Merry Christmas Everyone!!!!!!
I hope all of you got what you wanted this year. If not then at least you still have things to look forward to next year =) I had a blast at my family's Christmas eve dinner thanks for the bruises =) Finally leaving for Vegas on Saturday I've been pretty nervous. I've trained at home, with the Native Americans and in Atlantic City in preparation for the days ahead. Hopefully I have learned the skills and discipline required to see me through the difficult tasks before me. It is with great anticipation and mild trepidation that I embark upon this journey to this city of Las Vegas land of dreams destroyed and wasted wallets. lol Was that dramatic enough? Wish me luck ppl this is the real deal hahaha. A more detailed holiday update when I return with a nice end of the year summary and hopefully some pictures.
It's been over six years since my first trip to the desert. Now a little over sixteen hours since my return I can't help but marvel at how much has changed on the surface without affecting anything underneath. At its very core Las Vegas remains an unapologetic sieve which thoroughly separates its visitors from their money and inhibitions. However now everything can be done with an air of faux sophistication whereas it was once only executed with unabashed vulgarity. You can still get your 99 cent hot dogs and 3.99 buffets while gambling away the rest or you can try to set yourself apart from the peasants and chase Michelin Stars and Mobil Diamonds instead of cherries and bars.
Sin City. Clever and catchy but woefully inaccurate. Las Vegas is a city of dreams which by definition are not real, dreaming shouldn't be a sin. In Vegas you can be a worldly connoisseur one minute and a degenerate drifter the next. You can surround yourself with beautiful people, objects, and food or immerse yourself in the most vile aspects of human nature on the slightest whim. You can wander around with cash dripping from your pockets and lose all faith in your fellow man as you see how cheap it is to elicit the full range of human emotions and actions. Or you can walk around penniless and absorb all the beauty that exists from any point on the strip into the horizon as far as your eye can see. Every last bit of that city exists because of the human propensity to dream. Serving no practical purpose other than to satisfy our cultural need for extravagant self-indulgence. A sparkling oasis carved into the desert because we wanted to. Then again you could say the same about a highway lamp.
Why am I talking about Vegas? I was no stranger to gambling the first time I visited the city, but it was that first trip that really captured (tortured) my imagination.
I was all of 22 years old and fancied myself an idiot savant when it came to gambling (I was half right) My heart was set on law school while my mind devoted increasing amounts of time to counting systems and poker probabilities. But even then I knew that luck was better than skill and boy was I lucky. I could split 4s against a 10 and come out 8 times better, I could stroll into a runner runner flush at will and 3 card poker was 2 cards too many for me to turn a profit. Those were interesting times.
Full of the half cocked bravado and swagger that can only accompany inexperienced youth, I tucked my rubber banded roll into my pocket and headed to the airport. Since I was under 25, the nicest car they would let me rent was a white Chevy impala. But we packed into that little car and drove it like it was Bugatti Veyron. Checked into the JW Marriott suites off the strip as if was the penthouse at the MGM Mansions. There on one of the twin queen beds in my junior garden view suite I spread my fortune across the bed and snapped a picture of it. Ten crisp one hundred dollar bills in a fan across the 250 thread count flower patterned comforter. A "gangsta wad" ready to conquer all of Vegas in one endless shoe of good fortune.
Do you know what happened? I won.
Every table. Every shoe. Almost every hand. Over a period of 3 days I turned that little chunk of change into an earth shatteringly huge amount...... $6800. It might as well have been 68 million. Endless food, drink, treasures, LV bags, wallets, shoes, shirts, crocodile belts. Everytime I spent some money I'd go win it back. Life was good. Luck had nothing to do with it. It was all me. Pure skill was what I used to overcome games where everyone else looses money.
I'm smiling as I remember how invincible I felt, how alive.
In the six years since I've returned to that city a couple dozen times with increasingly nicer hotels, bigger rooms, faster cars, and larger bankrolls but I've never had more fun than that first time. Yesterday night I was having dinner at the Encore and I felt something I never thought I would feel in Las Vegas. Apathy.
There was neither happiness, sadness, boredom nor excitement. I think I may have reached a significant plateau on the hedonistic treadmill. Sitting in the middle of one of the most luxurious hotels ever constructed in the history of mankind, surrounded by beauty both aesthetic and functional, being waited on hand and foot with food good enough to be art I found myself thoroughly not interested.
Make no mistake that is not to be confused with ungrateful or unhappy just not terribly into it all. Did Vegas lose its magic or have I just lost all of my charm. There are still plenty of mountains left to climb; mental, spiritual, emotional, physical and financial. It's not like I spend my free time racing towards enlightenment in a Bugatti roadster solving a rubix cube Miranda Kerr and Megan Fox are holding without hands.
The trappings of luxury are really just that; trappings. I can have a more fulfilling time reading on my kindle while sitting on my roof looking at the Queensboro bridge.
Six years ago I looked forward to Vegas eagerly anticipating world conquest. Today I understand that the only world worth conquering is the one in my mind. But when I'm done with that tell Orlando Bloom and Brian Austin Green get their Jets helmets ready.
Viva Las Vegas!
18 holes and all equally easy to fall into.
