Tuesday, November 10, 1998
Leave senses in Las Vegas
THOUGHT: Take a vacation from responsibility with overload of
sight, sound, smell, sin
Being in Las Vegas is such a trip. Time moves intermittently.
For 105 minutes at least, I did not think a single thought. I had
just enough experience to fill my head well past the point where it
leaks out of my ears. Disgusting.
I would only think to write this in Vegas. The city promotes a
completely different mindset, one that is almost impossible to
describe. When I get back from Las Vegas, I’ll want to remember
what the experience was like, and I’ll try to describe it.
But I will never remember, later on, what it felt like to be in
Vegas, and so I figure I should try my best to describe it now,
while I’m still here. But then, it’s hard to focus while I’m here,
and I’m worried that I won’t get any writing done, that I’ll get
back from Vegas and all my writing will amount to three or four
fleeting thoughts.
Well these are those thoughts, however many, and you can be the
judge of whether they’re enough to adequately describe Las
Vegas.
Let me start from the beginning of this trip, when my two
friends and I went to Treasure Island where we met some other
friends of ours from Seattle. In our hotel room, I noticed
everything. I heard my friend unlocking and locking the window with
my left ear, and Michael Jackson’s voice occupied my right ear, but
then his voice was interrupted by static as my friend changed the
radio station.
Leaving the hotel room, we crossed the street and went to a
relatively cheap casino, where we gambled away some money and spent
some more at the bar.
Then we spent some more money on a taxi, which drove us to a
strip joint, where we spent a whole lot more money. (It was at the
strip joint, around 2 a.m. when I noticed that 105 minutes had gone
by, and I had not thought a single thought.)
When we left the strip club at 2:30 a.m., we wound up back at
the relatively cheap casino where we’d started.
We’ve regrouped in so many different rooms since we got here: in
our hotel room, in our friends-from-Seattle’s-hotel room, in the
elevator on the way up and down from our hotel rooms, in lobbies,
waiting rooms and bathrooms, and on adjacent bar stools at
different bars. Within the casinos that we’ve been to, I’ve sat in
at least 10 different chairs in front of 10 different slot
machines, usually not to play, but to rest.
That’s just what I started doing when we returned to that casino
at 2:30 in the morning. I found chairs to sit in, maybe started to
write a little and then began to fall asleep.
"No sleeping in the casino!" said a security guard, and my eyes
opened abruptly, and my heart skipped a beat. So I got up and
walked around the casino, until I found another chair to sit in.
Every time I sat down, I would start to fall asleep, but then I
would catch myself, and I’d stand up and walk around, just to wake
myself up and to avoid the No-Sleep Patrol that had nailed me
earlier.
I’m walking around – now that’s something I’ve done in so many
different casinos, past so many different singing slot
machines.
This might not impress everybody. One might say, "Wow, so you’ve
walked to a bunch of different places, and when you’re not walking
from place to place, you’re sitting or standing somewhere. That’s
fascinating."
And maybe, by itself, it’s not particularly fascinating. Or
maybe you have to be in Las Vegas to really appreciate it or to be
fascinated by it.
Maybe in Las Vegas, the scenery is so gaudy that it makes you
appreciate every minute and every episode of sitting, standing or
walking. For instance, my friends and I, just now, are simply
walking from one casino to another, and our senses are being
assaulted on all sides. A cold wind dries out our faces and makes
our noses run as we walk across a pedestrian overpass that offers
an extensive view of the strip, the main avenue in Las Vegas.
But maybe my senses aren’t being assaulted; maybe I’m just more
conscious of my senses when I’m in Vegas. My nerve receptors are
much more active; they send me so many signals. The slightest
tingling in my hand, or in my eyes, all of these tiny sensations
become emboldened, and they arrive at my brain en masse. And so my
attention span is shorter as my train of thought is constantly
diverted.
When I’m in Los Angeles, I spend a lot of time thinking about
what I’m going to do next; I think about the past and the future
and the practical consequences of my actions. Passing time is more
meticulously chronicled; it passes in well-timed blocks. And each
block is focused on a different task or goal; for instance on
Tuesdays and Thursdays, I spend one 75-minute block of time
learning about economics.
In Vegas, the present is too distracting to allow for this
rumination on the past and on the future. If, in Los Angeles, I
average 12 thoughts per minute, then in Vegas, I average about 12
gazillion thoughts per minute. Since they come so fast, none of
them get a chance to develop.
If I happen to have a profound thought (as I usually do), it is
interrupted by a million other sensory distractions. And so while I
might not be goal oriented while I’m here, I am, more firmly than
ever, grounded in the present.
While one could say that Vegas distracts us from our goals, I’d
like to say that everyday life distracts us from one ever-important
fact: we spend all of our time either standing or sitting still, or
transporting ourselves from one place to another, either by
ourselves, or in the company of others. Go ahead, examine your own
life. That’s what you do. Just don’t think of it that way, because
you’re thinking of a goal or of a fear or you’re thinking of
changing your philosophy of life.
This is all well and good; one should have goals and fears and a
philosophy of life. Thus, I wouldn’t want to live in Vegas. It’s
just a good place to spend a weekend.
Mark Dittmer
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