Back From Vacation

I've returned to the frozen wasteland of the Mid-Atlantic form the sunnier climes of Las Vegas. While home is where the heart is (I keep it in a jar next to my bed) Vegas runs a close second. While there, I engaged in the expected drunken debauchery. In fact, before you are allowed to leave the city, you have to demonstrate a .015 blood alcohol level (no problem), business cards from at least three strip clubs (check) and citations for public disorderly conduct (one will do; I collected eight).

I found myself at a casino one morning at 7 in the AM and took down some notes, which I'll share with you. Because sharing is caring. Enjoy and tune back in for some movie related fun.

Early morning in a casino coffee shop. A few dregs from last night still washing up on the shore, trapped and smashed by the grating music of the slot sirens. The air is thick with first and last cigarettes, the occasional scent-bite of stale beer, fresh coffee and buffet eggs and bacon. Soft rock blares, keeping thoughts at a minimum.

But, who wants to think at 7 in the morning in a second tier casino in Vegas? Not the players. They have shark eyes focused on the big win, the jackpot, the thing that gets them out bed and into these palaces of cheap dreams. Not the staff, coming off all-night drunk-and-hooker shifts. They’re deaf and blind with fatigue and boredom. Too many flashing lights and sloppy passes by toilet brush salesmen from Topeka.

A push cart heavily laden with cases of beer and limes. Reinforcements for the bars, fodder for the “first thing in the morning” drinkers. The lime is for citrus, to fight off scurvy, of course. You can’t have a successful career as a loss addict, if you have bad teeth and bleeding gums.

And they are all loss addicts. No one who is a serious gambler wants to win. Every incremental victory is fed back into the machine. The talk of the big wins is less passionate than the lamentations of the losses; that's where the action is. We all know that dreams never come true. A place like this just confirms that. It makes crystal what we’ve already decided is the center-point of reality...we all lose in the end.

That bright, beautiful past, glowing like neon nights in our rear-view mirror. It all comes to an end, baby. You can try to push it back, try to maintain, but it always falls apart.

We are meant to be transients, a brief flash of light, then darkness. Our curse is that we know this. The lion doesn’t wake up knowing he’s one day closer to death. The gazelle ruts and eats, one eye open for the lion. But that’s not us. We keep both eyes open on the immutable past and the declining future.

A trio of elderly women waddle past, fat with the American dream or some hydrogenated version of it. Is this what nursing homes of the future will be like? Run by Caesar's Entertainment Corporation with nurses in micro-minis, flashing lights to bring on grand mal seizures to be swiftly medicated by attendants in tuxedo tee-shirts? Hooked into intravenous fluid drips, chained to a slot machine, blast of music, tinkle of coins, stirring memories of hot sweaty nights of youth?

There is a blue sky painted on the ceiling. Was it done out of a sense of irony? If so, that would restore my faith in humanity. Some smart assed prankster, grasping the lunacy of the task at hand, decides to mock the people who he is building a temple of loss to. Here’s the sky, the only one you want to see, blue and white paint on concrete and stucco.

An apt metaphor for the world we’re immersed in. Television and video games letting us live other lives. Relationships that are born, live and die as electrons over wires. Wrapping ourselves in layers of distance. Don’t talk about religion and politics. Don’t share your feelings. Don’t show weakness or doubt. Wrap yourself into a little ball and build an ego-world, where you are star, cast and critic of your own made-for-tv movie.

The fake sky, the flashing lights, the all you can feed trough, 80s pop, ringing buzzers from random slot machines. What’s it all for? No, who’s it all for? The loss addicts don’t know, don’t care. They only have eyes and ears for the Big Bust Out. For the employees, this must be like a low-rent Hell, Dante’s Casino, with the Brimstone Suite, now 666 a night. It’s environmental nostalgia; a time when the music, the lights, the barely there waitress outfit were something unique.

Vast seas of information have inundated us, turned the unique into the ordinary and left us swimming for islands of the past, hoping we’ll feel something new when we get there. But, it’s a lie. There is nothing new. We find the limitations of the human mind in places like this. Where we vomit out the same cave paintings and earth-mother tits and shiny beads that we’ve fondled and fought for since we dropped out of the trees.

What doesn’t change is the universal nature of the modern American coffee shop. It squats on every corner, selling liquid vibrations. We are sucked into its milky black hole, willingly giving ourselves over to muscle spasm, brain jitters and frequent bathroom trips. But, why not? America has always been a jacked up society. We sucked down cocaine in soft drinks and fueled our wars on uppers. With 20-foot tail-fins and nuclear bombs, we showed the world that the only way to go is big. Give the world a big middle finger as you rampage into the future. It’s worked for us so far; why not just keep it up? Of course, like all rushes, eventually you come down.

And that's what this place is...the junkyard of the future. I think I need another drink.