Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Part I
29 January 2007If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The fact that I do not travel much and that I do not travel well comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me. I suppose a case could be made that the collapse of my travel tolerance is directly proportional to my advancing age. Could be. Why should I travel well? I’m a hermetic writer hole up in the mountains. A guy whose idea of a major social event is going to both Sam’s Club and Martins’ Gourmet grocery store, all on the same trip. Send that man to Vegas and see what happens. I actually believe periodic sojourns away from home are beneficial and appropriate from a psychological perspective: it’s important (for me) to periodically get outside whatever box I find myself in. I periodically and purposefully provide for otherworldly frames of reference. I want experiences of great contrast to compare to my current groove. One Nation under a Groove. Familiarity breeds contempt and nothing makes me long for home more than being away from home. I find periodic doses of compare and contrast engenders a real appreciation for what I have. Can’t get much more of a contrast then where I live and what I do to Vegas, Sin City. Up all night, sleep all day. Some people cannot wait to go on vacation. They live for vacation. I dread the approach of vacation – actually what I dread is the flight travel portion too and from the destination. As I ponder the airport scene, I am overcome with an (ever-increasing) impending sense of dread. Still, in order to get outside my box, I traveled to Vegas to attend the AAU world push/pull championships. I would be there in the capacity of a coach. I would use this important athletic work to justify a visit to the epicenter of the hip universe. Oddly many of my east coast Irish relatives have mysteriously migrated to Vegas. I am a morning Irish person and these are night Irishmen.
One day I’m forty minutes into the middle of the deep woods watching a hawk soar 50-feet overhead walking on some unnamed, cross-cut, deep woods fire trail. The next day I’m standing in an endless line at Dulles airport waiting to check luggage. In a few more hours I’m standing in the middle of the kaleidoscopic Fremont Street Experience light show drinking a beer in public. They mess with your mind in Vegas and they’re not subtle or apologetic. The Vegas product hawksters apparently have taken their cues from the North Korean torture masters in the movie The Manchurian Candidate. These people are brainwashing experts out to sell some products. Like Mugato brainwashing Derrick to kill the Indonesian Prime Minister when Relax, by Frankie goes to Hollywood is played, weak-minded people are in big trouble in Vegas. The Fremont Street experience could have been dreamed up by Mugoto. Incredible, trip-esque dolphins and reindeer gallop or swim the length of the quarter mile ceiling, Kenny Gee-style Christmas music is played loud. They bombard the senses to soften you up for the purchase. Vegas purposefully promotes sensory overload on every seductive sensual level: the eyes are continually barraged with brilliant exploding neon lights of every hue and shade. In every direction lights blink and pop and dazzle, bedazzle and induce a visual hypnosis-euphoria. The ears are subjected to a continual backdrop of amplified noise. Droning, pulsing tones, dull, indistinguishable, white static music, staccato or smooth, but never ending. The desert air is dry and devoid of moisture. It wants your moisture. I needed a haircut before I left and I should have made time; the dryness took every bit of moisture my hair had to offer, leaving me with what Irish host El D referred to as “a Spud Fro.” He told me to take off the baseball cap before we left the bachelor pad to go eat. “You look like a mid-seventies baseball player with their hair crazy sticking out under the cap. People will think your’re Rain Man.” I took off the hat.
I was there for the AAU powerlifting competition held in a Fremont Street Hotel Casino. I would coach my young Russian comrade Pavel Tsatsouline. The competition provided us a perfect excuse to gather in Vegas. There is a component of enforced idleness preceding a lifting competition. The lifter is well advised not to run wild. Pavel would be stuck in a hotel room for three days and since half of Dublin now lives in Vegas, I thought it appropriate to go see all the boys in one fell swope. This seemed a totally valid and sufficiently weird pretext for assembling. After all this would be Vegas and as Vegas Patron Saint, Hunter S. Thompson would say, “When the going gets tough the weird turn pro.” Vegas is the new center of the entertainment Universe: Elton, Prince, Celine, Wayne Newton – the top paid entertainers in the world play regularly in Vegas. All the Hollywood and Euro-trash celebrities own multi-million dollar Vegas condos. The Who played last month in the headliner room of a local casino – the cost? $350 bucks general admission! Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. I wasn’t into the shows or the gambling. I wanted to explore the food possibilities. My double ulterior motive for this trip was to sample some of the best beef and pork dishes in the world. It would become a meat pilgrimage. I have done this sort of thing in years gone by - but all my old-time partners fell to the wayside for a variety of reasons. I occurred to me that brother beef aficionado Pavel would be stuck for days in a town that has an incredible assortment of celebrity chef beef restaurants, And an equally impressive collection of local eating establishments that would blow your mind. Plus the incredible collection of ethnic eateries. Pavel and I would need on the ground local intell. I had just the guy: El D knew everyone everywhere in Vegas – he was Wired with a capitol W. He had great taste buds and helped lay out our Vegas culinary plan of attack. I suggested we use powerlifting periodization principles and systematically rotate through the pile of fine beef houses, BBQ joints, top local joints and the unending ethnic restaurants. It would be a dramatic display of extended and refined gluttony.
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