Las Vegas, Day 2: Everything Tastes Weird

There was a moment yesterday where I said earnestly to myself, “I think I prefer Reno to Las Vegas,” and I knew I was blogging about the right tournament.

I don’t dislike Las Vegas. I just don’t know how much I like it. I’ve never done it in a conventional way. One time, I flew out for the last day of my cousin’s bachelor party after getting two hours of sleep the night before. I was a senior in college. I blacked out within three hours, lit the wrong end of a cigar, woke up to myself shattering my brother’s sunglasses by kicking him repeatedly in the chest, lost fifty dollars playing blackjack, and flew home. I was actually wearing the same shirt I’m wearing right now, drafting this. Another time, I stopped by while driving from Flagstaff to Sequoia. I ate a sandwich, placed a $20 future on the Cubs to win the World Series (it hit), and saw the Hoover Dam. A third time, I had a layover here on my way to Joe Kelly Bobblehead Night. I’ve lived a great life, and if I die from the third confirmed case of Legionnaires’ Disease to be traced back to the hotel which runs the arena which is hosting the NIT Final Four, it will be hard to complain during the part of purgatory where they tally your karmic assets.

And so it is that I find myself typing away on the tenth floor of the “Ivory Tower” at the Palms Casino and Resort, computer sitting next to the Winter 2023 issue of Hamiinat, The Magazine of the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, having found a discount through a tourism website and telling myself, “It looks like I can walk to both the games and the Strip,” which is only true in a technical, punitive way. I went for a jog yesterday morning and took the little pedestrian bridge over the train tracks and the interstate. It was weird. I turned around earlier than I intended.

Last night, I dined at TGI Fridays, having somehow found the first Pad Thai I didn’t like on Sunday in the 24-hour restaurant here at The Palms™. TGI Fridays was deep inside the Golden Nugget across the street, an establishment which feels like someone took a caricature of a grandma who smokes, stole that woman’s carpet, and alchemied it into a casino. It had the doors from Bennigan’s and the woodwork from Bennigan’s and despair on the felt of whatever the Chinese poker game was that said “Year of the Rat 2023” and made me say “It cannot possibly be 2023 in here.” There was a thin layer of ash over the whole place, like they’d tried to clean up but Mount St. Helens wasn’t done in there yet. The TGI Fridays is, by my count, the nicest part of the Golden Nugget, and the TGI Fridays isn’t a nice TGI Fridays. Also: Either Verizon has a new feature that switched it from saying you have no reception to saying “SOS” where it normally shows how many bars of service you have, or my iPhone thought I was in danger once I got to a certain depth inside the building. Maybe I was. I did hop on the unsecured TGI Fridays wifi to tweet a picture of my post-brownie skillet.

Everything tastes a little weird here. The Pad Thai (why am I capitalizing Pad Thai, help I can’t stop capitalizing Pad Thai). The Bacon Cheeseburger at TGI Fridays (oh no my poetry professor from sophomore year is going to lose his mind). The air as you pass the car tinting studio across the street from the combo Video Poker/Ice Machine convenience store (honestly, very convenient). Brandon Flowers talks in interviews about adolescence in Las Vegas preparing him to be a rockstar, and I think he’s talking about all the destructive temptation around him in both environments, but I wonder if he really means you’re always out of sorts. I’m not the kind of guy who criticizes people for wearing Covid masks—I prefer to criticize people doing that criticizing—but I was taken aback by the young patrons at the Golden Nugget wearing Covid masks. I’ve always thought the mask was for when you were doing something that’d be a real nuisance to avoid. It’s pretty easy to avoid Las Vegas.

There’s a type of guy who loves Vegas. He doesn’t love *Las* Vegas—that’s a different type of guy, I might be that type of guy after I make my brother’s college roommate Andy go to the old Mormon mission with me before we grab dinner tomorrow night—but he loves “Vegas.” “Vegas, baby.” I’m scared of this type of guy, but not in a fearful way. I’m scared he’ll inconvenience me. By talking to me about how he loves Vegas and making me find a way to exit the conversation or egg him on until he gets too horny and runs into the street chasing a taxi with an ad on the roof for a gentlemen’s club.

That’s another thing about Vegas: There are still taxis here. It’s like how Cuba only has old cars. There’s something weirdly timeless about this place.

There are signs of suburban creep here, suburbs encroaching inward upon the city. The NFL let these guys get a team, for example. That’s the mark of a pushover right there. You don’t want your cities to homogenize. Homogenization is boring. If Charlotte and Las Vegas become the same, there’ll be no reason to go to Las Vegas. I’m going to go to an office supply store when I’m done with today’s blogs. We’re moving in a few weeks and I think we’ll have a lease to sign, and I feel like if I ask someone who works at the hotel if there’s a business center they’ll either point me towards the “high rollers room” of slot machines or lead me to a printer that hasn’t been touched since Hugh Hefner used the scanner lid to crush up his Viagra so he could snort it the day they opened up the Playboy Club that’s now extinct. I have a similar fear about asking if there’s a gym on-site. “Maybe they’ll have a Peloton,” I said to myself as I wiped my brow after my last set of air squats during the first half of the North Texas game last week. Stupid idiot. I did a lap last night around the casino to digest my red meat while the automated craps table bounced its dice in a bubble, looking suspiciously like someone was trying to profit off nostalgia for the board game Trouble.

The moral of the story is that if you follow your dreams, your wife will FaceTime you from outside a house you might rent and you’ll excitedly tell her, “The UAB coach liked my hat!”

I don’t dislike Las Vegas.

I just love Reno.