Don't tell the redneck he's an alien and the weekly jogger report

Don’t tell the redneck he’s an alien and the weekly jogger report | April 29, 2012

Sometimes the people who find themselves in the Hangover movie paradigm are real issue babies, problem children who probably deserve the scorn you are heaping on them as you read this and little of the envy you may feel when you think about it.

Just so there is no doubt
The Lifestyle
Like the one gentleman a few months ago who stumbled into a local hotel three days after the event he was supposed to be in left town and or the one who crawled into another person’s bed in the wrong hotel and few months after that.
Sometimes they are just ordinary people who found themselves in the one city where they won’t ( did you know wont and aint  are officially proper English now hmm) be judged any harsher than any other hedonist in a town full of them and got in over the heads.
Like the woman whose friends ditched her when he was stone drunk and left her not knowing where her room was, her purse was or the room key she was supposed to have was or the medicine or money she left in the purse was or why she slept in her car the entire night etc etc etc ….
A hint to all you coming to Vegas if you are going to ditch your friend in Vegas make sure they are dozing in the right room in the right bed with the right person  with all their stuff before you leave them its just the right thing to do. It is part of the hedonist code..I think …..
Also this week …..I consider myself to be a calm person not one prone to silly belligerence and quite frankly I am too freakin old to be busting knuckles for the sake of …well anything ….but there are times when it seems the right thing to do.
Arrrgggggggghhhhh
This week I had to tell a cab driver he couldn’t do something. I wont go into detail because its  a workplace policy but this is _ what happened. I had a cab drive up to someplace he wasn’t supposed to be and I had to tell him he couldn’t do,  something he most likely he wasn’t supposed to do.
First this idiot mumbles something I can’t understand and when I get tired of trying to figure out what he is trying to tell me with his Monte Python routine “nudge, nudge, wink wink..you know what I mean ,” no I really don’t dude you cant pick up or drop off here….
Then this genius says no dumb ass I mean …well those of you who understand what it means to work with such people will understand when I tell you I stopped listening right there and told him to move his ass more or less and when he continued to make veiled threats I said either get out of the cab or get out of the garage.
Jmore to the point he said something about “No speakie English,” or some red neck BS.
Just for the record in case I haven’t made it clear I am 50-year old white guy  from Texas with what is quite literally an Anglo Saxon surname. I was born in a town that might accurately be called a modern day Mayberry. You just don’t get any more white bread than me and my family.
I mean I’m so white when I was younger  Ronald Reagan once called me a honkie mo fo. You honkie mo fos are always trying to keep the out of touch middle aged white guy down…
No really  I never met Reagan but when I worked at that newspaper in Texas I once paid a young man musician to help me be cool and have soul.
He took one look at me handed me my money back and said man I cant cure the rain ( see colorful southerner vernacular.

           The new Las Vegas motto–photos by Royal
The point is if you are trying to do something you are not supposed to do and have to ask to do it don’t mumble and don’t tell the red neck security guard you think he is an illegal alien.
This weeks jogger report:
I have always been of the opinion that if you want to look at yourself in the mirror and admire what you see try your bedroom or someone else’s bedroom or the bathroom of whatever useless trendy restaurant you want to overpay for mashed potatoes in.
Jogging past the slightly reflective doors of an older Las Vegas casino staring at your image in the somewhat reflective length of glass at its Las Vegas Boulevard entrance is not cool and its kind of weird. Even if you are minor celebrity and if you happen to be just short of a heart attack stop jogging. There are no security guards on Las Vegas Boulevard to call an ambulance for you if you go unconscious and stop breathing. You are going to die as people fumble for their cell phones and take pictures of you for their facebook page.
Man up strange looking dude with clothes from an I love the 80s garage sale and tell your wife you have to stop jogging or your going to fall on the ground. Woman up chick with the Kurt Cobain ensemble jogging suit and tell your jock boyfriend with the crew cut and the triathlon T-shirt you cant breathe.
Get a clue drunk guy who clearly doesn’t recognize what city he is in. Pretending to jog because you realize you look weird walking around in a pair of someone else’s female jogging shorts and an unbuttoned $3,000 Armani shirt doesn’t really fool anybody here and more importantly no one here cares.
Just ask the guy who stood at the corner of Flamingo and Pecos in a huge straw hat, long sleeve ladies western wear button up embroidered shorts with pink trim and floppy sandals…..boring and yawn…
Such is life in the City of Sin
Til Next Week
Take Care

Shopping in the City of Sin

By Royal Hopper
Question how often do you pack up the family and head out for a day on the infamous Las Vegas strip, a day trip to the center of the City of Sin no less and end up shopping for an hour and a half ?
Answer your wife and daughter want to go shopping and manage to drag you along under threats of a chick flick marathons and long sessions of meaningful conversation about feelings, fashions and first times. ( babe remember the first time we….. insert meaningless chick obsessions like the first time we held hands or the first time we watched television or played monopoly arrrrggggghhhhh)



Is this really a problem ????
Themed Shopping in the City of SinLas Vegas is home to vast seas of immorality, Disney like adult ( an adult means exactly what you think it does) tourist traps, legendary debauchery, themed gambling halls larger than many towns, prostitutes, billion dollar bets ( not really) and non stop drinking.
It is also the home of the state’s largest Coca Cola store and an M & M emporium that comes complete with a free 3-D movie and two hyper active Mcs . M & M coffee cups, M&M baseball caps, M&M tops bottoms and so on and so on and so on and all the cheesy themed shopping stores you can possible imagine.
  It is a truly bizarre thing to see people who were likely gambling their rent money  and gazing at the cocktail waitress …assets hugging Coca Cola Polar bears, and stuffing  Coca Cola T-shirts, Coca Cola coffee cups, Coca Cola dog tags, key chains, newspapers and machines that make any kind  Coca Cola flavor made in the known world in Coca Cola shopping bags.
The M&M store was truly an interesting experience. The teenie bopper hosts looked and sounded a great deal like living M&Ms and most of the people shopping in the store were well into their 40s.



The Pill
Did you ever work with someone or have a customer that made you want to pick up a tire iron and cave their skull in simply by walking in the room or speaking for more than 20 seconds?  It would be a mercy killing you say to yourself as you chant your inner peace mantras and humm you favorite Ozzie song as a way of distracting yourself from what you know is a righteous desire to…I’m going off the rails of a ….see it’s working….
There is an old saying that stress is the mental conflict that occurs when the mind interferes with the bodies desire to strange the crap out someone who desperately deserves it and anyone who works with the public or works with the people who work with the public has to develop the skill of distracting yourself from this righteous rage.
The kind of people who for some reason seem to know your name even though for six months you even see them in the same Vegas casino on a regular basis you thought his name was bald angry fat guy.
This is the kind of person whose own family probably refers to them as the bald angry fat guy. “Were here to see so and so,” ( I still don’t remember his damn name)
I’m sorry I don’t know that person…You know the bald angry guy…” Oh him..I think he went home….
This week alone I can count at least three times when I had to tell a tourist something was closed or moved or they couldn’t park somewhere and had them ask ‘why did they do that???” I suppose referring the magical fairies who make all the decisions at to hotels in the City of Sin.
You want to say something like, “you know its all my fault. I knew you out of the millions of tourist who come to this city every year were coming here from Okawalaphodog and did all this just to piss you off. Or maybe …Dude I’m dressed in a polyester uniform that hasn’t been in style since disco was hot and new and lava lamps were cool how much do you think people who own this hotel tell me .


Las Vegas on the run. No not really I was just experimenting with the focus
                                                         Photos R.M. Hopper


The jogger report
This weeks jogger report. The number of people jogging down Las Vegas Boulevard increased by the inverse of ooh my freaking God how OCD do you have to be to travel hundreds maybe thousands of miles to the City of Sin to go jogging.
Not that I mind watching the better looking lady joggers and you can always tell the real runners from the fakers like me who look at old pictures of themselves in military uniforms and forget that it isn’t 1986 and hasn’t been for a long time.
The real runners have thick well muscled legs and actually look good in running shorts. The fakers among us will pretend to run for a couple of blocks get that to hell with this look and then pretend they were actually just trying to catch the bus or beat the light crossing the street and just didn’t make it. I swear I saw one guy holding a soda and running suddenly cut across the intersection so he could pretend that’s what he wanted to do all along and he wasn’t jogging down a deserted Vegas road in the wee hours of the morning and ran out of gas.
Also in the City of Sin a lonely plastic mini bottle of Vodka was spotted sitting on the window sill where it was deposited the night before a lonely metaphor for this city, the city of Sin. Like Sin City this tiny bottle of booze is cheap, cheesy potent and powerful, brightly colored and difficult to ignore but in the end all about the fun and payment and regretting tomorrow…. tomorrow …..
Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til Next week
Take care

A week in the burbs and drunken confusion returns to Sin City

I took a few days off this week and fled to suburbs to visit ( as we say in the south) with my mother who was in town and to drink coffee and watch sci fi and Gothic reruns (sue me Im a nerd…”



A dusty portion of my dragon statue collection
absolute proof Royal is a Nerd..Photo by Royal

Even in the suburbs there are people who talk to themselves like the gentleman I saw walking down a suburban Las Vegas area street shouting something about “old White people…” being about white as you can get and having just turned 50-years-of-age needless to say I left that particular dangerous looking gentleman be.
I discovered in my brief isolation in my suburban sanctuary that now and then tourist and denizens of the City of Sin do find their way out to the burbs where they look even more lost than they do in the confines of Sin City.
“Where are the naked people and the occasional drunk laying on the sidewalk and the two for one cheap drink specials, the people in strange costumes, the hookers who call themselves private dancers, ( when I was younger and better looking they always wanted to tell me their life stories go figure)  the hordes of clueless picture taking tourist and the hustlers trying to sell them tickets they can get for free two blocks down the road”
Then you tell them that that this is the suburbs and there are no such things here and they run screaming down the street.
 “The suburbs that bastard dropped me in the wrong place, the suburbs…ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh……”
 My mother who is 69 this year bought me a tank of gas and my wife and I took the opportunity to go power walking aright the pain…all nerds and geeks everywhere send me your energy to preserve my sanity.
A week in the burbs makes you appreciate the great things about living in Sin City like all the great intellects you meet.
The 20-year-old trust fund brats who get angry because you allowed them to hire an escort named after a forest animal or tasty desert or seasoning ( Candy, Bambi, or Jasmine Lotus) from an ad in a flyer handed out by people from Seattle with green hair who haven’t bathed in days and then allowed them to get rolled by self same prostitutes after they have been charged $400 for a bottle of apple juice that is drugged.
In the good old days it was common for taxi drivers to drop naïve tourist at bars colloquially called clip joints where tourist would be seduced into buying $1,200 bottles of champagne that was actually grape juice and end up being dumped unceremoniously at their hotel doorway without getting lucky or even truly drunk.
Good things like people shout “Vegas,” in creepy sounding tones while stumbling down the street in a drunken stupor as many this week seemed prone to do. People who live here don’t shout Vegas it is just too silly.
Thegenius’ that will scream loser at random strangers who have different haircuts than they do or get drunk and make passes at other guys dressed in latex naked lady costumes.
This actually happened in the mid 90s at Treasure Island hotel casino.
  Good things like the lady who asked “Do you know where I can get some groceries?” “There are groceries stores down the street and several convenience stores on the strip,” I answered if memory serves. “You have stores here???” she said. “Yeah and schools and gas stations too,” I said as politely as I could manage. “Wow,” was the answer I got in return.
In the suburbs you get dog parks, dog park etiquette, teen age drivers, 24 hour fast food as opposed to 24 hour gambling and lots and lots of TV.


A photo of a Pinball hall of fame---sue me I was in the burbs most of the week


Today I went back to work and in the first hour we found two men lying drunk on the floor one at the bottom of an escalator, a drunken domestic argument where a guest wanted to kick the woman who was sleeping with his roommate and maybe his girlfriend too. Good things like the man passed out drunk in the seat of a slot machine with his hand on the handle and his head in his own lap and the gentleman counting a large wads of $100 bills on the table top by the security booth looking around and occasionally over his shoulder smelling of alcohol and newly purchased $500 T-shirts
A man discovered on the floor at the bottom of the escalator asked if he fell down the escalator said “escalator????” and a half empty whiskey bottle shattered into large dangerous pieces in a high traffic area eight feet from a trash can.
                                                                                      

You just gotta love this city
After all such is life in the City of Sin again
Til Next Week
Take Care

Shaggy haired dye job and Starchild embraces the wind

This weeks jogger report….
I swear I saw a jogger running with a cup of coffee in his hand. Maybe it was water but it sure looked like coffee. Now that’s a feine head (caffeine lover)
Anyone so determined to have that first drink of caffeine laden coffee in his hand when he is ready that he brings it with him on the morning jog is a dedicated feine head. Sin City might run on ego, alcohol and hormones but it survives the morning on coffee, old music and bad lighting.



“Do you want another card sir?…Sir do you want another card?”   “One minute,” might be the response as he takes a huge gulp of coffee looks at the woman beside him and asks “who are you???”  No not really..well sort of …
This week in the city of Sin I discovered long shaggy dye jobs are not just for chicks anymore. I saw a young man with a really attractive woman  on his arm and bright blue dyed hair walking across a local casino. For a moment I thought he was a giant life sized blue haired Cupie troll doll or a well dressed Anime character.

Self explanatory ---Photo R.M. Hopper





I think he was Canadian or a mutant same thing really. Canadians are always trying to swim when locals consider it freezing cold and passing out from heat exhaustion on pleasant 100 degree Southern Nevada summer days.
You see a lot of working girls here in Las Vegas, and no I don’t mean working girls, I mean working girls. After awhile you can spot some of them. They dress differently and know how to walk down a busy city street in six inch heels without tripping and falling on their ass, no mean feat.
Pun intended….. One morning, very early in the morning, I saw a woman dressed in a striped form fitting disco evening gown with wild frizzed hair, that was a little flat in the back if you get my drift.
It could be she was a rabid Tina Turner fan rocking that retro look at 6:00 a.m. or a business woman with shockingly bad taste in clothes and make up getting her groove back  but probably not. She was stumbling a little as she walked and I can only guess that she had a busy night.
Silliest crimes of the week. Someone at a local casino risked the wrath of the Buddha by trying to take pennies from a small shrine of the same sitting on  a table near a group Asian themed table games and one woman bummed a cigarette from a tourist and then quizzed the poor man on his life, saying she wanted to get to know him.
                                                                           http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=troll+dolls
                                                                                          


They both smoked after all and had so much in common.
This tourist who I will call Starchild after my late mother-in-law a genuine Starchild for the New Age who will be very much missed, later stood facing the sharp, gusting winter wind blowing that day, spreading her arms wide holding her open palms to the wind and closing her eyes as if to truly feel the wind and embrace it like a loved one.
I have one thing to say about that. “Rock on Starchild,”  If makes you feel, if it helps you deal, if it sees you through the day, don’t change, or sway . If that’s the weirdest thing you do in this city of sin, your not all that weird no way…..
Such is Life in the City of Sin
Til next Week
Take Care

PS I just heard that Nevada is the first state to approve self driving cars. Scary thing