least the the high end of a five figure income.
It’s also the seat of no holds barred capitalism. The Sands, a famous casino, was forced out of business because of newer giganto casinos, juiced-up marketing behemoths that sweep away the old guard. For my stay I was at the Riviera, a place which boasted of its celebrity past with pictures of Steve Martin and George Burns and others that used to play there when it was the place to go in Las Vegas. Now it’s lumbering as an old-fashioned second rate casino under the shadow of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio, as well as other, newer casinos.
About a ten to fifteen minute walk away from thee fancy casinos of the strip you come to the junky souvenir shops, the seedy tattoo parlors, and those independently owned eateries that serve not only prime rib, but the kind of all-you-can-eat sushi that you should only try if you have absolutely no hope left at all. Homeless people are everywhere, as are actors dressed up as superheroes or cartoon characters, hustling for tips. It’s also the place where you can find vast armies of overworked and underpaid employees. From the tired middle aged cashier at the seedy food court to the impeccably dressed man in the high end fashion shop that resembles the Fourth Reich. No matter how many of them try to greet you with a smile and ask you how your day is going, the veneer of what’s really going on seeps through your skin, as anyone with any kind of empathy knows what this person is going through. It’s a wonder that any business would put their frontline people through this kind of ringer, yet virtually all of them do. No where is that more apparent than in the non-stop retail pressure cooker known as Las Vegas.
For many patrons of this glitzy city, it’s a hit-and-run vacation, but when I was hanging out in the sports book at the Riviera I realized that there were people there who were gambling to try and strike it rich. There were people there who were mainstays, the regulars, not the kind to jump up and down and yell over a fumble because they were so used to it. Most of these people had been gambling long enough to usually win a little or break even, grab enough to just keep going, but very few people have the ability to make a living at it. A few do, but they are a rare breed. I talked to some of these people, some who were surprised that I would take the Niners-Panthers on a straight bet.
So some waiting for their ship to come in, others just wanting to be entertained, and then those who live in the casinos. The hyper-crass splash of marketing and avarice exists in a place that makes the wildest cities in California look tame by comparison. It’s a loud and unbelievable place, and if hanging out in Las Vegas doesn’t give you at least some existential angst, then you have no soul at all.
My hotel during my
November 2013 stay
