Vegas is Burning
"Vegas is a cesspool," my Dad always says. He should know. He grew up there, when it was just Sin City, long before it became Sin Metropolis, the center of West Coast Sin, the left armpit of America.
I'm not sure what our obsession is with Las Vegas. On the East Coast, it's Atlantic City, but even AC visitors dream of the City of Lights. In high school, tales of Vegas abound with hookers, drugs and drunken debauchery. In college and thereafter, it's more of the same. Vegas is our "excuse" to act irresponsibly. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Sound familiar?
Even though I hate everything Vegas is about, I found myself there yesterday attempting to find a reason to like it. And it just so happened that I did—part of it burned down.
In a fit of structural idiocy that could only happen when architects construct behemoths of glass and polystyrene instead of the brick and mortar buildings of a bygone era, multiple stories of the Monte Carlo went up in flames. I watched with glee as black smoke rose into the air for nearly an hour and hundreds of gamblers and staff were safely escorted to nearby
MGM. Here are views of the blaze as it looked on TV.
The voice on the monorail says that each Vegas visitor spends about $650 per trip. For me, it's only worth it if it's free and a casino burns down. There are only two places worth revisiting in Vegas for me—stay tuned for more.
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