A place like Vegas

 

“The Circus – Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos … but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County – Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space.”

-       Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.”

-     Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The problem with a place like Vegas is the illusion it provides. That illusion is freedom. People think that freedom is excess and carnage. They seek a freedom of the body, a freedom from work, a freedom from the day to grind of their insignificant little lives. They miss the point. Being one who has lived in excess knows this. The only true freedom is the freedom of your mind, and soul. Once these things are free the rest will follow. These freedoms aren't found in excess or at the bottoms of a bottle. They are found on a walk, or found at the beach, or in the sun, or sunset. Not at this place with its fake air and bright lights. I'll take a day at the pool and a walk around the block in the sun than a walk around this monstrosity. The problem with the human condition is we look to the wrong places for freedom. We find the wrong things beautiful.

So is the question what is beautiful? How do you define that? Sunsets in Barcelona. Hell sunsets anywhere for that matter. The extinguishment of fire in the sky is beautiful. Her smile, I'll always find beauty in that smile, the real one, that touches her eyes and makes them dance. The mountains dusted in snow. The sound you make when you exhale under water through your nose. Clear blue water up against a beach, they type it's so clear you can see the blues change the deeper it gets.

If one was to live in excess and in sin why can't it be in places like this? I’ll take slothing on a beach or staring at a sky as it fades to black any day to a building built with one goal in mind, keep you inside. Keep living the excess, it says. Keep pouring your souls down a bottomless pit, it says. Drink all day it's on us they say.

I'm of the opinion that place like Vegas will never be on my yearly tour. Not unless it's out in Laughlin or something far away from the big lights. The main reason is the life I'm building for myself will have binging and excess in it but it will be in a pool or on a bike. It will be to sun and there will be too many waves for surfing and too many slopes for skiing. There won't be the need to live Vegas because there won't be a need to blow off the steam because I will have achieved freedom in my day to day existence. I won't need to escape because I'll love where I am and what I'm doing.  I will in the trustiest sense of the word be free.  Free in the mind, the body, and the soul.   Free.