No fear; just loathing.
Can't post much today. Too busy. I can hear all the wailing and crying now, from all five of my fans.
Anyway, my friend Carol just got back from Vegas and wrote about it, which reminded me of how much love I have in my heart for the place. Ah, Vegas. Seeing those lights in the desert is like being a bitterly thirsty, dying man, crawling with his last bits of inner fortitude toward what seems like a mirage of splendor, a paradise unmatched by Eden itself, a fountain of exquisitely living and breathing water from the Gods, dancing in an endless loop to the golden-throated tones of a digitally-remastered Sinatra from his red-leather booth in Heaven itself...and finding it's actually a big glistening pile of lizard shit.
My best friend Jim actually DOES love the place, and so does this girl I've been crushed-out on for years who shall remain nameless (if you're reading this, hiya P -- yeah, you know I got it bad for ya, despite your inexplicable love of LoserLand). And since I highly respect these people, I have to accept that there must be some redeeming quality to the place that I just don't get.
But to me, if you aren't a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, frivolously-shopping, hooker-renting gambler and you don't like crappy buffets and really bad shows that even a hundred bare breasts can't save, Vega$ is just a neon nightmare. After 2 hours there, I start feeling like I suckled from a garden hose in Guadalajara.
I mean, I don't drink -- not enough to make even the free drinks worth it, anyway. I don't pay for sex, even if it means I go without. I don't like magic shows, or cheeseball animal acts (though I would have liked to have been there when that Sigfried guy -- or was it Roy -- got his head bitten off. That would have been nice imagery to add to my already twisted mind). Anyway, gambling seems like just a great big losing proposition and you can lose BIG fast. I mean, sure, people win now and then -- but only as a marketing device so that everybody else will keep losing. How do you think they pay those electric bills, eh? Usually people who win in Vegas are the type who have already lost ten times what they're all excited to have won, whether it was this trip or the last five combined. The house still wins in the end, or else they'd turn off all those lights.
So what is it? What makes that place so utterly irresistible to all these people, among whom my friends number so I can't make any sweeping generalizations about American collective insanity?
I just don't know. But to me it seems like Vegas represents capitalism at its most disgusting extreme, laid bare without pretense to some bucolic "American Way" or anything like that. People go there to take a big economic shit in public, without pretending there's any point to it at all. In a way, Vegas is America at its second-worst, minus all the bombing and flag-waving. It's squalor encrusted with Christmas lights; it's fast-food that doesn't pretend to be nutritious; it's human excrement spray-painted gold and put in the window as a fishing lure in an ocean full of spandex-leopard-print-wearing bottom-feeders.
OK, I guess that WAS a sweeping generalization. But then, this whole posting is hypocritical anyway. You see, I'm one of the few people who have actually ever WON -- I mean, long-term, NET -- in Vegas. Jim talked me into meeting him there one weekend, and I put three bucks in a slot machine and won $900. Just like that. The only time I gambled the whole trip, and one of the few times I ever did at all. Go figure. Vegas likes me.
But I still fucking hate the place.
* * *
Anyway, my friend Carol just got back from Vegas and wrote about it, which reminded me of how much love I have in my heart for the place. Ah, Vegas. Seeing those lights in the desert is like being a bitterly thirsty, dying man, crawling with his last bits of inner fortitude toward what seems like a mirage of splendor, a paradise unmatched by Eden itself, a fountain of exquisitely living and breathing water from the Gods, dancing in an endless loop to the golden-throated tones of a digitally-remastered Sinatra from his red-leather booth in Heaven itself...and finding it's actually a big glistening pile of lizard shit.
My best friend Jim actually DOES love the place, and so does this girl I've been crushed-out on for years who shall remain nameless (if you're reading this, hiya P -- yeah, you know I got it bad for ya, despite your inexplicable love of LoserLand). And since I highly respect these people, I have to accept that there must be some redeeming quality to the place that I just don't get.
But to me, if you aren't a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, frivolously-shopping, hooker-renting gambler and you don't like crappy buffets and really bad shows that even a hundred bare breasts can't save, Vega$ is just a neon nightmare. After 2 hours there, I start feeling like I suckled from a garden hose in Guadalajara.
I mean, I don't drink -- not enough to make even the free drinks worth it, anyway. I don't pay for sex, even if it means I go without. I don't like magic shows, or cheeseball animal acts (though I would have liked to have been there when that Sigfried guy -- or was it Roy -- got his head bitten off. That would have been nice imagery to add to my already twisted mind). Anyway, gambling seems like just a great big losing proposition and you can lose BIG fast. I mean, sure, people win now and then -- but only as a marketing device so that everybody else will keep losing. How do you think they pay those electric bills, eh? Usually people who win in Vegas are the type who have already lost ten times what they're all excited to have won, whether it was this trip or the last five combined. The house still wins in the end, or else they'd turn off all those lights.
So what is it? What makes that place so utterly irresistible to all these people, among whom my friends number so I can't make any sweeping generalizations about American collective insanity?
I just don't know. But to me it seems like Vegas represents capitalism at its most disgusting extreme, laid bare without pretense to some bucolic "American Way" or anything like that. People go there to take a big economic shit in public, without pretending there's any point to it at all. In a way, Vegas is America at its second-worst, minus all the bombing and flag-waving. It's squalor encrusted with Christmas lights; it's fast-food that doesn't pretend to be nutritious; it's human excrement spray-painted gold and put in the window as a fishing lure in an ocean full of spandex-leopard-print-wearing bottom-feeders.
OK, I guess that WAS a sweeping generalization. But then, this whole posting is hypocritical anyway. You see, I'm one of the few people who have actually ever WON -- I mean, long-term, NET -- in Vegas. Jim talked me into meeting him there one weekend, and I put three bucks in a slot machine and won $900. Just like that. The only time I gambled the whole trip, and one of the few times I ever did at all. Go figure. Vegas likes me.
But I still fucking hate the place.
* * *
posted by brioSphere at 11:17 AM
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