What Stays In Vegas

What stays in Vegas stays in Vegas, I guess. I left some portions of me behind in Vegas and I imagine they're still there. Some carbon dioxide. Some water vapor. Skin flakes. Some of my tame eyebrow hairs...

I have two sorts of eyebrow hairs, tame and wild. The tame ones are thin, blonde, straight, well-behaved, entirely happy to rest closely against my skin, and so placid they can be convinced to fall out without much effort. The wild ones are just that - long, kinky, twisting, oddly-colored, and often so curvy they bend down and poke me in my own eye. And they won't fall out no matter what.

But that's not why I'm here.

I'm here to say a few words about Vegas. I think, upon due reflection, that those words include "noise", "crowds", "secondhand smoke", and "no free lunch". Not that Vegas was a bad time. The purpose was to travel to Vegas to get my nephew hitched, and that mission was achieved in fine fashion. But I guess I'm just not the Vegas sort. If given the choice between going to Puerto Penasco and Las Vegas, I have to side with Puerto Penasco - the rooms are at least as nice, and the ocean is free. If Las Vegas had an ocean, I'm sure they'd figure out a way to charge for it - and find a way to make a not-so-subtle status display out of it. "I'm sorry, sir, but only Platinum Club members are allowed to wade in past their kneecaps. You, being a member of the Sheet Metal Club, are only entitled to get your ankles wet." Meanwhile, members of the Einsteinium Club are faintly visible on the horizon, dodging plastic sharks and shouting "Feed them another homeless person!"

I saw a lot of doors in Vegas marked "Platinum Club Only" but with no idea of what lay beyond them. Roman-style orgies? Fire-lit abysses? Watercress sandwiches?

As most of my regular readers know, I used to smoke until fairly recently, and I'm still at that fairly delicate state of quitting where cigarette smoke bothers me. No, let me rephrase that. It tempts me. It doesn't make me cough or make my eyes water or make liquidy rales come rasping up from the depths of my lungs. It makes me want to light up, man, and drag deep. I didn't. I survived the secondhand smoke and the roaming cigarette girls without wrapping myself in the blue miasma of the tobacconist's art. But it was hard.

Vegas is about the only place left in America where one can smoke in public. As a consequence, people seem to smoke in public in Vegas with a kind of joyous abandon. "I can smoke, therefore I'm going to really smoke!" You almost expect the occasionally overzealous security guards to force hookahs and cigars on you at the entrances to the casinos. In some places the casinos smelled like Rod Serling's ash trays.

Nothing is free in Vegas. You don't even have the option of making a cup of instant coffee in your own room, presumably so you'll buy four-dollar cups of coffee from the faux French bakery down in the shopping district (the zone d'shoppage, fully gridlocked by hommes du cigarettes and shoppeurs). I found this rather annoying and cite it as one of the reasons I'm not likely to return to Vegas any time soon. Between the relentlessly grasping nature of the hotels (six bucks to print out an airline boarding pass! Four bucks for a tiny bottle of Diet Pepsi!), the cheesitude of the faux culture, and the ever-present clouds of cigarette smoke, I believe I'll pass.