I did not write anything yesterday for a couple of reasons, the first is relatively pragmatic- I wrote two on Friday, so i felt i could take a day off. the other reason, very simply, because although I don't have a diagnosed case of Attention Deficit Disorder (which when i was growing up people just referred to as hyper, and you just were told to mellow out, but that's for another post on how much i hate doctors), but this town induces a case of ADD in even those with a great degree of singular focus. It's just really hard to know how much time you're spending in a place with no clocks, infinite noise and even more lights. The purpose of the casino is for you to lose perception of what's going on, lose all track of time, and not realize that chips are given to you so you don't really evaluate it as money. It seems that every time i come to this town, I intend on meeting people and going out and painting the town red, but it always seems that we never can keep the mob together (I have spoken at great lenght about how large a pain in the ass finding people in Vegas once you all have been split up), so i end up spending time with some of the people i want to chill with, but others, it doens't really works itself out. This where the Strip Induced ADD kicks in. I can think of numerous times on the strip where i'm at a crossroads- do i stop and look for my friend, knowing how futile that could be, or do i try to make sure to have the most positive experience i can have, and just make the assumption that if it's supposed to work out, it will? That's the option most of us take, which makes it easier for us to find ourselves parted. I guess if a bunch of dudes were willing to hold each others hands to walk through a mob, they could resolve this...i'm not sure if i've ever met that group of dudes, but i'm sure they exist.
Saturday night on The Strip is utter fucking madness. To really enjoy it, you have to 1) be really into crowds, 2) not mind a little inadvertent contact, or 3) be mind-numbingly intoxicated, with most choosing option 3. Walking up and down the Strip and people watching is really quite interesting, and I have gotten more than my fair share of walking, as many do in this town. I believe it has a lot to do with a couple of things, 1) scale of everything makes peoples perception change to something smaller, 2) nobody really knows how long The Strip is. The strip, from the Mandalay Bay to the Sahara, is a six mile walk. Walking from the casino floor in the Venetian to the casino floor in Treasure Island (which is literally across the street) is a 1.4 mile walk that takes about 20 minutes, as is the walk from the casino floor at the Venetian and the casino floor at the Wynn, which is also across the street. So everyone looks at the buliding the want to go to, and start walking (option of a cab on The Strip is a nightmarish idea, it literally is the opening scene of Office Space where the guy in the walker passes you). You don't realize how far of a walk it is until you're clearly en route, have been walking as long as you thought it would take and it's still seems off in the distance. So there's thousands of people walking on The Strip, and it always seems whatever direction i happen to be walking in is against the critical mass, so it feels like salmon must feel swimming upstream, fighting against nature to get to their necessary location. It also seemed like every table i wanted to play were playing with minimums that were too rich for my blood (the only craps table at the Venetian with space on the oval for me was a $100 minimum, which is an easy way in craps to lose $20K in less than an hour.) So i hit the road, and walked up The Strip to to find a place with cheaper and/or better (read: cheaper), and found myself at O'Shea's, a fine establishment that happens to have beer pong (if you don't know what beer pong is, please follorw this link:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=oGL&defl=en&q=define:Beer+pong&ei=N6frSdiqCpa0MPLcvfEF&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title
Besides beer pong, they also have some of the cheapest drinks and tables on The Strip, which makes it an ecclectic mix of people, young and old, rich and poor, and all kinds of racial diversity (couple salsa dancing to salsa music, then it changed to 50 cent and another couple started doing the C-walk.) Need a $2 beer? Go to O'Shea's. Need a single deck $5 craps on LV Blvd? O'Shea's is your place....which is where i need to go now, as apparently i forgot they had a cashier cage, and need to cash in my chips....
Closing out with...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e69laCvKxEw
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