Wonderland

I love Las Vegas. Yes, I am easily charmed by bright shiny lights, and by places that will serve you alcohol literally at any time. But it's more than that. I love the town because it is completely shameless. There is a fake pyramid, a fake Eiffel Tower, and a fake New York skyline. There's a small handful of buildings styled after European palaces, except fifty stories tall. The Bellagio has an enormous lake in front of it, so you can only enter from the sides, a lake filled with jets to shoot the water tens of stories into the air. The strip is one long string of egregious baubles. It's all so colossally, monumentally stupid. But, and this is the key, it's also normal there. Never mind that it's a hundred and fourteen degrees outside, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, it's perfectly reasonable to put faux European capitols down in there side-by-side. They belong there. So does everyone else. High rollers that want to bet thousands of dollars on a dice roll or hand of cards next to pasty tourists in shorts too short and sandals with socks. Five-star restaurants and unkempt migrants handing out escort service playing cards. I-banking hotshots in for the night from SF and chain-smoking eighty-year-old grandmothers. It all belongs there, and when it's in Vegas, needs not apologize for itself. You get fifty-year-old men in factory-ripped jeans and shirts a size too small unbuttoned to the navel, busts "enhanced" with silicon and saline to make them perfectly spherical, taxis with custom rims, and all of it is ready to meet derision or despair with perfect nonchalance. Everything is in Vegas is stupid and crazy. But it's okay. In Vegas, stupid and crazy are just fine.

At one point there was a brief discussion about the word "egregious" and what it really meant which led to it being adopted as a synonym for awesome and the new catchphrase of the trip. "Yeah man! You just hit the hard eight! That was egregious!" I met a cool 3L, and together we decided we would do all the monosyllabic Vegas nightclubs one better by opening our own joint called "Of." I think someone stole my cell phone at one of those places. I rode with two college friends up from LA and the drive both ways flew by as we had those long and far-reaching conversations about everything that articulate TV characters have and that real people never seem to. The last night we were there we were out a club until 6:30 in the morning, and spent the whole cab ride home dazed and blinking. The driver described himself as a "ho-ologist" and spent much of the ride laying out an elaborate taxonomy of his own devising.