I don't know where to begin.

A lot of things have been happening lately that have left me speechless (and not so speechless).

Going to Vegas was one of them.

I had passed through a couple times, but I had never been to Vegas. Part of me didn't even want to go. From the outside, it just looks the world's largest epileptic fit inducer.

And it is.

But that turns out to be a good thing.

Arrival

When you land in Vegas, you're right next to the strip. As the plane was taxiing into its parking spot, I got a view of Mandalay Bay, the Luxor, and others.

My first thoughts were:

- The strip is too close to the airport

- I hope my hotel room isn't facing the tarmac

After debarking, I took a short walk (the last of its kind I was to have for a few days) through the terminal. Something that I think Vegas-Virgins don't realize is that the lights and noises begin as soon as you're off the plane, and I'm surprised they even wait that long to put chances to lose money in front of you.

To get to the baggage claim means navigating through about fourteen-hundred-bajillion slot machines, each of which is screaming in its own "BING! BING! BING!" way. They're themed, too. You'll walk past a Monopoly slot, a Charlie's Angels slot, a Spiderman slot...

It's overwhelming.

Checking In

When you're checking out the strip from the airport, it's impossible to appreciate the size of the various buildings you're seeing.

Aika and I stayed at The Luxor. It's a pyramid-shaped hotel that's sandwiched between a resort with a wave pool and the universe's tackiest kingdom.

Looking at the pyramid, you get the idea that the hotel isn't especially large. Your brain uses previous hotelicular experiences to judge what seems to be "large," and The Luxor doesn't, at first, seem to qualify as anything out of the ordinary.

What you don't realize, though, is that much of what's on the strip is very well proportioned in relation to everything else on the strip. This leaves you with absolutely no frame of reference for size or distance.

When I stepped inside The Luxor, I realized that I couldn't have been more mistaken about the size. Rather, I was floored at the building's interior, wondering how in the hell anybody managed to build it, and how many slaves died in the process.

I could see the roof when I was approaching, but I don't recall ever having seen a ceiling. It's enormous, and it's basically hollow.

Sitting in the center of the hollow is an iMax theater, a casino, and a slew of shops and restaurants.

It makes the business hotels that I stay in look like doll houses.

For midget dolls.

The Room

After seeing a few Vegas hotel rooms, I've come to the conclusion that they're all designed to make you want to leave your room.

They're... "nice," but nothing special.

When I walked through the door of my room, the first thing I noticed was that there was one lame armchair and one crappy dining area. Everything about the scene said, "GET BACK TO THE CASINO, YOU IDIOT! WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING IN HERE? THIS CRAPPY ARMCHAIR DOESN'T OFFER YOU ANY CHANCES TO WIN! GO BACK WHENCE YE CAME, DOG!"

I ignored the talking (yelling) furniture and got ready for the evening.

A Mission

Aika and I wanted to go catch the Cirque du Soleil "Mystere" show. This meant that someone had to go pick up tickets.

Since I was the first one in town by several hours, I took a vote with myself, and it was unanimously agreed that I would go get them.

Aika, who knows Vegas, told me that the tickets could be picked up at Treasure Island, "...which is on the strip."

I had been fooled by the size of the hotel, but had not yet learned my lesson on Vegas Perspective. I thought, "Hey - I've got a couple hours before Aika gets in - I'll just walk down the strip until I get to this Treasure Island place, and then I'll grab the tickets and head back."

Ha ha ha.

Ha ha.

Ha.

First Impressions of The Strip

I had no idea where to go. All I knew was that Vegas seemed to come to an abrupt and screeching halt in one direction, so I decided to head down the street in the other.

This is the kind of situation I adore. There's no better feeling to me than having to get something done and not knowing exactly what to do. For all I knew, the ticket box office was in another state (it might be worth noting that this is nearly true).

So, I walked.

And I walked.

And I walked some more, continued walking, walked a ways again, and I still hadn't seen any hint of this Treasure Island place.

I had walked through many casinos. Vegas is designed to route traffic through casinos. I'm surprised they haven't found a way to force road and air traffic through them, but I suppose that day is coming.

Another funny thing is that, because everything is ridiculously huge, and because the casino corridors are designed to get you lost, you find yourself relying on, and (ho ho) trusting the signs in the casinos that point the way to an exit.

The people who place those signs have an incredible sense of humor.

You learn that, although the signs aren't lying, they aren't exactly being up front about things, either. They're like a French lover.

For example, you might see a sign which points in a direction, and the sign might read "Back to the strip." Now, this is ultimately true, but what the sign has failed to mention is that you would need some impressive mining equipment to burrow through the wall the sign was pointing at in order to actually get back to the strip, which is in fact just on the other side of the wall! The sign wasn't lying - it just didn't say how to punch a hole through the building.

As a result of these signs (which remind me a bit of the evil trees in the forest of the Yellow Brick Road), I spent a lot of time wandering through various casino floors and seeing things.

Beautiful things.

Horrible things...

The Zombies

The world is full of misconceptions.

When you think of Miami, what comes to mind? I can take a guess: Bronzed women, suntanning topless on a white sand beach, slowly turning their shimmering Coppertone skin to leather.

But, have you ever been to Miami? Are you ready for a little reality?

Think: Pale retirees and seventy year-old men wearing Speedos and drinking cheap beer.

Sexy, no?

No.

Now, think of Vegas. I don't know about you, but I pictured a lot of smiling faces, people having a good time, booze flying everywhere, maybe an appearance or two by Paris Hilton. You know. Whatever.

Now, see Vegas: Armies of drones tapping buttons, drinking nail polish remover, and smoking their cigarettes all the way down. Not just down to the butts, mind you - there were people in Vegas who were so under the spell of the slots that they were smoking their lips. Their chins were stained with ash, and their dry, chapped, and unkempt kissers were smoldering as they inhaled, probably still managing to deliver a dose of nicotine to their bodies from previous decades' smoky resin and accumulated tar going up in flames.

The slots are about as sexy as eating your own barf out of an ashtray.

This sexy bastard is, no doubt, extremely rich by now, eating oysters on the
half-shell, and snorting coke off the tits of untouchable models

Part of me wishes that I could understand what it is that drives these people, but another part of me is that glad that I have absolutely no idea. Thank you, fools, for laying down your lives, self-respect, and money so that I don't have to.

Not that I think slots are bad - it's just the people who seem to spend their lives sitting at them. It's scary when you look at the displays on these things. You'll see that someone has "768" credits. This means that the person has stuffed enough dough into the machine to be able to "play" it 768 more times. Watching these addicts is creepy as hell - they just tap, tap, tap the buttons and watch as their remaining credits go from 768 to 767 to 766 and so on. At the end, and this is the sweetest part, they'll just start over again from the beginning.

Ick.

The Lazy

If there's a way that Vegas can stop you from having to walk, it will.

Up and down the strip are a bunch of pedestrian overpasses. These things are really quite a good idea, as it means pedestrians never have to wait for the right of way to cross a street, and cars never have to wait for the pedestrians.

These things are all accessible by means of escalator. However, running up and inbetween the up/down escalators is typically a staircase.

While the escalators are perpetually packed, the stairs are eternally empty (god, that was some shitty alliteration - apologies to anyone out there with taste - Vegas may have tainted me in an unpositive way).

I chose to take the stairs up and down. If I had taken the escalators, it would have made me feel lazy.

When using the stairs, though, I felt like I was showing off: "Hey, everybody! Look what I can do! Yeah - use my legs to walk up and down these strange terraced bits of concrete! Suck it, losers!"

There were moving platforms everywhere, and the cabs were cheap enough that you could actually justify using them for a two block trip if you wanted.

Everywhere you go in Vegas, you can hear the sound of arteries clogging.

The People

Here is an example of the deepest conversation I had with a native Las Vegan:

Starbucks barista: You work for Microsoft?

Me [wearing my Microsoft shirt]: Yeah.

Starbucks barista: I want to learn how to build computers.

Me: OK.

Starbucks barista: How do I pirate software?

Me: Can I just have my scone, please?

Starbucks barista: If I use Microsoft, how many pirated MP3s can I download? More than a thousand? Because I like Justin Timberlake. I think he's a genius.

Me: Yeah. He's hugely talented. I'd like my tea, too, if you don't mind.

Starbucks barista: My cousin says I should use lornix. Does Microsoft make lornix? He said it makes it easier to get Justin Timberlake songs.

Me: No. We don't make lornix. Will you please take my money so I can leave?

Starbucks barista: Can you fix my printer...? Hey - where are you going? I haven't even given you your coffee yet...

Yup.

The Indulgence

Just as often as it tries to relieve you of the need to use your legs for the purpose for which they were invented, Vegas tries to stuff large quantities of refined sugar-fat into your various orifii.

Aika and I went to one of these renown Vegas buffets where you hand somebody about fifty bucks, and then they give you permission to pig the hell out on the premises until you're vomiting lunch back up in your throat, dead, or both.

We kept the main courses under control, but then dessert time arrived, and we kind of had our way with the resources spread out before us.

Aika, holding a bloody-Mary and a glass of Champagne, eating several desserts at
once without any silverware: Vegas in a nutshell

Rory's Vegas tip: If you use the stairs instead of the escalators, then you'll feel less guilty about having had a strawberry cognac cream pie for lunch that you washed down with three martinis.

Not a slice, by the by.

The whole damn pie.

The Party

One of the main reasons I went to Vegas was to hang out at the DNR Vegas Party. While I don't remember all the details, I know that I remember having met some nifty people. Of course, I ran into the usual suspects and homies: Brian Kuhn, DonXML, and so on, but I also got to meet a few n0obs.

First, I'm going to get a shout out to these crazy bastards:

Anybody with an arrow next to his head in this picture is insane

Those guys with the arrows are Kyle, Sidy, Mike, and Cory. They drove five hours just to come to the party, and they were a hell of a lot of fun. They also made me feel short. If you look at Cory, he's half-kneeling so that he can appear to be a somewhat similar size to me. Any one of these men probably could have killed me with his bare hands, but instead they chose to hang out and have a good time. Can't complain about that.

Now, in the back of this picture is a man in a green shirt. His name is Phillip Mustafen, and...

Well...

:)

He's what I call a "Russoklahoman." He's from Oklahoma, but he still has something of an accent that followed him from Moscow, and he's a bit unusual.

Here's the deal: No matter what was going on, Phillip was Phillip. I don't know how else to say it.

The night of the party, he came out on the strip with Aika and I. We ate dinner at 3:00 AM in Caesar's Palace and talked about everything.

This was one of my favorite exchanges:

Aika: Teach me a little bit of Russian.

Phillip: I forgot it. I don't know it anymore, man.

Aika: Oh, come on. Just teach me how to say something.

Phillip: I tell you: I forgot it.

Aika: I'll teach you Japanese if you teach me Russian.

Phillip: I don't want to learn Japanese.

We were all guilty at one point or another of trying to get Phillip to teach us some Russian, but he wouldn't budge. He saw it as people trying to get him to "perform," and he stuck to his guns on that. It's just a good example of how, regardless of the situation, Phillip was Phillip. There was no way to get him to be unPhillip [insert something here about integrity].

A shot of me with the man who can only be Phillip

Then, of course, as I mentioned, Brian Kuhn was also there. He's a regular .NET Rocks listener, and I had met him before. I love seeing him, and I think this picture demonstrates that love:

Picture stolen unashamedly from Brian's Vegas Gallery

The party was good.

I love running into my homies, and I also got to perform, for the first (and last?) time in public, the Chris Sells Burning Man Song.

Good times.

I think I wound up spending most of my time with Aika, Brian, and Phillip, so it only seems appropriate to get a photo up of the three of us doing whatever in the hell it is that we were doing together:

Homies having their way with a Luxor lion

What's really impressive about this shot is that Brian, seen on the right, was able to climb up to where he was in spite of the fact that he had, by this point, and I'm not exaggerating, ingested something like 57 glasses of Scotch. That would simultaneously explain the smile on his face and the reason he's having to stabilize his head on the lion's nose.

Aika, on the left, is just being pleasantly graceful.

Then, Phillip being... Phillip.

The Tacky

If I had to summarize Vegas, I would say that it's like a plastic emerald embedded in a foil crown stuck on top of a half-woman/half-pig that can't stop oinking, and isn't even the slightest bit ashamed of itself.

In this shot, Aika's begging me to buy her the pink porcelain poodle.

In Vegas, it's entirely conceivable to think that the thing actually was picked directly from the pink porcelain poodle tree and delivered fresh to this showcase.

I love this shot.

The Reality TV

I'm realizing that it isn't going to be possible to cover everything that happened in Vegas, or even a small little bit of what went on. I mean, what I've written about so far has been like a summary of a summary.

However, I want to at least hit many of the Big Things, and I think this qualifies as a Big Thing.

Basically, provided some producers at this network like our segment, some of the DNR crew is going to show up in part of an episode of a thirteen part documentary/reality TV show about Caesar's Palace.

I'm not going to give away any details except this one: We sounded like idiots (so, like ourselves) :)

Picture stolen from the Carl Monster

I would say that it was surreal to have spent about four hours with these people in Caesar's in the middle of the night, but the truth is that, by this time of my Vegas trip, it just seemed very normal.

It's interesting what one street of one city can do to warp your sense of reality.

The Summary

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I'm pretty much at a loss for words.

I expected to hate Vegas in detail. When I had passed through before, I felt a thin patina of wretched debauchery collect on my arms, and it made me a little nauseous.

The trick, methinks, is to not take the city at all seriously. Then the patina turns into a frosting you want to lick off.

Also, one last note: It's easier to get a hooker in Vegas than it is to get a meal, so bring a sacked lunch.

Maybe I'll write more as my energy comes back. I'm totally beat from a fabulous, fabulous, and wonderful week.