Sunday, September 14, 2014

Death And Resurrection In Las Vegas

As I sit here quietly reading 'Michael Palin's Diaries 1969-1979 The Python Years' on a late sunny Sunday morning, cat at my side, wife asleep in the other room, a thought occurs to me. I'd like to start this up again. I miss writing, and my wife and I lead such a busy and event-filled life together that it would be a bit of a shame to let much of it go by undocumented. For example, just yesterday we went, mostly on a whim, to a liquidation sale at The Clarion Hotel here in Las Vegas. A place formerly owned by Debbie Reynolds, its small size and odd location (just off The Strip, and not in an exciting-by-Las-Vegas-standards way) meant it couldn't keep up with the mega-casinos that are everything now. This sale had been going on for at least a week, and EVERYTHING was up for sale...right down to the kitchen sink ($425, if I recall correctly...a slop-sink that could be placed anywhere was only $75).
As a consequence, the interior of the hotel looked as if the zombie apocalypse had occurred roughly a couple years ago. Rooms were ravaged to varying degrees, with some still maintaining some furniture, but all of it displaced. Other rooms had suffered from more pillaging, as chairs, tables, sheets, even entire beds were gone. Kat figured that they could leave the place as is and market it as The Zombie Apocalypse Hotel, and it would be booked solid. Dumber ideas have made millions of dollars.

For the record, we walked out of there with 6 dishes, 6 small bowls, a dozen green cloth napkins, a 5 foot mirror that is maybe a foot wide, a small plastic carafe, 4 hand towels, and some silverware. Only cost us 50 bucks. But the pictures of me "passed out" in random semi-destroyed hotel room bathrooms and strewn across misplaced pieces of furniture probably are worth that themselves.

Blog Post Soundtrack: Probot, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Clash, The Misfits (doing 'Horror Hotel'...rather appropriate), Grandmaster Flash, John Lennon

2 comments:

  1. If we collected all the empty bottles around there and scattered them it would have made the pics even better......but those bottles were kinda gross....

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  2. It looked as if they'd ordered everyone out of the building in an emergency evacuation. Still some food left in the kitchen, half-empty bottles in some rooms, even something that may or may not have been blood on the sheets in one room. Atmosphere.

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