Viva Lost Wages

Alex Trebek: Dangerous liaisons with Cubans. Sleep deprivation. Waterboarding. Brinkmanship.

You: What is The Cuban Missile Crisis, Alex?

Alex Trebek: No, I'm sorry

Me: The answer is What is Las Vegas…to…the…FACE.

I finally arrived at my apartment just shy of midnight on Sunday night. A mere shell of the man who so naively boarded a plane last Thursday evening with a nice little wad of crisp hundreds. I'd never been to Las Vegas, and now I'm wondering I'll ever go back. As a sportsman I'll give you this analogy, "leave it all on the court". Suffice to say, I just witnessed ten guys (it was ten, I think, I sometimes had trouble counting) just leave it all on the proverbial court. In fact, I think the best example of literally leaving it all on the court occurred at the club on Saturday, where a big-boned, high-heeled, strong-willed woman projectile vomited about an oil drum worth of Welch's Grape Juice and Hennessey on her way to rush the stage to get as close to Snoop Dogg as possible, since he was performing for some reason. She literally didn't even break stride. If I didn't have a drink in my hand I would've clapped. It was simultaneously the most inspiring yet disgusting thing I think I've ever seen. Welcome to Vegas.

Before I recount the glories of the weekend it's only fair to share the inglorious aftermath. At work on Monday I was, how you say, less than efficient, mostly due to severe dehydration and a bout of sleep apnea. At one point I was texting with the bachelor (the reason we went to Vegas) that when I'd gotten home I'd emptied my bag of its contents and then burned my computer. He wrote back, "why did you burn your computer", to which I wrote back, "I meant my clothing". Clearly I was not firing on all cylinders. But why did I want to burn my clothing…because it smelled like Las Vegas. More on that later. I'm still recovering I think. Primarily because of I've been downing the sweetest nectar on this planet…water, not eating Denny's at 6am, and doing this thing called sleeping. It's amazing by the way. Try it.

So what of the rest of the weekend? As you know…what happens in Vegas blah blah, so I'll honor that and just paint some broad strokes. Let me first describe the all-day bacchanalia at the pool/club/awesomeness at the MGM on Saturday. You know how if you wrap anything in bacon it makes it exponentially better. Bacon-wrapped scallops. Bacon-wrapped dates. Etc. Well if you had to dumb down the description of what went on at the MGM that gorgeous day, I think you'd have to basically say it was bacon-wrapped Spring Break 2010. Yeah, let that marinate for a minute. I think we gave a new definition to the word gluttony, but little did I know we'd continue to give a new definition to the word gluttony every subsequent evening. For shame Finger:TheBlog, for shame. Well as you can possibly imagine, after we finished up at the pool eight hours later I wasn't quite in shape to operate heavy machinery so I took a nap. I woke up to the phone buzzing at around 11:45pm. It was my friend, we'll call him Liev Schreiber, and he was saying that I had 15 minutes to get downstairs because he'd just won a serious four-game parlay of the Sweet 16 games that day, and then had thrown those winning on red and won that too and we were going out. In a near zombie-like state I took the coldest shower of my life, smacked my face a few times and headed downstairs to the lobby. At this point I was cold and shaking and hungry and in need of a hug. It was off to a Gentlemen's club.

I expected to go somewhere to learn how to better open doors for ladies, and how to properly ballroom dance. You know, gentlemanly pursuits and such. Well well well. I had been tricked because when I showed up at this "gentlemanly establishment", the most gentlemanly pursuit taking place was that a…um…actually there was nothing particularly gentlemanly going on. There's something magical about strippers and by "magical" I mean "grossed out by their c-section scars", but magically grossed out I suppose. And what of that smell? What of that smell? All weekend I was trying to put my finger on what that omnipresent smell was. In the elevator. In the lobby. In Denny's. In the cab. In the airport. I'm not scientist, but I'm pretty sure it's a combination of strawberries, Lysol, crushed up Marlboro Reds, and leather. I'm actually in talks with a major manufacturer to get this turned into a perfume. It's going to be called "Slots". I'm looking for some VC money so let me know if you're at all interested. Typical me, I was interested in the back stories of these wonderfully-talented women. I imagined they'd grown up in the Eastern Bloc, nibbling small rations of stale bread and potatoes in the depths winter just to stay nourished. They'd come to Vegas in pursuit of their lifelong dream of becoming a biochemist. They attended UNLV where they had just applied for a Marshall Scholarship to continue their studies, and stripping was just a way to pay the bills for school. Listen, I know it's not likely, but it's possible. In fact, the closest these girls would ever get to becoming a biochemist would probably be working in a meth lab to pay off their pimps. I'm not going to get into details of the evening, because they were pretty normal, given the circumstances of course. Get your mind out of the gutter people. This was clean, wholesome, American fun.

I'm not even going to try to describe the events at the club the next evening. Something about a giraffe, a 7-month pregnant woman, cocktail dresses the size of washcloths, our gracious and kind and caring club hostess Amber, shenanigans, shenanigans.com, www.shenanigans.com, follow me on twitter @shenaniganstotheface, Snoop Dogg, anger, redemption, pseudo-Cuban Bulgarians from Henderson Nevada, making assessments, drinking Baileys from a shoe, and the man of the weekend who was responsible for the tsunami of events that almost ended the lives of ten strapping young gents…Old Greggggggg.

I sum up Las Vegas like this…the city simultaneous embodies every reason why America is the greatest country on Earth and every reason why so many people on Earth hate America. From the mouth of the former self-proclaimed Most Disciplined Man in Media Services, I must say that Vegas is a true battle of the mind versus the body versus the wallet, and in some inexplicable way even though we all lost, we all won...big…and this, my friends, is why we go to Vegas.