Hello from Las Vegas! I am on the 8th floor of the Prince tower (I think) of Caesar’s Palace, eating a bowl of all-bran. We got a mini-fridge and went to Von’s (the NV/CA Safeway contingent) and stocked up. If they give you shit about the mini-fridge, tell them you need it for medication. Because my doctor told me to drink more water, and that’s sort of medicine, right?

I am glad to be here, but I think in the last five years, Vegas has been fundamentally broken. Everything is gone. The Denny’s I used to go to for all of my birthdays is gone! Never mind that I couldn’t eat a single thing on the Denny’s menu, but that pisses me off. Stardust - gone. Frontier - gone. Boardwalk - gone. The strip mall where I used to use internet is now some Hawaiian bastard child. Aside from the old versus new, there’s something missing I can’t explain. I remember this short story by Joseph Heller, a memoir, about how as a kid, they used to swim in Coney Island, out to the first buoy, where you can’t even see the land anymore. Before that, there are lots of places you can stop, the first safety net and floating things that divide off the beach from the ocean, and if you want to stop, you can grab on and rest. But after the last one, there’s this long stretch where turning back will take as much energy as continuing on, and if you need to stop, you’re essentially fucked, unless your friends are there to help drag you to the buoy. And there’s a certain panic in reaching out into that unknown. It’s like flying a plane to Hawaii, when you reach that magic point in the Pacific where you need to keep going, because there is no alternate place to land if your engine goes out. And to me, Vegas had a lot of those metaphorical points, little stores or lounges or museums or t-shirt places or whatever else that broke up the stretch of nothing but places to drop lots of money or go deep into your vices. Now there are a lot of places from Tropicana to Sahara where you can get bled, and not many places anymore where you can’t. I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s my best explanation of how the dynamic has changed.

I went to the Bodies show yesterday at the Trop. It was interesting, although I don’t know if it was $34 interesting. This is the thing with cadavers that have been plasticized and posed in various ways, with parts trimmed and dissected away. I wanted to go because see also my previous rants and descriptions of the sliced-up-in-glass cross-sections of people in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. This was a lot different and maybe less intriguing because everything was there. And the plasticising made it look a lot more fake. There were some interesting things, like removed organs, hearts and brains and cross-sections of stroke victims and of course the smoker’s lungs, along with a plastic box where you could dispose of your cigarettes. (And at current prices, I wonder how many people really do, or if this is just a prop.)

I think the most fucked up thing for me (aside from the conjoined twin fetuses) was all of the parts and pieces I’ve broken personally in the last few years. I could rattle off every muscle and ligament in the knee in under five seconds after all of the x-rays and MRIs in the last few years. (Check it!) And to see those same muscles I’ve sprained and bones I’ve broken, cut apart and laid out for display, that was a bit weird. There was also the cirrhotic (sp?) liver on display, which brought back the memory of my friend Chuck who died last year when he drank his way through his liver. (And oddly enough, I just this second remembered a conversation with Chuck back in 1994-ish at the support center, where we were talking about how Kerouac drank his way through his liver. Weird.) Anyway, looking at other stuff, it made me wonder if in a few years, I’d be thinking back about what a kidney really looked like as I dealt with a bunch of doctors telling me that mine were going out. Or heart, or stomach, or whatever. A lifetime of fast food and psych drugs gives you a few choices there.

So yeah, I am still on my health kick, even in the city of high calories. I don’t think I have mentioned this yet, but I have lost of all of my weight in the last six weeks by going to Weight Watchers and using their new online resources for men. There’s no way I could do a “eat only blue food on tuesday” diet, because they are all a crock. Eat less, exercise more, is the basic thing, but there’s a lot of re-learning how to eat. I eat way too many carbs and fat, not enough protein. I eat way too many high-energy-density foods and not enough fiber or vegetables. I am addicted to Coke. Getting around all of these is the challenge. Being held accountable to what I eat every day helps. Doing that in Vegas - harder than I thought. I figure I can eat breakfast in the room, eat lunch every day at Subway, and then eat something sane for dinner. The hard part is that I normally would be drinking Cokes or stopping for fries or nachos or whatever all over the strip. Late nights = fourth meal. The easy part is that walking from Caesar’s to the Trop and back in 103 degree heat as fast as you can burns like an entire meals’ worth of calories. (It also gives you a mild case of heat stroke, btw.)

Gotta shower and then walk more. I’d like to swim, but I am sure the pool is horror central today. I have a minor league baseball game at 7, and I have a car, so maybe I will find some other trouble after lunch.

I have a few seconds for a quick update. I wish I had time to write more in here, but my time seems to be vanishing lately.

I have been in dental hell since last week. They ground down two of my teeth in preparation for crowns, took impressions to send off to the lab, and then put on temporary crowns. The bottom temp is basically a metal cap that looks like something you’d put over a screw head on a piece of furniture, except coated with a thin coat of white paint. The top one is a chunk of nylon. I think I described this before as looking like North Korean dentistry. Anyway, the top one came loose when I bit into a wrap sandwich thing, and freaked me out. They re-cemented it for me, but the cement, which is basically that Mr. Gasket stuff you use to seal hoses in your car engine, has been disintegrating, leaving a lot of weird edges. Yesterday, the white part of that lower metal cap started flaking off, so I have a nice sharp edge in my mouth. Luckily, the lab is done, and in an hour, I go in and get the real article permanently cemented into my mouth. It’s been a week of Slim-Fast and applesauce, which really sucks.

It’s not a good time to be a Rockies fan, but it’s a true test of my fanhood that I’m still watching. After a long, long slide, they won their last two against the Dodgers. There was even a bench-clearing brawl the other night, although it wasn’t terribly exciting, just a bit of shoving. I probably should have went to the day game yesterday, but for whatever reason, flaked it. My next baseball will be a minor league game in Las Vegas next week. I also got us tickets to a Golden League game down in Long Beach on the 14th. Box seats were $10. I think they are box seats on a little league field, though.

I will be in Vegas next week. With any luck I will see Simms, and get to a baseball game, and not spend any money otherwise. It will be a tough trip, because of the heat, the fact that I don’t want to gamble, and also the fact that I don’t know how I will eat. I can’t just march into Fatburger and eat a months’ worth of calories anymore.

I think I am down 15 pounds now. I can eat well in perfect laboratory conditions, but going out to eat is still panicky for me. I also need to work more on the exercise component. Long walks in 140-degree Las Vegas sun, maybe.

Top-secret writing project I can’t talk about is underway. My not-top-secret project has been transferring CDs into binder sleeves. I know at one point I would have considered this a travesty. But now that everything is in iTunes, I never look at the CDs, they just take up space. So I bought the sleeves, and I have been putting stuff in, and also organizing things, and ripping CDs that aren’t in the system. All day yesterday and a bit this morning, and I am doing with G, H, and I. I have a garbage bag of jewel cases headed for the garbage, and have maybe a 100% gain in storage space. Now I need to order about ten times as many sleeves to do everything - this was a trial run of 100 sleeves to see how it would go.

Gotta shower, get to the DDS. Fingers crossed on the new teeth.

I got new glasses yesterday. My last ones were from the end of 2005, at a LensCrafters at 8th and Broadway, after I found out I can’t get Lasik. I actually got two pairs yesterday, a daily driver and I got the lenses replaced in my Ray-Ban sunglasses. I am not 100% happy with them; in both new pairs, it seems like the lenses are thicker. I ordered them with the super-ultra-whatever gradient or whatever they call it, the shit that makes the lens thinner, but costs an arm and a leg. The regular glasses are slightly bigger, so that’s probably it. The sunglasses, I wear them so infrequently, it could just be my imagination that they are thicker. Also, the glasses feel a little more brittle to me, or breakable. I had a pair of those Nike frames you could tie in knots without damage, so these ones are a little less invulnerable. I wish I could have afforded a few pairs of frames and lenses, so I could switch out every now and then. But average frames are like $300, and I think my lenses are like $500, and I would probably be better off making three car payments and wearing the same glasses every day.

I am having a party in Las Vegas on 1/20/09. Those of you to the left will recognize that date as the last day of the Bush presidency, and a quick google search shows that many people are counting the seconds until that day. But any of you who read this site might remember that January 20th is also my birthday. (It’s also Bill Perry’s, who is usually there with me.) And what magical gifts have I been given over the years? A Richard Nixon inauguration, two Reagans, one HW, and two GW Bush. I turned 10, and everyone was glued to the TV to watch Ronnie raise his right hand. I turned 30, and not only could I not get anyone to go to Vegas with me, but I ended up running into an ex-girlfriend at my hotel. Oh, and my other gift was 8 years of George W Bush.

I’ve written letters to both Clinton and Bush four times asking for an invite to the big party in DC. No dice - I guess you have to be politically or financially geared in to get the hook-up. So that’s why I’m trying to think of some kind of plan to capitalize on this and have a kick-ass party in Vegas. I’m open to any ideas, but I am thinking I will create a web site, spam all of the anti-Bush sites, make t-shirts, have a picture of Geo and take off a piece of clothing every time I reach another level of funds, whatever.

Kick in a buck or two if you’re with me. The more money I get, the fancier the bash. Right now, I think I can afford the 50s McDonalds in Henderson, or maybe the Hot Dog on a Stick at Fashion Mall, but I’m hoping to upgrade that. And if you can actually come out to Vegas, by all means, you’re welcome to join us.

Gotta get the dentist on the horn - this temp crown is coming loose!

I’m thinking about selling my land. There are a few reasons why I’d like to dump it, and a few why I don’t. One of the big reasons is that I have doubts about ever building a house out there, or living there. The conditions are so harsh, and it’s such a long way to even a small hick town, that I would quickly go nuts. I also don’t know that I have it in me to build a house. I’m pushing 40, and I remember when I was 21, I barely had it in me to do roofing. I couldn’t imagine framing a house by myself, unless I had a lot of help, and help costs money, and by the time it averages out, I might as well pay $900,000 for a condo in Santa Monica.

There is a part of me that likes the idea of having the land. It would be nice to build a vacation house there. Of course, I could have bought a waterfront timeshare in Hawaii for the same amount of money. It’s less of a pain in the ass to get to Maui, the amenities and view are just slightly better, and I don’t have to dig my own sewer by hand or worry that meth-heads are going to strip the wiring out of my walls in the 51 weeks a year I’m not there. Or if I had the payment instead of putting it to my mortgage, I could have taken one really kick-ass vacation a year to a different place each time.

One big thing that also motivates me is that prior to this year, my annual property tax averaged about $7. This year, my property tax was $440. Why? Nobody can tell me. The county re-evaluated the land, and I guess my land is now worth two and a half million dollars. In reality, I think if I found a buyer, I could probably get about twice what I paid for the land, and that would be a decent chunk of change I could apply toward a down payment on a house. And getting a house would be the best investment, because I use it every day, and despite the urban legends and common misconceptions, there is absolutely no tax advantage to owning raw land without a residence or business on it.

So who knows. But if you’re gung-ho about owning 40 acres in the Sangre de Cristo mountains and you’ve got cash burning a hole in your pocket, ignore everything bad I said above, and drop me a line.

I can’t believe it’s been so long since I bought that land. It all started on a birthday trip to Vegas, in one of the Elvis suites in the Stardust (which is now a smoking hole in the ground.) No, I didn’t win the land in a poker game; I was researching some way to blow my annual bonus, and got the ball rolling on that purchase. It was six years ago, although 2002 seems like last year. I had one of those “holy shit where has time gone” moments as I tore through all of the old journal entries. I tried not to stop and read too much, but I still think now and again, I should scrape everything into a lulu book, so I can read it not at the computer. I also think I should make a list of my favorite journal entries and put them in that right side bar.

But first, I have other work to do…

The dental visit yesterday was pure medieval torture. To be fair, the new dentist was very careful, and did good work. But I got two teeth ground down for crowns, and temps slapped on there until next week. The grinding part is brutal, but the temp crowns are the bad part. They’re roughly like the dental work you’d get if you went to a dentist in Cuba or North Korea: very rough, not perfectly shaped, and not permanently glued in. They actually look like they’re tacked in with a giant clump of silicone gasket sealer from a car parts store, the stuff you use to tack on a valve cover gasket. And I now live in fear that anything I eat will snap loose one of these things. It’s going to be a long week, a long week filled with many slimfast lunches and dinners.

I think all of the initial fixits for the journal are done. If you ever flip through the old entries and find a busted one, let me know. Two features I’d like to add are some kind of paging links at the bottom, and the ability to add tags to articles. The first is easy, the second is hard. I probably won’t do either until some point in the distant future, because that’s the way things work around here.

I really wish I had my old VW back. Not the gas 2-door I had in Seattle, but the diesel 4-door I had back in Bloomington. This was a car that I could drive like I stole it, and still get 50 MPG city. Diesel is five bucks a gallon here, but even at $50 for a 10-gallon tank, that’s 500 miles CITY on a fill-up. I’m surprised every single VW diesel from the 80s hasn’t been resurrected and put back on the road. I’d expect to see more Rabbits than Hummers these days.

Speaking of stealing cars, I’m still picking away at GTA4. I think I have 13% done; you need about 20% done to get into Manhattan (aka Algonquin.) The missions are starting to get harder, so I might hit a wall soon. The biggest difficulty is actually finding time to play, since I’m too busy with other projects. And I think it’s Tuesday, but it’s actually Wednesday, which means I have a conference call in an hour, and I better get a move on.