Saturday Morning

Sitting in a coffee shop having tea (I gotta be me) and playing with my PDA. I find my attention lingering a little too long on a twenty-something woman who is the only person in line but has been getting her order "filled" for the last five minutes. She showed up in sandals and socks and a tank top that must be on its fourth owner, and I am not half as deterred as I should be: I am, to put it bluntly, staring. I have gotten three rather perplexed glances from her, probably more concerned about potential criminality on my part than in perception of the retroactively obvious.

I have expended considerable effort to keep my attention from wandering from my wife during our marriage of 19 years. I could justify it easily enough by citing her declining health over the last decade, but the truth of the matter is that I seem always to have been wired this way. The only thing that has really slowed me down as a "cheat" over the years has been a strong construction of the notion and nature of personal integrity (the full scope of which is beyond the topic at hand). The conflict has NOT gotten less pronounced over the years: I have lost a step since I was 21, but I seem not to have lost any more than that.

Hunter Thompson used the word "atavistic" to describe Las Vegas in his book set in this city, and forty years later, the term still fits. It is a city that has had no business model beyond "People from other states can bring money here and leave it when they go away again. " It found a way to trash its economy DESPITE the gambling crescendo of the last twenty years. It is trying to sell its local culture as "LA Lite," but I expect residents of southern California would be sophisticated enough to laugh off the idea. The social environment of southern Nevada is too nouveau, too petty, too deliberately nervous, too lacking in relaxed and easy magnaminity to pass for the image or the reality of tens of millions of people screwing in hot tubs. (Another capsule characterzation of Vegas from Thompson: "Bush league sex." Consider yourself warned.)

I stopped apologizing to myself for my "polyamorous" (I hate that word) nature several years ago. But I find that Vegas indulges a "party atmosphere" only when it can be sure it has complete control of such an atmosphere, and unlike the locals, I recognize the implications. I've lived in enough different cities that I know how the local culture can vary on this point, and I know it isn't "just me." (I will refrain from suggesting that when you're losing to ATLANTA on this point, you have some work to do. ) And I know the woman in the sandals and socks and tank top is going home alone this morning and would be even if I had never put on a ring in my life. What happens here is only a simulation of enjoyment, and you knew that coming in, didn't you?

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