august 13 2000
when we were in the cab on the way back to our hyperersatz renaissance-era venetian hotel from the hyperersatz obisidian pyramid hotel which we had just arrived at after leaving the hyperersatz tropical rainforest hotel upon which we had stumbled after walking through the hyperersatz manhattan hotel, we saw a billboard which summed it up just about fucking perfectly. a woman wearing a madonna blond-ambition-tour-era headset microphone sang her grossly enlarged two-dimensional little heart out next to the statemen "accept no other substitutes." the billboard may have been for a casino, or it may have been for that woman, or it may have been paid for by a shrewd social theorist who just wanted to warn people what they were up against. even when you take any of those into consideration, it remains the governing mood of las vegas: self-conscious mirage. i think i summed it up best when i said "it's like, you know, all these buildings are supposed to look like other buildings, but the people who made the buildings know that everyone else knows that the buildings aren't really, like, buildings as much as they are, like, you know, 'buildings'." like the mariana trench, i am.
yeah, so las vegas was the site of 44 hours of crazy fatigued revelry and interpersonal avoidance. also, nickel slots, which i played with wild abandon, taking great care to crow like an alcoholic hausfrau whenever it began to look as though i might get away from the machine with anything more than my immense ego. before you write me to upbraid me for sticking exclusively to the nickel slots, i'd like to point out that i played the quarter slots, too. they were scary, though. loud and flashy. when money comes to me as slowly as it does, i have a tough time reconciling myself with losing it. or, at least losing it to a leathery croupier with a smoker's hack and disinterested eyes.
the people that i saw in las vegas belonged, for the most part, to one of two classes. both these classes lend themselves to a nifty bit of assonance, which makes the categorization all the more fun. the two classes are 1) weathered and chesty and 2) shaved and veiny. the weathered and chesty ones were the women, who all had deeply-lined and burned-looking skin, as well as poorly-augmented breastesses. the shaved and veiny ones were the men, or rather, one man who sat next to us in the las vegas airport as we awaited our return flight back to philadelphia (the return flight, commonly known as the "redeye," lived up to its name, as we were stuck in the very very veyr back row of the plane, and as such could recline our seats just out of the severe-chiropractic-trauma range to the constant-pressure-exerted-upon-the-kidneys-range. also, it was hot. also, the light that allowed the flight attendants to sit four feet behind me and gossip cattily about one of the attendants' husband's rampant dipsomania without losing sight of one another had a pesky habit of creeping in under the faulty seam of my vainly-shut eyelid and danicing about on my retina. dancing, like a little photon minx. right, so i didn't sleep at all on the flight, nor on the two-hour train ride from philadelphia back to new york, which was punctuated by 1) boarding the wrong commuter rail from philadelphia to trenton, 2) stepping in a large puddle running from track to track in north philadelphia trying to catch the correct train to trenton, and 3) sitting next to a garrulous group of pakistani bankers who apparently thought pressing their thighs into mine was going to aid my sweaty and sleep-deprived relaxation.) and was built more or less like a humvee. the other men--the ones in the casinos, the ones lined up outside of horrible clubs that resembled comic-book-adaptation movies' visions of what nightclubs would look like, the ones with the weathered and breasty girls--those other men were fond of tight iridescent collared short-sleeved button-down shirts, not unlike the ones you buy at stores with names like "strawberry" and "loco y caliente" and "illfittingsyntheticfabricorama." there were exceptions to these two classes of people, of course. there was the little blond girl i saw playing the slots at 3:30 in the morning in stardust who upon closer inspection turned out to be not a little blond girl but a dwarf--"dwarf" being the clinically correct term, and not simply anthropologically patronizing, because she was in possession of a "normal"-sized head and torso, and simply foreshortened limbs. there was the trollish and unpleasant woman who insisted on drinking from a bottle of tequila in public and shouting things like "fuck her!", then, when being asked to tone it down responded "this is vegas! people don't care!" there was also, thankfully, an extended cast of agreeable characters, literal rock stars, figurative ones, an orange bear, and some crazy fresh linen pants that i found at banana republic for $20. say word.
to recap: crowing like an alcoholic hausfrau. illfittingsyntheticfabricorama. thank you.
p.
p.s. happy birthday pj!
and yo. my full-on venture kneejerk.net is up and running, though not nearly full. go and getcha read on. for me.
props to darkcounter.com
and sitemeter