by the way i made another trip to my favorite place.. vegas, baby! where the tigers are white & the prostitutes pay taxes. when we rolled into town at 10pm it was 98 degrees - jeezus god it was hot!! so naturally we went directly to jack in the box and got a chocolate shake! yummm! i swear they’re like heroin for me. later, about midnight, the parking garage at the bellagio was 104 degrees - what the hell is that about?! hell being the operative word. but who cares, ’cause as soon as i walked in i knew, this must be what heaven is like - i swear i could hear harps playing and angels singing (tho they were almost drowned out by the ka-ching, ka-ching, ding, ding, ding, from the sea of slots.) i don’t know what it is, but i LOVE the Bellagio! and, by the way, i don’t gamble! i have, however, watched ‘ocean’s 11′ at least 11 times. actually i did gamble this time. a friend told me you HAVE to play the mega bucks slot machines, put in $21 and pull 7 times - just in case you are karmically (sp?) “meant” to win. so that’s what i did. even tho the mega bucks machines were right next to the bar where you are never supposed to play because they never pay out, but i figure if i’m meant to win the rules don’t apply to me. so i put in my hard-earned $21 (seriously that’s two hours of torture at the mall) and started pulling that lever (i think it’s lame to push the buttons). and on just about the last pull it happened…
ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! - the woman next to me won 3 thousand bucks! i have no idea what that means karmically (sp?) speaking for me, but i’m pretty sure it’s not a good sign.
also went to the Mirage and got a peek at one of those famous white tigers. and took Kylie to freemont street. you would have thought she was jessica simpson or something. everybody - and i mean everybody - was pointing and gawking and having a fit, “oh my god, it’s a dog!” “hey, look at the dog!” “how cute!” “can i take your dog’s picture?” i’m not kidding, it was like we were her entourage. which i guess makes sense because it’s kylie’s world, we just live in it. but come on, there is a 3 million dollar light show over your head people! - have you never seen a dog before? people are strange.
oh, and speaking of strange, and by strange i mean sad & disturbing, the weirdest thing that happened while we were there was while we had kylie with us on freemont street. these two little kids, like 6 or 7, came up with the usual, ‘can we pet your dog’ bit -and i don’t think this is strange for KIDS, by the way. so i was letting them pet her when the little boy looked at me and said, “you have a really cute dog.” followed by, “we are a few dollars short of having enough money for a hotel room tonight. could you give us some money?” i looked at him and blinked hard a couple of times and as i asked him “who are you here with?” and his sister had to grab the third kid, who was maybe 2, i noticed the tattoo on his neck. and i am not talking about a sponge bob square pants temporary tattoo all smeary from the sweat because i’m sure it was at least 101 at this point. this was the real thing! he had “a tat,” “ink,” a real tattoo of a snake on his neck. while i was processing that input, he pointed and said, “my parents are over there.” i turned and looked and there was a couple, no idea how old, somewhere between 19 and 59 sitting on the ground leaning against a store front. before i could even answer him, he got distracted and took off, of course i was probably speechless for a full 60 seconds which is a long damn time in this sort of scenario. now, i typically do give to homeless people. not that i’m a saint or anything, i just hope that it will be karmically (sp?) good for me. i figure homelessness is not out of the realm of possibility for my future, and i can only hope people will drop me a dime (or maybe even 89 cents for a super big gulp). the youngest homeless person i encountered prior to this was a 15 year old girl on the mean streets of Philly. that was disturbing too, especially since the temperature that time was about 15 degrees. i was in line outside a club waiting to see duran duran and freezing my ass off. so i bought her some hot chocolate, a grilled cheese sandwich and a snickers bar from one of those roach coaches. but this was just… startling. i had never seen a whole family. and also because of the context. vegas is like disneyland to me, in a really sleezy, minnie-gone-bad kinda way, but it’s all fun & games (although now, i do tend to think of CSI and wonder what would really happen if i found a dead body in the elevator at circus circus, and if you’ve been in there lately you know that’s not unlikely). so i didn’t give them any money. maybe i should have. maybe dad would have put it in a slot machine and had the same luck the woman next to me in the bellagio had. i don’t know.anywhoo, i guess that was my vegas reality check.
but luckily jack in the box is open 24 hours a day there, and a chocolate shake took me right back to my flashy flashy fantasy land. Hey, i can’t solve all the world’s problems!
god i wish i had a chocolate shake now!
*notice: the phrase ‘what happens in vegas, stays in vegas’ did not appear anywhere in this entry (until now). as much as i love vegas, i am really sick of that whole campaign.
