Here is how it happened:
Friday 10:11 PM - JetBlue 777 from Boston touches down in Vegas. I’m on it. Your life just got that much better.
Yes. 10 minutes early, I think. I scored during the trip by learning of a better route between my home and downtown Cambridge. I tried it my first day back and shaved 10 minutes off of my commute.
Friday 10:12 PM - Fire up the text messages to find friends. Who doesn’t like friends? Text messaging is so hip. Maybe I’ll even send out a few tweets.
Texting is apparently passe. Twitter is it. Although I had signed up for Twitter when it first came out, I never used it. Being around people who connect through Twitter was a little strange. Having my experiences documented by others in real time was very strange. Not knowing what was going on within a cell phone signal radius was very strange. I’ve since started playing with Twitter more and see the attraction - the allure of an immediate memory dump and hope that someone will enjoy your pithy 256 character format. But still - it is very strange.
It looks like a slippery slope - blog -> twitter -> borg society.
Friday 11PM - Get to the IP, drop off baggage. Locate people who received desperate cries for attention text messages. Party like a rock star. Albeit an aging rock star, but a rock star nonetheless.
Found said people at MGM through my quaint text messaging efforts. I still love that $6 shuttle out of McCarran and up the strip, but mental note: if it goes to the Flamingo, get off and walk to the IP rather than wait for a tour of the Ceaser’s drop-off circle. Do rock stars use public transit?
Friday 11PM - Saturday 9AM MGM, IP Geisha Bar, random houses of ill-repute. Whatever, Baby, I’m up for it. Rock. Star.
Crashed at 4:30 AM. Nothing unseemly happened during those first 5 hours in Vegas.
Saturday noonish - try to find out where the ArgCie and ss-Pablo wedding is going to take place. The Vegas Courthouse, which is the designated site, per sheverb.com, since all of the fake reverends can’t even get their shit together enough to perform a wedding in Vegas. Geesh. Anyway - Googlemap says it is 3.5 miles away. Really? There are a bazillion wedding chapels in Vegas. Why do I have to go 3.5 miles? There is a perfectly good one right in the IP. Some people are so finicky.
I woke up around 9:30 and made some mild noise to see if my roomie (Senor Maha) was interested in breakfast. I took his “ugh” as a no and headed over to the MGM. Texted a breakfast connection and found the MGM diner after being misdirected to breakfast at Wolfgang Puck’s. Yes, a $15 omelette probably would have been good, but they weren’t going to sell me one until 11:30 when they opened. Instead I settled for a 5-meat omelette at the MGM diner. To find the MGM diner you must give up on Wolfgang Puck’s and go look for the buffett. You will spot the diner out of the corner of your eye at the last possible minute.
Saturday 1PM - watch marriage, that is if I haven’t passed out from exhaustion due to the long trip out there.
Ok, the wedding of Pablo & Gracie was pretty awesome. It reminded me of my own vows 1.3 decades ago and reminded me to be more attentive to my wife. Also I was able to ride up and down the strip in a stretch limo with stripper bars and a window that might or might not have been ready to fall off of the limo at any moment necessitating the owner spending $7000 and waiting for an replace to arrive from someplace somewhere that I didn’t care about because I was sick of listening to him at that point.
Also - some guy spilled his drink all over pants #1. Luckily, I had brought both pants #1 and pants #2 with me to Vegas. Unluckily, pants #2 were back in my room at the IP.
Salternative - weasel my way into The Procedue. But definitely wedding first. Wedding before boobies. Yes. That would be the right thing to do.
Probably if I had Twitter and followed BadBlood I would have had a better chance at this. As it was I didn’t even see him once during the whole weekend.
Saturday 2-3PM - mill about at the Venetian. Prolly eat some noodles in their fabulous noodle bar.
No noodles necessary. 5 meat omelette still working its magic. Milling about also blocked. I dug up my players card and brought it to Vegas only to leave it in my room. I’m sure it enjoyed its time with pants #2, but I was forced to wait in line for a replacement players card. Or like the Rooster would say, playa’s card.
Saturday 3PM-7PMish - play poker. Final table. If I make it far enough, I’ll chop it to stop it because…
Yes I particpated in poker in that I sat at a table, received cards and moved a few chips into and out of the pot. Whether any sensible person would call what I did actually ‘playing poker’ is debatable. I did still Iggy’s blinds once so yay me. He’s apparently quite good at poker in Latin America.
Alternative - 3:05PM - 7PMish Drink at bar. Maybe eat more noodles, but probably a different kind of noodles. That is to say, different from the first kind of noodles I ordered today. If you thought by ‘different kind of noodles’ you thought I meant penis, then you are very wrong. I’ve only grabbed one particular penis with any kind of affection in my lifetime - we’ve kind of got a thing going on and I don’t want to break it up. So yeah - really noodles. Not penis.
Yep, still no noodles. I wasted $5 in a slot machine that Joanada was going to show me how to play but didn’t because she was actually only using me to enable her play on crazy +EV run on -EV games.
Saturday 8PMish - Hofbrauhaus! Praise be to the Germans! Deutscheland uber all, bitches! I’m not German (close though - Swiss and French). They sure did fuck a lot of things up last century, but none of the people that made those decisions are alive anymore. Can you really hold the children of lunatics responsible for their ancestors actions? No, I say. Exhaulted producers of both beer and sausage! And oom-pah bands! And dirndls! Go here for a free beer coupon!
Highlight.
of.
the.
trip.
(the wedding was all good and heartwarming, but H-House was fuuuun.)
A group of stalwarts made it here and partied like German rockstars.
Sausage, large/tiny beer comparisons, sausage, pretzels, vomit, spankings, and boobie-flashing by random strangers. Also a waitress who knew how to work her dirndl.
Saturday 11PM - Back to the strip. Craps! Pai gow! Low limit poker! I got a whole lot of money that I’m ready to burn, so get those stakes up higher. Actually I’d quite like to win some money. I’ve never really ‘hit it big’ in Vegas. I say this trip I’m due, baby, I’m due.
A funny thing happened in Vegas…I really didn’t feel the gamble in me, so I didn’t. I hung out at the bar and chatted with various people, or simply stared off into space and watched the freak show that is the population of the IP after midnight on a Saturday night.
Sunday 3AM - get into an argument with Iggy about something stupid.
Now, I told Iggy I had put this time aside for him. He tried to start an argument earlier in the evening when we were negotiation what this argument would be. Since he is heavy into the fisticuffs, he assumed we would be duking it out by the bikerack. When I corrected him on that he challanged me to a spelling bee. I suggested we use British spelling rules and he lost on the second word. “Centre”. Funny thing is that caught the er->re inversion but insisted on spelling it with an “S”. S-e-n-t-r-e. I told him he was wrong, he was angry and insisted that should have known he meant “C” instead of “S”. He pouted after I informed him that spelling bees don’t work that way.
I somehow becaume distracted and didn’t notice 3:00 AM roll around.
Is that my fault?
Maybe. I think I was distracted by the fisticuffs taking place near one of the gaming tables. Apparently some homie insulted some other homie and his girlfriend. Rather than go the spelling bee route, they settled it with their fists. Or rather one set of fists and the other guy’s turtle-like shoulder and back. Suprisingly, the guy who received the beating was escorted out because the rest of the table agreed that he had been acting like an asshole and deserved the beating. Justice, the IP way.
Anyway - back to the Iggy/Biggestron bout:
Maybe I should have gone to him at 3AM and made some ridiculous statement about the utility of adversting in our society. Perhaps I could have suggested to him that Guinness tastes better if you cut it with ice and Budweiser. Maybe I could have told him that sniglets do not, in fact, ‘rule’. Whatever - I didn’t start it with him. When I told him we were 45 minutes past our appointment, despite the fact that we had been sitting next to each other the entire time, he tried to start something but I was having nothing of it.
Biggestron 1, Iggy 0.
Sunday 6 AM - likely asleep. Maybe not. Redbull does give you wings.
Close! I made it until just after 5 AM. Redbull might have carried me the rest of the way but I was done for the night.
Sunday 12 - will football still be showing? Will people be watching? Who cares? Football bores me. I will buy drinks for anyone who can explain to me why it is interesting. I get baseball. Baseball kicks ass. Hockey is alright, but I’ve sort’ve moved on from hockey. But football? Nope. I even played in high school so it’s not like I don’t know the rules. Just boring to me, that’s all. Like I said - if you can make football interesting for me, without involving putting money on a game, I’ll buy you a drink. Not much of an offer in Vegas, but there it is.
Breakfast in at the IP diner. Waited 40 minutes to sit down, only to wait 30 minutes to eat an overpriced, undergreat breakfast. Roomie not amused by my terrible suggestion but still pleasant about the whole 60+ minute overpriced undergreat breakfast.
Passed through sports book. Football didn’t do it for me so I went shopping for gifts over at the Forum. Apparently the Magic Store never changes their inventory. I have now bought the last cool thing there and will likely never return.
I sat down and played about 45 minutes of 3/6 hold em’ when I saw an open seat at the table. It reminded me of the first time I ever played poker in a casino - I by myself and tried out 3/6 hold em after receiving a few months of training in my $2 spread homegame. Finished up $50 thanks to some good cards for me and slightly less good cards for other people. One new player couldn’t believe that he could lose with a full house and contested my win over him (my 888JJ vs his 777JJ - board was J8J 7 7 - I had pocket 8’s he had A7). Nicely played sir - perhaps you can find a few reruns of the world series of poker on ESPN where they explained the game more clearly.
Maybe I’ll go check out the Las Vegas pinball hall of fame.
Went back to the SportsBook and did just this. Not many takers on this journey. Roomie came along, but I suspect only out of abject boredom - he was playing some game on his I-phone when I asked him. The PHOF was pretty awesome. They had pinball machines that were over 40 years old and still working. They had the pinball machine that I played while bowling as a youth (NY Taxi driver). They had the pinball machine that my friend had in his basement (Kiss) when I was growing up. They had the baseball game that my parent’s had at their bowling alley when I was an even younger youth - 3 pitches and a control consisting of a large silver button.
Here’s the amazing thing - almost every machine was in working order and you could play them for their original price - mostly between 25 and 50 cents. Best $10 I ever spent in Vegas.
Sunday afternoon - pick up some magic trick gifts at the Magic Shop in the Forum shops for the boy. Maybe some jewelery for wifey. It is a Christmas tradition in my house.
Done.
Sunday dinner - either Sushi Roku in the Forum Shops or Todai Sushi in Planet Hollywood. Anyone interested? I have not had great sushi since leaving California. If I were a better writer I’d slide in some clever analogy here about a man seeing his firt woman after a long stretch in jail. Yeah - that’s how I’m going to eat that sushi.
The sushi restaurent ended up being a sushi buffet. I wasn’t interested in eating $30 worth of buffet food so I settled for a slice of pizza while I walked around the Planet Hollywood shops (Miracle Mile?). I noticed that the same stupid non stock rotating magic shop could also be found here. Not that it mattered - I’m really not planning on ever patronizing them again.
Sunday evening - Open! I can’t plan out my entire Vegas weekend, can I? That would be kind of uptight of me. I probably would have put bowling with Proud Geek, but my shoulder is still a bit sore from my bike accident last month.
Hung out in the sportsbook and watched the rest of the Dallas game. This one was kind of exciting. I dumped $40 on video poker after hitting quads in the first 5 minutes of play and running my initial $20 up to $55. I figured I would just play for the big score and be done with it rather than hit-and-run the poker machine. When I was out $40 I missed the $35 I could have made.
Sunday 10:00 - get back to McCarran airport. Flight out at 11:10. Sunday night security lines suuuuuck.
Made it back to McCarran on time. Security was line was super light. I couldn’t find anywhere interesting to eat so I elected to order a fruit-smoothie, figuring I could use some nutritional recharge. I asked for the carrot-lover’s smoothie but the smoothie-jerk told me that they were out of carrots and that he could make it without the carrot juice. I saw a whole stack of carrot’s behind him but didn’t feel like arguing it with him. Maybe those were just display carrots? Anyway, I told him that a carrot juiceless smoothie “would hardly satisfy a person who had just asked for the carrot-lover’s smoothie” and went with some berry mixture smoothie. I hate seeds but there was really nothing else there. Sometimes you just have to take your lumps in Vegas.
Monday morning - land in Boston. Get my sorry ass home with public transit. Sleep. Do some work from home. Come back here to check this outline. Post amusing updates on timeline.
Made it home. Took me nearly 2 hours to get from the airport to my house by public transit (its a 30 minute drive). Slept.
Missed the pokerstars freeroll. I reengaged my Twitter account and read about everything I missed over the weekend, including the events that I took part in.
Good times, but wondering if I will return next year. I think I might be done, Winter Gathering. It’s not you - it’s me.
Then again I think that I’ve said that everytime I returned from Vegas, so who knows?
