Losing your mortgage money at the craps table. They even tell you in advance that you're there to be robbed.īut deep into the fantasy are certain, meat-hook realities.
It sells the ideal, the fantasy, that just one dollar plunked down into the right machine will make you rich, that some padded stool awaits, where you will squat and watch your life mutate into an endless madness of unlimited wealth. Plopped down in the desert is an illusion. It's the ultimate escape, the ultimate fantasy, and, at times, the ultimate lie. The City of Las Vegas is literally a mirage, an oasis for a beleaguered populous that is looking for something, anything, other than the template machinations of life.
And it's not the mobbed-up monarchy that I discovered when my dad took me for the first time in 1987. Gonzo (Hunter Thompson) contorted in 1971. It's not the one-horse dust bowl that Bugsy Siegel discovered in 1946.
