The Desert Mermaid

So, whatever did happen to Tuesday and so slow?

 

Because that is not what went down on my last full day in this party town.

 

The other reason I came to this weird place was to visit Aspen/gondolinchick01, with whom I’ve been pretty out of touch what with her gallivanting off to places like Paraguay and then to a fancy-shmancy cooking school here.   But she had as yet not checked out the temptations of the tourist trap that is her new home, so I dragged her off to see The Sights and chat—after I stuffed her with food, of course, because that’s the kind of hobbit hospitality I offer.

 

 

Jeezus, my aunt has good ideas sometimes.

 

The trouble with conventions in Las Vegas is that they require you to actually, you know, go to the meetings, instead of enjoying the hedonistic frivolities of this sinful place.

 

What this means is that in between the exciting evening shows, I was pretty much on my own.

 

I expected Aunt, who is always a bit behind on how old we are, to want me to stay close, to maybe spend my unsupervised time in the hotel room reading or sleeping off the last of my cold or something.* But instead she told me to go check out the Mirage myself.

 

And, to my own great surprise, I did.

 

 

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I have sworn to tell the truth, or at least the truth the way I see it, in this blog as far as I can.  So I have to tell you exactly what happened in Las Vegas.

 

I had a fantastic time.

 

It was incredible! I’d never been there before,* and my image of it was of one big, sleazy casino full of smoke and glassy-eyed people.  Which it is. But interspersed between identical casinos, there were all these things you could check out or buy or look at or experience or eat or watch, and I plunged in with gusto. I loved it all.

 

Interestingly, I didn’t even try alcohol or gambling. My reaction to gambling is pretty cold, and the idea of drunkenness seems uniformly unattractive to me. So all the stuff I did I did sober, unless you count heat stroke and lack of sleep, and all the money I lost was on silly kitsch, like a necklace of an iridescent bug encased in plastic.

 

I did sneeze a lot.  Allergies, the tail end of a cold, and a constant atmosphere** of cigarette smoke will do that to you.

 

Now, I could leave it at that, but here’s the bad news for all you obsessive friends-list readers: apparently, Vegas inspired the writer in me.*** My journal is filled with entries of my impressions of this town, from the beginning to the end. And I want to tell you all about it. So for the next few days, as I get time (da boss has me working two last eight-hour shifts, probably for revenge), I’m going to post a series of my Las Vegas journal entries. I’ll blogify them a bit and put ’em behind a cut, and y’all can have a look at what I thought of this place and either compare your experiences with mine or glean more information for possible future trips on how to have fun in Las Vegas by yourself and without any chemical enhancements except maybe Nasonex. We can only hope I get sidetracked catching up with my own friends list.

 

 

Oh, and for those of you in for chunks of Penn’s ponytail, I’m afraid he wasn’t wearing one.  It’s just as well. I wouldn’t have been able to reach it anyway. Good lord that man is big.

 

 

*Unless you count that one time for a few hours with the school orchestra when I, using my mutant powers, absolutely buried the needle on the Awesometer, but that wasn’t much of a visit.

 

**Though I discovered that in Vegas, “atmosphere” is synonymous with “dark.”  If a restaurant or bar has lots of atmosphere, it means you will bang your shins into a lot of chairs on your way to the bathroom, and you won’t be able to find your table when you come back out.

 

***As is so often the case.