The next day we awoke, opened the drapes and had a smoke first thing. It’s important to remember, when abusing ones lungs to the extent that we did, that if you give them a chance to recuperate your doing it wrong. You want a healthy cough and a serious respect for the casino air that refuses, even with those ginormous fans and air-conditioning systems, to ever truly dissipate the smell of cigarettes and cigars. If fact I’m guessing that if you found a cache of their cleaning equipment the cleaners would be cigarette scented and have that beautiful black coloring to them.
We ended up finding the shineys later on that day as they had the urge to shop till they dropped and could not be denied. So we once again wandered and watched and drooled over the little dancing girls and felt generally male and virile for the day. We hooked up with the shiney’s and hung out with them in their fairly palatial room at Bally’s and watched them treat their caffeine with an almost crack head like rationing. Misses shiney was the funniest as mister shiney had kicked the dew habit for the past few weeks, possibly without realizing the ramifications when he finally did drink it and spun out. She would drink a bit and put it gingerly back in its place in the mini fridge they had going in their room. She had actually nursed a coke since three days before or so and had a slightly shaky countenance when she drank it a sip at a time. We spent a few days with them here and there but for the most part it was all about the bro and I having well, bro time as it were.
When we did hang out with the shiney’s it was mostly wandering about the wonders of Vegas, though we did do the live event with them and a few others as they had upped the group size to nine I think it was. If you go to the guild website the video of me trying to shove about nine marshmallows in my mouth, the most disgusting thing on the planet I might add, and speaking without the vomiting is something not to be missed. If you watch close there is a moment where I am almost done in and I do reflexively gag a time or two. But all in all we did Vegas as Vegas deserves to be done. With a healthy buzz on and smoking till we dropped.
Now what amazed me the most this trip was the lack of Fan Faire stuff we did, which we had agreed upon before we even left (it was to be about the free food and the live event), and how much we saw of Vegas. We walked and rode the shuttles all over that city and I saw stuff I hadn’t seen since I was nine years old. Cleopatra’s barge is now a dance joint, they have big psychedelic mushrooms in the Belagio I think it was, and all manner of other odd and unique Vegassy things around and about. So we mostly spent our days in transit from one place to another, clutching our drinks and praying that the air conditioning wouldn’t crap out.
The pool party was a strange and unusual experience as well. It wasn’t as crazy as the first year we went when it was held at the Rio pool but the drinks they had were tasty. One was called a Jedi mind trick and I had a few of them. Well, maybe more then a few, but I didn’t ever really have a serious buzz going. There was a point were the guy in the froglock costume went swimming, but when he did it was with the consensus that no one had ever seen a frog not able to swim like that before. Now the pool was almost vacant, but there were some serious hotties in string bikini’s and the like, and some larger folks in skimpy outfits, but the vibe of the crowd was semi subdued and not at all as crazy as past years but it was enjoyable. Mostly because we found a couple that had been playing EQ for years and the husband had split off for EQ2 and the wife was still holding onto the dream of EQ1. Now that was all fine and dandy but when we started talking about other things the conversation became much livelier. We started with odd and fringe stuff, mostly covered on Coast to Coast AM, then went to the ghost hunters, then to really odd Japanese anime and film in general. They were really into anime and turned me and the broskie onto other films we hadn’t even heard of. She was from Japan and he was from the US but they had met years ago and had gotten hitched and she had come over here for a taste of the culture shock. They were adorable and were very pleasurable to talk to. We had tried to contact the Shiney’s but they were doing other things and so we left the pool party, well after it ended and the security forces went to work with the standard “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here” lines and we flowed out into the city again.
