So the way I came to find myself in Las Vegas again is,
my company is creating a partnership with Cisco, and we must have a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) on staff to qualify.  That’s me.  We must also have a CCDA (D for Design) on staff, and I am again in Sin City to endure a class which will attempt to fill the water balloon of my head using a fire hose of information.

With this additional certification, I will be the Cisco kid, so to speak; the key to lots of new business for our company.

But the part that is blog-worthy is the surreal nature of the entertainment district of Las Vegas and the swirling entropy that encompasses the frenzied vacationers.

Where else does an ambulance whiz past my hotel window every 20 minutes?  Where else are there so many pools of vomit on the sidewalks?  Where else can you be accosted by hordes of Mexicans hawking flyers for prostitution services?  Where else can you find such fabulous shows as Barry Manilow, Gladys Night, and Cher? or all-male dance troupes, like one the called “Thunder Down-Under” featuring topless, chiseled presumably Australian men with tousled hair and oh, so serious eyes.

How odd I must look:  a single middle-aged man in something other than a captioned T-shirt, reading a book over dinner.

How taken-aback are the faces of fellow bus travelers pumping their fists, women stretching down their necklines, giddy as children on Christmas morning, when I tell them I’m not planning to gamble, and in fact never have.

The people I can simply pity.  But what is more malaise-inducing to me is the institutionalized paltriness, not so much the helicopters constantly circling overhead giving tours over the city such that I cannot make a phone call outside, but the stretch SUV limos, the flat-bed trucks with lighted marquees of girls in mid-remove of their narrow patches of bikini, the $100 per plate dinners while homeless people (illegally) sit shabby and silent in the dark corners.  One has the sense that everything here colludes to fleece the willing despoiled, to shut out the quiet desperation of everyday life, hiding from the darkness in an even greater darkness, and eviscerating many good earthly gifts in the service of the basest passions of the unimaginative, overfed, heedless, feckless, reckless middle class.