It's like ordering off the world's smallest Chinese menu. There are only two responses to the statement "I'm moving to Vegas."
1) "Why?" Served with a side of "You poor, stupid bastard, were you dropped on your head as a baby?" Add a subtext of "What's wrong with this idiot?" for $1. No substitutions, please.
2) "Cool." Served with a side of "Man, I wish I could do that."
By far, option one is the most ordered.
I've been back in Seattle for a little more than a week, and most of that time it's been raining sideways. When it's not raining where I am, it's raining down the street. Even the clear sky is tinted gray, like it knows we've got 8 more months of this, and it doesn't want us to get our hopes up. The trees that bother changing colors go to piss yellow, or bile green. A few rogue maples, mindful of their family's reputation, buck the trend, go through the colors of flame before they go bald. They stand out like sore thumbs. Everyone looks at them and wonders if they were dropped on their heads in the nursery.
I read Maxim on the shitter. This month, one of the fluff pieces was on the "Ten Toughest Cities in America." Seattle came in at number 6. I'm not sure what the formula was they used that got them that result. Something about number of days of sun, crappiness of local sports franchises, karate studios per capita... Whatever the formula was, I started laughing. In the rich, relatively sissy Boston suburbs where I spent my teens, you were lucky if you could talk your way out of a fight, and there was a fight someone didn't try to talk his way out of every day after school. I've been here 9 years, spent most of them working in bars, and I can count the fights I've seen on my fingers. There're plenty martial arts studios, but half of them advertise as "Non-Violent Martial Arts," a statement that is at once oxy-moronic and painfully ignorant of what a martial arts training means. But we wouldn't want our kids to learn something violent, here, so it'd better be non-violent and non-confrontational. Yes, the sports franchises here suck, but you can't really call Seattle fans tough the way, say, Cubs fans or Eagles fans are. Tough fans stick with a losing team. When the Mariners lose 3 in a row, the fans disappear, only to return when the M's hit a 9 game winning streak. The last game I went to, the Mariners had men on second and third with two out, down a run, in the bottom of the 8th inning, and the douchebag behind me was trying to start The Wave.
And after all that, the funny thing is that I love this town. I just can't take it anymore. Is Vegas some sort of Shangri-La? No, but I do think they're building a Shangri-La Resort and Casino. Vegas is unbridled hedonism. It's plastic. It's greedy. It's an ugly, artificial swatch of manufactured paradise in the middle of the desert. But maybe that's why it's so fantastic. Naturally, there should be nothing there but sand, and the little artesian spring that made it a stopover on the way to California. The railroad first came through 100 years ago. It's barely more than 60 years since Bugsy first arrived. Vegas has been through the hands of cowboys, prospectors, the railroad, the mafia, and now corporate America. Everything there is there because someone saw an opportunity to build something out of nothing. And I guess that's the dream. Take everything I've got, everything I've built here or anywhere, all the habits, identities, assets, all of it, and bet it all on a chance to build something out of nothing, to take a piece of desert and turn it into something bigger and better. That's the side of Vegas that the people who order option number one don't seem to see. And it's the one I'm counting on.
