Sin City
Vegas is a crazy town. Recently, thanks to my work, I was installing a hotel in Las Vegas. There’s craziness to Las Vegas, a feeling that you get once you hit the streets that everyone who’s come to this desert attraction, is there to get themselves messed up. To taste the dreams of avarice. They wander from casino to casino hitting the slot machines, and tables, and wondering where the next thrill is going to come from. They snap their pictures, and take their sound bites into their camcorders, all the while chortling to themselves, knowing that their friends are envious of the trip they didn’t get to take. They swarm the buffets, crowd the shows, watch the white tigers, and all the while marvel at the greatest party town in earth.
Except it’s not.
Vegas is the kind of place that you go to if you’re looking for one mission objective. To get riled up and drunk, and then crash parties and be a fucking star. Now, that’s all well and good, but you can only do that for so long before you become a sad bag of crap that should just clean up and go home. And sadly, some people haven’t learned that little lesson. There’s a number of 24 hour bars lining the streets of Vegas, and they serve their libations with reckless abandon at all times of the day, without care for whom they turn into drunken shit bags. Many of them were lying on the various lawns down the streets, in what appeared to be a stupor. They of course are only rivaled in their debauchery by the hundreds of migrant workers, lining the streets, trying to hand out brouchers and flyers advertising sex of all shapes and colors. So much so that I actually found one man stuffing said porn under the door of my hotel room. Our encounter was not pleasant to say the least.
The attractions at Vegas are mostly hollow. Easily produced, thrown together by some carpenters in a few days, and given the glitz paint job that everything in Vegas gets, then stamped with the approval of the Nevada Gaming Commission, so that whatever it is, Star Trek exhibit, Daycare, etc. its got slots and blackjack in the corner. The rampant gambling infection, in every nook and cranny, lends some seediness to places that would be alright, if they didn’t have some vacant eyed grandma, blowing her life savings, sitting right next to you, trying to eat a steak sandwich. Which by the way cost 15 bucks; I think Vegas was better priced when run by the mob.
I have no real point, not really trying to get anywhere with this. I’m just saying that Vegas isn’t necessarily the place to go, or the place to be. Its okay if you’ve got a posse of solid bro’s together, and you all want to go out and get pissed up, but after a day or two, it isn’t worth the time or money anymore, and you could do it just as easily in the comfort of your own home. Some of the places were amazing, Caesars Palace floored me with its intricacies, statues, and statuesque women. But, aside from the glamour, it was a hotel just the same as any other: Two beds, a bathroom, TV, and a bill you’d need a 3rd job to pay off. So take my advice kids, stay home, keep the money, and have a drink in your favorite local pub, because when you get home, you wont have “hot asian sex” stuffed under your door.
- Sin City
- by Crom
- Published on June 1st, 2003
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