Las Vegas

It’s the cramped feeling that comes to you first, a little achy and tight, as consciousness starts to reveal itself to you. Next is the brightness, the sun seems too bright through your eyelids. Have the curtains fallen down? You try to roll over and cover your face, but there’s no room to turn. You pull the covers up instead, which uncovers your feet. Good thing you’ve got socks on. Wait, socks on? Why do you have your socks on? You’ve reached the threshold of too many things to ignore, and open your eyes.
Lying in the back seat; now you have a context to start ordering your sensations to make sense. You face the ceiling for a few seconds, blinking your usual morning expectations out of your eyes. Then, fully present, you start to see. The back of the driver’s seat on your left. Snack wrappers and empty bottles on the floor behind it. Books, map case, and backpack all wedged in on the floor behind the passenger seat which has been pushed back into and leaned over them. The red blanket clutched in your fist pulled tight under your chin contrasts with the grey of the back seat upholstery on your right. You shift to turn to the right a bit more to uncurl and lie facing straight up. What a weird shape to the dome light. Still a little unfocussed, you take a few moments just staring and wondering at it. Your eyes are still tired, and you blink hard, trying to wipe the soreness off them. When you open up again, you look down towards your feet. The passenger seat is all the way back and leaning over them, and a familiar shape turned away from you with a hood up inhales and exhales deeply, shoulders rising and falling, just barely on the right side of snoring. You start to reach out with a foot to tickle, but pause when a red bird flies by the window to land on the branch just outside the window, ducking it’s head around scattered drops of last night’s rain still on the window. It looks in at you, or at it’s own reflection, and hops further up the branch, towards the back of the car. Now it’s mostly occluded by the sticker on the triangular window, which pushes itself into clarity as you switch your focus to foreground from background.
White rectangle centered in the frame of a triangular window. A big round blue palm with five short, clawed teardrop fingers all coming straight up. A paw, not a hand, but still almost a hand. Counterclockwise white spiral radiates out of the center of the palm. You wonder why you’ve never noticed that before. It’s odd up close, doesn’t provide a context for itself, and floats separate and enigmatic. Your attention is drawn back to where I’m shifting a bit, trying (apparently unsuccessfully) to get comfortable in my sleep, stretching my upper back a bit and trying to settle back in.
"Hey Driver, why are we stopped? Driver?" I feel the ball of your foot in the middle of my back, toes grabbing at the sweatshirt. A nudge, a second nudge with the toe, and I reach back and catch your foot, turning around under it to bring it into my lap. "I’m up before you today." Yeah, don’t think it counts when I have to 'sleep' sitting up. "Where are we? Not sure exactly. "What’s that supposed to mean?" Well, I know what’s up the road thataway, and I know what’s on the road back there, but I don’t know what this place is. ("Wait, the title said ‘Las Vegas’. I got all excited for some adventure." So, now I’m supposed to tell what happens in Vegas? "It didn’t seem natural to me, but it’s your title." I’ll have to get back to that, give me a cue later...) The rain got too heavy to drive, I was getting sleepy, you were already sleeping. "Sorry about that." No, I didn’t mean it that way, just that having a conversation with just myself made it harder to stay awake. Wipers, sound of water splashing in the wheel well, white dash, white dash, white dash, and the repeating mile markers, all too hypnotic to ignore after a while of staring out the windshield. Plus, I was tired to begin with. I thought, we don’t seem to have a fixed itinerary ("Is that why it takes forever to get to each stop?" Touché, guilty as charged), it seemed best, if I was going to fall asleep in the car, that it not be while I was driving. So, I found a place to pull off where the truckers were unlikely to wake us. "You were singing along to a CD?" Yeah, why? "I had a weird dream I kept dropping in and out of. The dream kept getting mixed in to the car, and the car kept getting mixed into the dream." What was the dream? ("Isn’t this it?" You know, I’m never sure -- even when I feel sure, I don’t feel it’s my place to decide for you.) "I can’t recall anything in detail, but there’s a feeling left over from it, the envelope of the dream." Ah, a dream of clarification. "What you say?" Not a dream where you’re trying to take in new objects from the recent past, but one where the familiar objects change their meaning for you. The details don’t stand out, ‘cause they’re not the issue... "Where’d you get that from?" Just made it up, take it for what it’s worth to you. "I’ll have to test that out on a few of my dreams and get back to you on it." Or you can filter mine with it. I’m going to see how it works on my everyday experience, try to appreciate how the meanings change, and how the change gets passed down through the related ideas. ("Too early." Too early in the story for that? "No, too early in the morning to be firing that many neurons." It should probably work better with fewer...) Sometimes realizing how one thing changed every other thing almost immediately. You’re testing out the fewer neurons technique, glazing over and staring through the window out into space. Your focus pulls back to the window on its own. "Wait, there was one constant image as I passed back and forth to and from dream." Something you remember? "More than that, something that earlier I thought I’d never seen before this morning: what is that anyway?" I look back over my shoulder out my window. What do you mean? "No, not out there, right there?" Oh, you mean the sticker? "Yeah, I thought you had a thing about stickers and labels." You’re right, that one’s part of a bigger story though. "Where’d you get it?" Vegas. ("Oh, okay, so here we go." Right, here it is. "Are you allowed to talk about it?" That part, yeah, I guess so, since technically it happened outside of Vegas. Don’t ask me about the porch at the VooDoo Lounge though. "No?" No. "Okay, I wont for now. I’ll start with the sticker, then see if I can wheedle details of the other thing out." I’ll try to make this one interesting enough for you to forget the rest.)
I roll the window down to let some cool morning air in, smack my lips and reach for a piece of gum...
Okay, so it was February, a couple of years back. Actually, it was right after 9/11. The annual meeting was coming up, everybody who’d met their goals ("There are company goals? Some kind of quality goals?" Oh, no, just financial goals. There were always two camps at the annual meeting, the larger one who was less committed to being good but talented at making money, and the smaller group of us who wouldn’t be satisfied not being good and just happened to make money as a result.) was invited to spend the money that’d been taken out of their budget every month. A lot of people were anxious about even going, about flying out there. In my mind, I was hell-bent to go spend that money they’d taken out of my bonus for 12 months. I was going, and I was gonna take advantage of every company function, squeeze some money out of them for one long weekend the way they squeeze it out of me the rest of the year. But, I had no interest in the golf tournament, and the other option that day was a spa day ("I can see you now, lying under the sun lamp, towel on your head, cucumber slices on your eyes..." Yeah, so you can see why I didn’t take that option either.). Nothing else in Vegas was much interest to me either. The whole place is designed to keep you from hanging out with more than 2 or 3 people at once. It separates you, isolates you, then starts to take your money. A lot of people sure seem to get a kick out of that, but if I’m gonna part with that much money, I’m gonna have a story about more than how I watched it go. I did a little research before going out, and scheduled a bike rental from the northern edge of the city, from where I could ride up to Red Rocks, where there was supposed to be a decent ride.
It was cool that afternoon, not like here in February, but therefore warmer that I expected. I started out with long sleeves, tights over shorts, midweight fleece pullover and a wind shell ("That bright yellow fleece?" Yeah. "The one that makes you look like Tweety on steroids?" That wouldn’t be so bad, it makes me look like Tweety after eating the whole bag of birdseed. It works great at the right temperatures though, and if I wear a windbreaker over it...). I looked a little ridiculous at the cab stand at the Bellagio, dressed like that holding my gloves and helmet in my hand. Not more ridiculous than some of the people there, but definitely in a different way. I got to the shop, and they actually had my reservation ready for me. Well, almost, they had to switch the pedals, since they didn’t believe me when I asked for clipless over the phone.
Now I thought the whole area was flat. I don’t know, desert, flat, it seems right. But riding north was a constant slight climb, into a head wind. The bike was geared different than mine, so I had a hard time finding a comfortable effort and cadence. It didn’t help that it was February, and probably the last long ride I’d taken around here was like in December. That, and also the ride out is just along the side of the road, and it seemed like I’d get caught having to stop for traffic at each of the lights. The sun was warm, and I ended up taking off the jacket and fleece and cramming them into the belt pack I’d brought ("You mean fanny pack." Yeah, okay, the fanny pack, that really entertains you, doesn’t it? "I think it’s funny how you go out of your way to call it something else." Fanny pack just sounds like something your great-aunt put together to push for more favorable legislation for multiple-cat owners. "Hey. You lay off my great-aunt Fanny." Yes, you’re right, she’s harmless, as long as she never learns how to make those cats into her great feline army. "She’d only use her powers for Good." I don’t know if the robins are confident about that.). Still, I’m sweating more than I thought I would in February. Usually, around here, it’s trying to make sure my toes and fingers don’t freeze. It ends up taking me over 90 minutes to get to the entrance to the park, and it’s become a real ride instead of just a little jaunt to see some sights. I’d lost sight of it as fun and taken it on as a challenge. I’m trying to keep track of my time, since I’m supposed to be back to the Bellagio for dinner at Picasso at a certain time. If it takes the same time coming and going, I still have about another 90 minutes before I have to turn back. The entrance to the park has a steep uphill to the beginning of the loop around. There’s a gift shop there, of course, and I stop to use the bathroom and get something to drink.
While I’m in the gift shop, I also get a bandanna, as the sweat keeps threatening to get in my eyes. Poisonous snakes of North America. Should be able to keep me out of trouble as long as all of these snakes are actually white on navy blue like the bandanna is. While waiting in line to pay for my bandanna and drink, a display of stickers catches my eye. I’m not really looking for one, just browsing through. I absent-mindedly stop at one, I don’t even remember which. At that very moment, some random man in the store approaches me. [That’s not the one for you.] I’m sorry, what? [This one, this one has chosen you.] Actually, I was kind of interested in Coyote, it’s got something cool about it. [Which one you choose doesn’t matter. You don’t choose them, they choose you.] This sticker has chosen me? In my periph, I’m trying to look to see if anybody’s in on the joke. [No, not the sticker, the Bear. Great Bear.] Okay, thanks. [Got any spare change?] As it turned out I did, after I bought the sticker and the other things I’d picked out.
As I started out riding again, the weird exchange at the gift shop stuck in my mind ("You always get caught up by those random happenings." I’m not sure which I find most disturbing, when they seem to mean something, or when they don’t seem to mean something.). My father was an Arthur. My G’pa was an Arthur ("Arthur?" Arthur = bear man). My favorite thing to do at the zoo had always been to stand by the bear enclosure. Smokey would sometimes come down to the front and watch me. Sometimes he’d dare me to come jump in the pool with him to cool off. ("How’d he do that, exactly?" Keep in mind I was still in my single digits; he would go to the edge of the pool, look back over at me, then drop in.) Later there was that time in Yellowstone when my G’pa and I went fishing out in the lake and the bears came to visit my G’ma as she was cooking dinner in the trailer. I thought she must’ve been pretty scared, but she deflected it so that I wouldn’t be scared, saying that she knew I’d be back soon and that the bears wouldn’t go against me. One very influential person once stood up in front of class in High School to describe how she had misjudged me, how she’d been afraid of my quietness like one would be of a brooding bear. But that she’d come to know that I was just listening, like a big teddy bear ("Not to mention warm, and gentle" For some, yes, and also a little worn. "You mean Well-loved." Okay, sure, I guess).
The rest of the ride was a task -- so many steep hills, and no real bike trail, just trying to share the one way road with the Suburbans and Campers and Minivans roaring along trying to get to the next scenic overlook or the next spot to head in to see the cave paintings. By the time I reach the highest point of the ride, I’ve just about had it. A car full of friendly people offered me a Coke, I suppose I must’ve looked like I needed one ("These friendly people, were they women?" Uh, could have been, I don’t clearly recall, it’s not important to this story. "Is it important to the VooDoo Lounge story?" I said I wasn’t going to tell that story. "You’ll tell me eventually..."). Overheated, a little crampy, pretty sure I’m going to be late for the first course of that dinner, I had a Coke and a Smile and took some time to look around at the rocks and the colors as the sun started going down. The ride back was completely different. The gradual downhill made it easy to keep up a fast pace, the wind was at my back now, and the lights weren’t a problem. I did have to stop once just to put my fleece and jacket back on, as it was getting cold fast with the sun dropping and at that speed. I got back to the shop in half the time it’d taken me going out. I get back to the shop, and the kid asks me how the ride was. I tell him it was fine. He asks if I was able to bear up against that headwind, and I had to laugh.
No problem catching a cab back, and as odd as I must’ve looked leaving, I must’ve seemed a little more out of place arriving at the Bellagio in the evening, stepping out of the cab all sweat-caked and dragging. Helmet-hair and helmet and gloves in hand. The cab stand guy opens the door and pauses a second and blinks before he gets out his [Welcome to the Bellagio, Sir]. I step out in tights and fleece ("Like a big canary?" Maybe like a big golden bear.) saying thank you very much Anton ("Name tag?" Yep, name tag), and slipping a ten in his hand just ‘cause it seemed so ridiculous ("A ten?!" Yeah, I was saving it to blow on slots, but this was much better), clearly overcompensating. Anton plays along though, [may I get someone to bring your helmet in sir?]. Yes, thank you, and my gloves, up to my room if you would Anton. And then my cleats clicking my way across the bricks to the door. ("Did you make it in time for dinner?" Easily, even had time for a long hot shower and a nap. "How was it?" Oh the meal was spectacular, I had to switch seats to really enjoy the dinner though. I started out between a pair of grinds that wanted to talk all about monthly revenue and run rates and P&L’s. Holy crap guys, give it a rest, you’re in Las Vegas. The I went to sit next to Ellen, who’s a VP, but still seems to remember the point. I started to re-introduce myself, but she cut me off, saying she knew perfectly well who I was. It startled me for a minute, but it turned out she did not remember dancing in Memphis. She said she’d laughed hard at the note I’d attached to my RSVP. Seems I have a rep for being sarcastic too "No! People can be so unfair." Yeah, I know, right? I guess some of those people I worked with wrote at length to Division about me, in a good way. I told her there has to be some upside to working with pushy opinionated people. That was the last we talked about work for the rest of the evening, even when grind #1 tried to suck up, asking one of those questions. I stopped talking to be polite so she could answer. She paused, looked at grind #1, then looked back at me and asked [So, then what happened?]. Did I mention that the wine was terrific? It always tastes so much better when the company pays for it. Of course, my damn internal clock still woke me up at 4 AM Las Vegas time. Gave me enough time to go down to the gym and pool and work out the hangover sweats.)
When I got back from Vegas (that was a huge cluster, the end of spring break that year and those first attempts at airport security), I stopped unpacking when I got to the sticker again. I went and looked and was struck by how much it fit me. Some things I knew about myself but didn’t know I knew. The whole thing was damn spooky. "So you put the sticker up." Right, just to keep me mindful of the power of coincidences and how they can reveal things about yourself. To remind me to keep my eyes and mind open. "And the VooDoo Lounge story, what would that reveal about you?" I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come on up front in this seat. I’ll get back in the driver’s seat and we can go find a place to get some coffee and breakfast. "We’ll probably have time for another story then." Maybe, maybe it’s your turn to tell one. "I know a Red Pathway story about The Bear and The Porcupine." Oh? That sounds interesting...