Three minutes

A story.

My friends love to take impromptu trips to Las Vegas.  I'll get a call Friday morning and they'll say, "We're going to Vegas tonight.  When you get home from work, pack a bag.  We'll come back Saturday night."  I've found this to be a very common Los Angeles experience, the last-minute Vegas trip.  It actually works a lot like they portray it in Swingers.  It's an escape from the horrors of a city no one wants to live in surrounded by people they don't like.  What a resource to have as an option!

Which is all great except I hate Vegas.  Like, a fanatical hatred of it.  Can't stand it.  The only thing I like about Las Vegas is the drive there.  I like doing it alone with my iPod.  But Vegas itself sucks.  I've heard it described as "the most aggressively mediocre city in the world" and I subscribe to this portrayal.  All the strobing lights and constant ding-ding-dinging of slots and honking of horns on the Strip and crappy lounge acts and a never-ending loop of cheap promos for shows and those STUPID Bellagio water fountains (they're not alive, people, stop fucking clapping for the fancy sprinklers) and stupid novelty-sized and -shaped drinks of horribly bright and vibrating colors and even more outdoor shows and all those frigging people and the infinite slapping of an infinite-times-two number of cards and magazines advertising strip clubs and whore houses thrust in your face by hundreds of immigrants being exploited at less-than less-than-minimum-wage pay all lined up in a row.  All I can think about when I'm there is how much I want the whole city to please just shut the hell up for like five minutes.  Please!  Five minutes is all I ask and then you can go back to being outrageously annoying and excessive and gratuitous.  But please just shut UP!

I do a good job of politely declining the impromptu Vegas trip.  But since I have a lot of friends on the East Coast and they all want to see Vegas, they all plan weekends there and I have to go see them because they're my friends and I won't see them again for another year or so. 

So I am forced to voluntarily, and with a smile on my face, head into... it. 

The last time I was in Las Vegas was about a month or so ago when a friend from New York took a vacation there.  Now, take all I've written before into account and prepare yourself, for I am going to pull a quick left-hand turn here and tell you that this story is about a great moment I had in Vegas.

We're walking down the strip after losing some money looking for the least-shitty place to eat after the ESPN Sports Zone made me want to spoon my insides out and hurl them out into the desert the food killed me so much the night before.  But there we are, strolling along the Strip amidst the sea of fat men in Hawaiian shirts and women pushing baby strollers (you brought the infant to Vegas?  Really?).  The sun had set an hour ago but you'd never know it from the horribly tacky and incessant lighting that makes you wish you still had your sunglasses with you.  Except very slowly it starts getting darker.  And darker.  It takes me a moment to figure out that the gaudy lights are going off.  All over the place.  It's like a power outage making a slow crawl down the Strip.  One after another the casinos go dark: Monte Carlo; New York, New York; Paris; Circus Circus; Bellagio; etc.  Darker and darker.  Until the only lights on the whole entire Strip is the Jumbo-tron at Caesar's Palace. 

This Caesar's Palace Jumbo-tron that now has a tribute to the recently-deceased Ronald Reagan on it.

Vegas has shut up.  All around us people have stopped walking.  Everywhere everyone taking in the moment, a moment for this "great" leader.  A time to reflect on the man who brought down Communism.  The man who knocked down the Berlin Wall so capitalism could run rampant, free to manifest itself in unfettered sick displays such as Las Vegas, all loud and obnoxious like a frat guy.  And so all these mid-Western Americans pause in their Sodom-and-Gamorrah weekends to pay silent tribute to their fallen leader.  Sadness and respect permeates.

Except where I am standing, with an ear-to-ear smile of unbounded joy and excitement and intoxication and glee; where I am actually not standing but bouncing a little on my toes, so ecstatic I can hardly contain myself and all my anxious energy gets thrust into my balled fists, the fingers of which dig into my palms I'm squeezing so hard; so there I am, in pure ecstacy amidst the silence, the sweet sweet silence, because Vegas has finally and completely and totally shut the fuck up, if only for three minutes.