Halloween in Vegas ...and I forgot my costume

10/30/01 1:37 PM EDT

So I'm crammed in the middle of an America West A320, the fuckhead in front of me with his seat all the way back so I've got my knees in my throat and I can only open my laptop far enough to see the keyboard or the screen, but not both. All's quiet and I'm on my way to Phoenix for a quick changeover and a shuttle flight to Vegas. Yes Vegas. Las Vegas. The magical city of gambling, booze, whores, high-fat food and low-grade entertainment. And I'm looking forward to every last bit of it.

I know I just went to Vegas last January, but I needed a quick escape from the city. It's the end of the world there, as you probably heard from the news. It still smells like burning plastic, and everyone I know has been in this state of shock for weeks. And who blames em, I mean, the place was fucked up bad. I saw it happen, and I don't want to get into it, but let's just say it was one of those events you can't just brush off. I haven't been as freaked as everyone else - hell, I'm in a plane right now - but everyone's been waiting for the big What's Next, and hoping the anthrax keeps contained to those who handle rich people's mail.

And I hate New York City anyway. I don't like the attitude, the grime, the scene in general, and I don't enjoy doing nothing every weekend because I'm not plugged into the trendy, socialite lifestyle. So I'm not totally up on spending all weekend flipping through the channels, and now this terrorist shit has made it pretty much mandatory. And I think the dust, the particles are making me sick. It's been like one big respiratory infection since 9/11. I felt like running for the hills, but I don't have the cash, and where would I go anyway?

I planned a vacation for this week right before the big catastrophe, but then backed out when the future of the world seemed uncertain. After things got calmed down, I got a cheap car rental for the week, and planned on taking a few day trips and tooling around town a bit. But then the airfare price drop began. I shopped around, and found some incredibly low prices to Vegas. And the Luxor had some sweet deals on rooms. So I got tickets, threw some clothes in a bag, grabbed the laptop and camera, and here I am.

This is the lightest trip I've taken in a while. I just brought a half-full gym bag of clothes, and my new laptop bag, which is way smaller than my computer backpack. I heard all of the horror stories about security precautions, so I didn't want to bring the full setup like I did on my Florida trip.

As far as JFK goes, I left a hair before 9:00 for a 12:35 flight. The cabbie got me there in record time, probably only 15 minutes, so he earned the $25 I gave him. I was second in line at the counter, but the people in front of me had like 200 bags and a kid, and I wondered how the fuck they were going to pull that off. The old guy at the desk asked me a million questions, and kept rambling on about how he could've gotten me on a 9:30 direct flight if I would've shown up a few minutes earlier. I told him I didn't mind, but then he kept going on and on about it, like he expected me to start screaming at him to give me a new ticket so I could start running down the landing strip after the departing flight. As long as I got through security and got there eventually, I didn't care.

So, on to the metal detector, the big horror story. And... it took me about seven seconds to get through. They asked me to take my laptop out of my bag, and they did the explosives check, and that's it. I've had rougher times going through on a tuesday night redeye flight. Oh well, it gave me time to eat. I got some eggs and fruit at the crappy cafeteria in the concourse, which wasn't all that bad today. There were minor reminders of heightened security, but not a lot. I did see national guard guys with full-auto M-16's strapped on their shoulders, but they were just standing around, not hassling people. Also, there were more airport people walking around, going to the quieter areas and looking around. Essentially, they were doing the job they've always been paid to do but never fucking did.

I sat around playing Game Boy (Tetris Plus, puzzle mode) and zoned out for a few hours. During boarding, I didn't get picked for the random security check/exploitation. The airport was very quiet overall, nobody around on a Tuesday. Now, a bit into the flight, the movie Tomb Raider is on, and I'm sort of watching it without headphones, mostly marveling at the gargantuan size of Angelina Jolie's breasts. I don't have any reading material with me, and I can only play Game Boy for so long, so this will be a long flight. I think I'm going to pack this up and doze off for a bit, try to think of what I'm going to do tonight.

10/31/01 5:25 AM Vegas time

I have no idea why the fuck I'm awake. My body thinks I'm running late for work or something, and I just woke from a terrible nightmare that it was 1991 and I was working in the computer cluster at college, helping some idiot with a random font problem in the Macintosh version of WordPerfect. Even though I'm tired, sleep isn't an option right now.

Vegas is dead. I've never seen it this quiet. Game three of the World Series was last night, it's Halloween, but it's a skeleton crew here (no pun intended). I'm in the 21st floor of the Luxor, a giant sloped glass window on my room overlooking the Excalibur. A lot of buildings aren't even lit up, shut down with nobody in them. The Excalibur's weird Disney castle motif lights the sky in gaudy neon orange and blue, in front of a minimal skyline. It's a pretty weird setup.

Last night's trip went without a hitch. I was in Phoenix for an hour or so, where it was ninety out, even though I didn't leave the air conditioned concourse. Today, the FBI and the government and everyone else announced a super terror alert, that they were 100% sure planes were gonna start falling any second now. Nothing yet, though. This is like that skyfall scare on 10/11, amd I'm not sure anything will happen. It's probably just so people don't get scared of that fucking chain letter that says not to go to the mall today.

I got a room with no problems, and the Luxor is just how I remembered it, except maybe it seems a little smaller. At least I didn't get tripped up on how to get to the rooms this time. The Luxor is a maze, and getting to your elevator usually involves a huge zig-zag across the floorplan and maybe a compass or a GPS. But I managed to get up here, get all of my luggage situated, and collapse on the bed at like 6:00 last night, tired and hungry.

I know I should have been ready to roll last night, ready to hit the town and tear things up. But I honestly wanted to go to bed without dinner and sleep twelve hours. I had a pounding headache, I was dying for a Coke and didn't have any change for the $1.50 Pepsi machine, and I felt like calling room service and staying in. But I took a Tylenol, grabbed the camera, and hit the road.

Vegas can be depressing when you're alone, and I forgot that. There are tons of beautiful women here, but they're usually with guys. This is the place you go to shack up with your girlfriend, more than it is the place you hook up with someone. Not that I was planning on anything - I was dressed in grimy clothes, I just rolled out of a day in a tiny airplane seat, and I hadn't eaten a meal since that bad breakfast at JFK. But the desolation got to me, and made me hope better things would happen later in the week.

The Luxor is connected via a peoplemover and a tunnel to the Excalibur, so I wandered over there, taking snapshots of the Egyptian motif of the Luxor on the way. I got to the medieval theme of the Excalibur, and went straight to the buffet for a $9.99 prime rib and shrimp dinner. Once again, it was pretty quiet in there, especially for dinnertime. I got a plate of food and ate ten bucks worth of salad and shrimp and a decent cut of rib.

Gambling didn't seem like the thing to do - the energy level at the tables wasn't high enough, and I still didn't feel that rested after the food. I wandered through the most barren tunnel I've seen, to the Mandalay Bay. It's weird how a place as busy as Vegas can have huge areas with absolutely nobody in them. It makes me wonder if there are abandoned tunnels somewhere, some place I could seal off and homestead, live for free forever in the forgotten catacombs of this giant city and never be found.

Anyway, I found out one of my favorite bands, Queensryche, is playing at the House of Blues on Friday, but I will have to leave before I could go see them. So that bummed me out even more. The lack of anything going on didn't give me much enthusiasm for a late night, so I headed back to the room, called my friend Ray, and flipped channels a bit. I couldn't even get to writing, so I just uploaded my last batch of photos, and called it a night.

And here I am. The sun is rising over Vegas and I feel like I should crawl back in bed and catch another four or five hours of sleep before I get a shower and pick up my car. Maybe with some rest and a big buffet breakfast, the day will pick up a bit. And having a nice car will help, too.

10/31/01 11:37 AM PST

Big portions and free refills describe one of my favorite parts of the Vegas experience. In New York, I go to a restaurant and have to pay twice for a thimble full of watered down Coke. But thismorning at breakfast, they kept refilling this giant bucket of a glass every time I drank an eighth of an inch from it. That's cool, although I think if I lived in Vegas, I would weigh like 500 pounds, and weight is a major point of contention these days. Anyway.

I slept a few more hours and took a long shower by about 11. The shower here is sort of a mixed thing. It doesn't have a tub, but I do like the sliding doors. It gives you a lot of room, and makes it look enormous. I wish I had a setup like this at home. Good water pressure, but the temp adjustment is a bit screwy, hard to deal with. The Luxor gives you tons of linen and a lot of good free stuff, so that was decent.

I went to the cafe downstairs, and got a fruit platter. It was like a boatload of fruit, plus muffins, yogurt, cream cheese, etc etc and I ate about 3% of it. But it was the freshest fruit I've had in a long time, even better than the stuff from the fruit market in my neighborhood. I also played fake keno, playing numbers in my head and then seeing if they hit without paying any money. I used a variation of my SSN and hit 3 out of 5. It's so weird that you can play Keno from practically anywhere in Vegas, like your room or a restaurant. I bet you can play Keno in the whorehouses while you're getting serviced by a chick. That would be cool.

Okay, I packed up and headed out, for the walk to the car rental place. It was a beautiful day out, maybe 80 degrees and very sunny. It still didn't feel like Vegas with no people out, but that's not a major complaint. I went past the Excalibur and crossed the bridge to the New York, New York, where I snapped a few shots of the fake Statue of Liberty and skyline. As I walked past the big fake waterway, I saw that the fence had become an impromptu memorial for the 9/11 tragedy. People left flowers, notes, shirts, and posters on this iron fence. I shot a few pictures, including this hilarious shirt that had the Statue of Liberty flipping her middle finger instead of holding a torch. Some of the shirts and photos were pretty jingoistic and fucked up, pictures of eagles and fighters dropping bombs, etc. It's weird to see the distortion of the event from a continent away. Even in the news, the TV and the newspapers, it's strange to see the response to New York. I mean, it's still front page news, but in New York, it's also local news, and it's all that you see. Here, you also see the local response, in a place that's probably totally isolated from the Anthrax and all of that, but where people are very concerned about the tourist dollar, and the fact that some idiots could drive a jet into a casino or something. It's interesting to see this alternate point of view.

Anyway, I crossed the strip on the bridge - it's very cool that there are pedestrian bridges with escalators all over the place here. I had time to kill, so I went inside the MGM to see if the lions would be awake. The MGM has this lion habitat, an indoor zoo exhibit with caves and stones all enclosed in plexiglass, and there are a few lions that live in there. When I went in, they were displaying baby lions, and you could get a picture with them for $20. I got in line, and within a moment, got this big speech about what to do and what not to do to avoid getting attacked by this 25-week baby cub. Then I got whisked inside, and there she was, a tiny little lion. Actually, she was about as big as a mid-sized dog, but when you see the full-sized mama lion, you appreciate the miniaturization factor. There was a photo rig, like on school photo day, and the lion was on a table. I stood behind her, and put my hand on her back. Then the trainer waved around a toy bone out of frame so she would look up, and SNAP. Actually, it took two tries. Then I sat in the gift shop forever while they printed out the photos on some kind of inkjet thing, and I had the picture. It's very funny, with a fake background - I'll scan it when I get home.

Off to the car place - I had to hustle to get there at one. When I was there, they didn't have the Porsche. The next best thing was a silver Audi TT roadster, so I said okay, and got the paperwork going. They also charged me $50 in insurance that they said they wouldn't, and the thing didn't have a CD. So this place is off my good list.

About the car - I went into this slightly pissed off. Also, the bad part of renting a car on the strip is that you get this pumped-up driving machine and then immediately spend like a fucking hour in stop-and-go traffic, never getting out of first gear. The interior is very spartan but still somewhat luxurious, and very european. The tach is on the left, which is a change for me. The stereo is pretty involved, although it didn't have a CD, just a tape. The transmission is pretty solid, and the car overall feels smooth and very well-behaved at low speed, with just a bit of a rumble from the exhaust. On the strip, I did get the chance to run it up a couple of times, and the pickup for such a small car is impressive, but not mind-boggling. I knew I'd have to get it out on the open road and really beat the hell out of it to see how things felt.

A bit north, I stopped at a record store and got the new Slayer album, and I got a Slurpee from a 7-Eleven. I also got to try out the power top for the first time, and it's not too bad of an operation, although the handle took a few tries to get the latches to work. The TT is power-everything, but doesn't feel like the old 5000 or the newer A4 as far as comfort level. No tilt wheel, the AC is pretty weird to work, the seats are manual and vinyl, with an adjustment handle that no valet parking guy can figure out. And forget drinking in the car - the only holder is in a weird position pretty far back. That said, the look and feel of the dash is impressive, and I like the little leg braces on either side of the console that keep your shin from digging in when you take corners. The more I drove it, the more I agreed with the layout.

I took another southbound run on the strip and listened to Slayer's new one _God Hates Us All_. It's been a few years since I picked up a new Slayer album, but this one totally hit everything at 100%. I played the title track about 400 times in a row and it was the perfect music for thrashing a high-test automobile on the strip around a bunch of old people and Jesus freaks. By the time I hung a left on Flamingo Avenue on the south side of the strip, I was ready to get all of the lyrics tattooed on my forehead. The whole album is this giant testamant to anti-religion, the perfect fuel for my pissed-off attitude toward everything at this point.

Anyway, I drove randomly out of town, sort of thinking I'd head toward Hoover dam eventually, but not sure. I went to the most fucked-up WalMart in the world to get a map and take a leak, and happened to come in on retarded cashier day. On the way out, some old lady came up to me and I thought she was going to acost me because I didn't have a bag for this map I bought. Turns out she handed me this halloween candy. I managed to memorize the map in the time it took the cashier to ring up two other people, so I knew how to get out of town with no problem.

First, I pulled into the back of a strip mall and found a big paved spot to take some pictures. The car looks great, the way the front end opens, the lines. It reminds me a bit of a stubbier Cobra, mixed with the Audi family of sleek European sedan. I popped the hood and found a very clean and hands-off engine compartment. There were about two or three coverings or fairings on top of the engine, and you could see the battery, but that's it. You couldn't do shit on this car without a full lift and entire Audi dealers' worth of tools and manuals. This car has a turbo, and has Quattro all-wheel drive, plus fuel injection and all the fixins' shoehorned into the tiny bay. It's an impressive feat of engineering, but I'm glad I only rented this thing for a day, and not the long haul.

I got off of Flamingo and onto the Interstate in short time. Highway speeds were decent, once I cleared traffic and started to get some open space. I was able to rev it up to 100 with no problem at all, with the top down. I knew it could do considerably more if I had some space, but for now I kept with the flow of traffic. After I got off the highway and toward Boulder, I was wondering why it revved so high in fifth gear, and when I looked at the shifter, I realized it was a six-speed! That made performance considerably better on the high-end, although it wasn't bad in fifth.

I started to recognize all of the scenery from my 1999 drive through the same area, and knew exactly where I was. I stopped in Boulder City to change camera batteries, and sat in front of a small strip of old-fasioned stores that looked like they hadn't changed in a half-century. I especially dug this fifties restaurant, a soda fountain that looked like an old place with the white and chrome storefront and greasy hamburgers and root beer in tall mugs. I also saw a newer Dairy Queen and even an A&W Root Beer restaurant. I considered stopping at the last one for a hamburger and fries (it sounds so good right now at 12:25!) but I wanted to keep going.

I did stop at Lake Mead for a quick photo op and then wound through a curvy road that approached the dam. I took a 35 mph curve at like 85 and the car handled okay, but I had to brake in the curve and it pulled the wrong way for some reason. I guess I was expecting it to handle like a front-engine, rear drive car and corrected the wrong way. I wished I had more curvy roads to practive on, but this wasn't Gran Turismo 3. I wished it had the same soundtrack, though.

My original plan was to drive over the dam and stop at the rest area on the Arizona side for some photos and a restroom break. But cars were backed up a bit, so I whipped back around and drove with the sun behind me, which made things even more comfortable.

On my way back, this casino had signs everywhere for helicopter rides for only $29. I saw the helicopter land on this hill, and I decided I had to do this. I pulled in to the casino - I forget the name but this is in the middle of nowhere and their big deal is they have a menu of food for next to nothing. Anyway, off to the side was a trailer with the helicopter guys. I went up there, and they said the $29 was the short ride, if I had two other people with me. By myself, it was $87. And the longer ride, to the dam, was $150. Now, last summer I paid $120 for a pretty cool ride in a biplane, and I figured this would be a lot more fun and a good photo op to boot. So to hell with it, I thought, I'd go myself. I paid the money, and they gave me a ticket. This guy named Sal, I think, loaded me up in this van and was talking to me about the car, about how his neighbor bought one of the new A8's and then sold it a few months later. He seemed pretty cool, maybe in his late 50's, and had a New York accent. He drove the van up a hill and to a plateau with the running copter, and another car. This guy came up to us in a uniform, sort of a white thing that made him look like a boat captain or whatever. He looked like a Vietnam Vet, maybe the kind of guy that's been flying for 30 years and saw a lot of tough shit in his day, but hung out in Vegas now. Sal snapped a few shots of me by myself in front of the chopper, and then loaded me in and snapped in the five-point harness over my shoulders and onto my gut.

First of all, the chopper blades were high up and didn't produce any wind or suction. You always see people on TV ducking low, or holding their hand over their head or whatever, and it totally wasn't like that. I just walked up, and got in. This was the typical type of news helicopter or whatever, with a glass bubble front and four seats. The pilot was on the right side, and there were just his controls. It was about as cramped as a Cessna, nothing too bad. Inside, it was relatively quiet, moreso than a small prop plane. The pilot did a quick check of stuff, put on a radio headset and made some small talk as the engine revved up, and we were off.

It felt weird when the skids left the pavement for the first time, like when you lift off in some amusement park ride and your feet leave the ground. It's not 100% stable either, so you pitch back and forth a bit. I totally would not recommend this to people afraid of flying or heights, because you would freak the fuck out. I mean, if you look down at your feet, they are essentially hanging over this glass bubble, and you can look straight down. For someone like me, who loves to fly, it was excellent. I was snapping a million pictures, looking down and at the instruments, and all over the horizon. It was truly incredible.

The scenery out there is breathtaking. We're talking mountains, deep shades of brown with some red painting in there. Not a lot of vegetation, this is the desert mountain sort of thing, where you can see the carving of a million years ago, the glacier lines left untouched by the light rainfall. The roads were probably dynamited out by engineers a while back, but otherwise, it's rugged stuff. And lake Mead is right there, this smooth, blue water that's between the peaks and not too developed, at least on this side. There's some human touch to this landscape: the highway, the casino and its parking lot, and a few boats and landings on the water. There are also a lot of power lines from the dam's hydro production, and the lake itself was formed from the dam blocking the river. But everything else is rock and natural beauty.

We angled over and toward the dam - man, taking turns on a bank in a helicopter is a real ride. I looked below in the pilot's window and saw the ground 2000 feet below us and wished I could spend all day in this thing, arcing through the valleys and mountains. We quickly came up to the Hoover dam, and seeing it from the air just blew me away. I had some okay photos from '99, but seeing the scale of the whole thing was completely different from the air. And the whole time, we'd see something from the front and through the bubble, and then I'd watch it pass under my feet below me. It's like a totally variable ferris wheel at like 50 times the height. I was taking pictures like mad, and then the pilot tilted us, did a whole circle with the dam below us on his side, and then another with the dam on my side. I couldn't believe how fun it was.

After we saw the sites, we went over the lake and then right toward a small mountain, then popped up and over, and back down toward the casino. We circled and then came right back down where we began. Sal came up and unhooked me, and I thanked the pilot for the trip. Back in the van, I left a tip for them, and talked about how incredible the terrain was. Sal mentioned that it was similar to the rugged hills in Afghanistan, and I imagined how easy it would be for people to hide, and how hard it would be to reach enemies there. But I also imagined that the AH-64 Apache probably flies a hell of a lot better than this generic chopper, so maybe technology would help in a situation like this.

I felt slightly bad on the way back from the trip, because I dropped so much money on the ride. It was cool, and it was $150 cool, but I wouldn't have as much to spend the rest of the week. My mind wandered, and the next thing I know, there was a cop behind me with his lights on. Shit! I wasn't even going that fast, I didn't think. I pulled over, and acted as nice as possible. I've found that if you are calm, agreeable, and as non-threatening as possible, police will act relatively nice to you. Cops are worried you're going to pull out a .44 and level them, so I try to keep the hands visible and be cool.

Well, he clocked me at 71 and it was a 45. There's not much arguing you can do against that. He wrote me a ticket, but made it 65 in a 45 so it wouldn't be as bad. Since I don't own a car and I don't pay insurance, getting a ticket is no world-killer. But it meant I'd have to pay $170 in a month, and that isn't cool.

Also not cool is that I got in the paranoid, post-ticket mode where everyone was a cop and I couldn't drive a mile over the limit. That's bad in a car that can easily double any speed limit without spilling your drink. It's also bad when you're paying a lot for that car and you wanted to spend some time speeding in it. I clunked back into town, left the car with a valet, and went back to my room.

Once again, the depression sunk through me, and I drifted off for a nap for a bit. When I woke, the ticket thing was out of my mind, but I still felt crappy. It was Halloween, and nothing was going on. I didn't have a costume, I didn't know anybody, I didn't want to spend any money, and I'd feel stupid leaving this car somewhere unused, but I wouldn't get much out of driving it around. But I needed food. So I changed into my Coven t-shirt and leather jacket, and went to get my car and go to fucking Denny's.

I used to take Denny's for granted. I used to go there every Friday night when I had nothing to do, so I could write, eat dinner, and then go to the bookstore to buy books and maybe meet chicks who read books, but I never did. I mean, I bought books - nevermind, you know what I mean. Anyway, I moved to New York, and no Denny's. There are shitty neighborhood diners, but they do not have the institutional uniformity of a Denny's, or the space to sit down and really eat a meal. One thing I love about vacation is that I can go to a Denny's and travel time, be back in Seattle or Bloomington or whereever.

I drove up the strip, top down, Slayer playing, and wished driving on the strip was more of an event. People on the sidewalk are too removed from you, and you can't really talk to people in other cars. This isn't like American Graffiti. I wished there would be a bunch of bored, dumb, cute townie chicks sitting around a bus stop that I could somehow... I don't know. Something. Give me a break, I'm driving a fucking $50,000 car and all I can do is go from parking lot to parking lot. There should be more, right?

So I got to Denny's, and ate a Reuben in relative quiet. A transvestite asked a waitress if s/he could use the men's bathroom and wanted to make sure it wouldn't freak anyone out. Free refills. That's about it.

I drove up and down the strip a few times, just for lack of anything better to do. I found some smooth romance whatever station on the radio that had a lot of Frank Sinatra stuff, and that seemed to be the thing to listen to while driving. A girl yelled at me, nice car, which was funny, but obviously not much else went on. Back when I was a kid, me and Ray and Larry and others used to cruise Main Street in Elkhart. We didn't have an Audi TT, and Ray was 100% convinced we'd get laid if we tried hard enough, and we never did. It was a big thing in Elkhart, hundreds of cars would come out to just drive up and down the street. They tried to ban it, and it slowed down after a while, but it was the big thing to do in a town with very little. So it's always funny to be back there in a strange way, to be twice as old (fuck! I am twice as old!) and still essentially looking for the same great unknown, in a futile effort. I guess that's a lot of what this town is about, people downstairs paying money to look at a set of cards, watch their money vanish, and hope for the big one. That's all that life is, but this is a strange focal point in the middle of the desert, where the lack of the big dream pools into a giant city.

Enough of that. Nothing else happened, I talked to Ray and then I wandered downstairs for a bit. Lots of people with costumes, I think going into the nightclub. Wandering just made me more tired and depressed, so I came back here. And now I need to stop doing this before my battery dies, and get some sleep before I return the car tomorrow.

11/1/01 9:06 PM PDT

My only Vegas advice that I thought of today is bring all of your money in dollars. It makes it harder to plow through all of your money gambing, you always need to tip someone, and it makes your wallet fatter. That said, I'm getting tired of tipping all over the place, and I'm also tired of paying $3 for a bottle of water.

Anyway, not much of a day today. I got a smaller bowl of fruit at the cafe downstairs, and then got out the car for its return. I saw a guy at the valet parking with a '41 Willys that had been chopped, lowered, shaved, and completely rodded out. I tried to play nice and talk to him, but he was pretty quiet. Oh well.

It was another beautiful day of top-down driving in the Audi, but I just had to get some fuel and then go back. At the rental place, they found some tiny scratch that was probably there before, and ended up charging me $85 fucking dollars for it. I'm never going back to this place again - they fucked up the entire thing with me, and were not willing to give me any leeway. The whole thing made me feel drained, broke, and tired. I didn't want this to be the theme of the trip, but it was. I was glad I'd get a weekend back at home before work started, so I could somehow acclimate from all of this.

On the way back, I stopped in the MGM again to see the lions. The two baby cubs were in the habitat and playing with the trainers. They had those fake dog bone toys and loved to chase them around and chew on them. They looked a lot like house cats, but as big as a small kid. Watching made me forget a bit about the whole car scenario. I also gave Marie a call from the pay phone to see what was up in NYC and to talk about the various adventures and misadventures.

I trudged back to my hotel to drop off some things, and take a rest for a few minutes. I thought about going to the pool for a dip, but it was crowded, and I felt intimidated by the whole process. I guess that's a common problem for me, in any unknown situation like this. Do I go down in my suit or is there a locker room of some sort? Where do I leave my things? Do people actually swim or is it just a bunch of sunbathers? And so on. Instead, I flipped channels for a bit and thought about what else to do for the afternoon.

I went back out for another long walk and to snap a few photos. In the New York, New York, I wandered through this fake Manhattan cityscape built up inside the casino. A food court and some small shops were integrated within this fake city terrain, with mock brownstones and office buildings, storefronts and sidewalks. It's this entire Disney-like charade of New York, and it's actually kindof neat. But it's the kind of fake New York that people get from bad movies and episodes of Friends, nothing like the real one. There are no clean cafes, or streets without trash and bums in the real New York. Shit, their models don't even have any graffiti on them. But it's a neat little area to wander through, and amazes me for some strange reason.

I hiked up the strip to the Bellagio, and went in there for a while. It's pretty high class there, no expenses spared. I went in this botanical garden that was done up in a Thanksgiving motif, with squash and oranges and browns surrounding the pathways of this giant indoor tropic. The whole thing has this Italian motif, very European with elaborate trim and beautiful decorating. I'm not an architect or an artist, so I can't describe it, other than to say it's all very new and spectacular.

Tired from the walk, I sat down on a couch near the art museum (which was closed for rennovation) and messed with my camera for a bit, managing to delete all of the photos on the memory card. That was about 40 shots; not a lot, but enough to really piss me off and cap a mostly shitty day. I sat on the couch and rested, with no motivation whatsoever to do anything else for the rest of the afternoon. Instead, I just watched people filing in and out of the hallway. I guess it was by the spa, because a lot of old people were wearing these white robes and for a second, I thought they were all part of some religious cult or some eastern taoist bullshit. I also saw this woman with enormous breasts and a white shirt with water all over the front of it, and I wondered if her boyfriend pushed her into some water, or if she got too close to a drinking fountain, or if she was lactating, or what. I guess the most amusing thing to do in Vegas is pick a spot and see who passes you.

After that, I caught a buffet at Bally's, and the service was good, but the food is mediocre and doesn't live up to the ad campaign, which makes it sound like the Big Kitchen is a big deal. It's just food at salad bars, nothing new. I got a Bally's pen for subjecting myself to their mass mailing for the rest of my life, and spent about $20 on video poker, which kept me busy for maybe a half hour. Then I headed out.

Not much to say about the long walk home, other than that I got out my minidisc player and started listening to Queensryche: Operation Mindcrime and kept thinking that I need to spontaneously lose like 50 pounds and somehow get my shit together when I get back to new york. This is a constantly recurring theme, the whole self image thing. I know that eating lettuce and riding on an exercise bike won't give me results, and I know this a cyclical conversation. But it still happens, and it's really bugging the hell out of me. I should write more about it some other time, or actually do something to change. Anyway...

I've been here at the hotel now for a bit, just watching TV and relaxing. I don't feel like spending any more money or going out, so I rest. It's vacation. I have a nice bed, a TV. I will rest. Tomorrow, I don't know what I'm doing to kill time in the afternoon. Maybe I'll just go to the airport and write. We'll see. For now, TV.

11/2/01 8:30 PM EDT

You know you have entered the cult of the laptop owner when you find yourself searching an international airport for an hour looking for a loose AC jack that has power. I wish I had ten spare batteries so I could be charging them up on the airport's dime. Sort of reminds me of some bizarre Mad Max flashback.

Anyway, I'm on my way home, sort of. I just checked in to my flight a full four hours early. Let me explain.

I checked out thismorning at 11, after packing up everything and stealing everything that wasn't bolted down. Then I left my bag and leather jacket with the bellhop, and set out for a delerious afternoon of timewasting activities. I didn't feel like walking an inch, but I set out to find photo ops and free stuff.

The list is too long to go through blow-by-blow, so let me run through it fast: inside of NYNY, self-portraits by the fake brooklyn bridge, the denny's where I ate lunch; the coca-cola museum. I went to a shitty internet cafe and checked my email real quick, then more walking and random photos. I spent some time in the Flamingo's wildlife area where there were flamingos, penguins, duck, and giant fish. I gave Michael a call from there, and then went to the Mirage, for the Tiger tour. I saw some sleepy big cats, and very playful dolphin, both of which gave great photo. Then the walk to the Bellagio, where I lost $30 on casino War. (fuck!) Then the tram to Monte Carlo, then the Excalibur, then the Luxor. And I ate dinner at McDonalds, played some Tetris in the arcade, and walked around forever trying to find a place to sit down and relax without spending money, and found THERE ARE NONE!

And that's it. No moral to the story, just a few days out West. And with that, I've got a book to write, so enjoy the photos, and sorry for the lame story.