Escape!

I finally got out of Las Vegas today. I didn't get very far, just to the first town back over the California border, but it took me three hours to get here because of all the traffic from other escapees. Baker, CA is too small a town to even have a chain Motel so I have finally taken the plunge and stopped at a random, independent roadside motel: the Wills Fargo. (note the clever use of an 'i' instead of an 'e', thus avoiding pesky trademark infringement suits) It's no luxury resort, but I long ago decided that all motel rooms were essentially the same: they have a bed, a toilet, and a shower. The only real difference is the price. So good enough.

(Hmmm, I can stay another night . . . or steal the blanket! What to do . . .)

It's my Blog and I'll Diatribe if I want to . . .

Sin has such a good publicist, you'd think it would be more fun. Having spent three days in Vegas, I declare it Sinfully Vile. The sin I can handle, but the vileness just drags on you. The various available sins look so good on the flashing signs and glossy handouts but they just don't live up to the presentation. I did not see a single glamorous person in any of the many casinos I went into, even the pedestrianly average folks were mere infrequent raisins in this fruitcake of the hardscrabble and the luckless.

Driving down the strip is the biggest hard sell of them all. From the outside these casinos look amazing and cool. Every one of them beckons you to come inside and see the gross splendour of their exteriors writ small in the imagined details of the matching interior. But instead, all one finds is the exact same slot machines and gaming tables as every other hotel, even the off, off, off strip cheapies near my $38/night Super8. They are like a box of choclates where every piece appears to be more extravangantly decadent than the next, but all contain the same dry coconut filling.

The immense expense of building these structures should mark their dangers as clearly as does the bright blues and greens of the South American Poison Dart Frog but, just as hundreds of visitors to the less regulated zoos of South America are killed each year through their unbreakable desire to touch the pretty blue froggies, the brightly colored extravaganzas of the casino skins draw us in, rather than logically scaring us away. The message our instincts should be telling us is: they would never spend the billions necessary to build these hotels if they didn't expect to earn it right back with interest from the fools who are lured inside. The games are rigged and the advertisments lie.

That being said, the show I saw (Stomp out Loud) was even better than its advertising. The performers just oozed personality and talent and I thought it was great. Cirque du Soleil always delivers and I'm sure the Blue Man Group is great as well. Taking that in hand, I propose the SInverse Law of Las Vegas: the relationship of glamour delivered to glamour advertised varies in inverse proportion to the amount of implied Sin. Gambling is high in sin, low in actual glamour; Broadway style shows are low in sin, but high in actual glamour.

This is rule especially applies to the sex industry. I have not been inside a strip club in over a decade and, despite my boredom, did not break my self-imposed rule of never going to one alone this week (and no, I didn't join a group tour either), but I did look them up on the internet out of curiosity. The girls shown on those websites only confirmed my previous experience, the actual girls in actual stripclubs range from okay to downright homely. However, there were some gogo dancers at the Planet Hollywood (dancing up and behind the blackjack tables, those wiley bastards) who were mind-blowingly hot. This is an important message of the SInverse Law, the more clothes they wear and the more distance they have from the audience, the hotter the girls. Based upon this law, I don't even want to know who would show up if you actually called a prostitue.