It should be reasonably obvious by now that I've been in Vegas for the last few days for BiSC. Now, it's been a while since I was last here, and even then, I was broke and traveling with my family. So it's safe to say that this time around was with a fresh set of eyes.
This town is hilarious.
It's an incredible departure from reality. Everything about the tourist experience here is designed to extract you from your everyday life and inject you into something so radically different that you have no choice but to be sucked into the vortex of light and sound, where they proceed to spin you so fast that the money just flies out of your pockets. It's a truly elegant system, from the ricockulous ATM fees in place to obliterate moderation to the labyrinthine halls of the casinos and shops created to trap you.
And the psychology goes deeper. By prying you away from your sensibilities so forcibly and completely and hurling you, kicking and screaming, into the shiny, shiny void, it encourages degrees of debauchery and excess that most cannot resist much less believe was deep inside of them.
It's rare - no, it's unique - to see a town designed like this. It's one of my favorite expressions of artifice and manipulation, to create an illusion so complete that even the disgruntled employees who see the streams of tourists ebb and flow through it can't crack the facade.
Farewell, Vegas, you sweet, beautiful Charybdis, you.
I bought a belt today for $78 today with a Visa gift card and didn't bat an eye. I'm not leaving this city SOON ENOUGH.
ReplyDeleteBack to the world that makes sense!