Happy 2013 From the City of SIN
New Years Eve, as I exited the Las Vegas Interstate I routinely take to work officially leaving the pleasantly boring confines of the suburbs on my way to spend the day at a Las Vegas casino I saw what looked like a ghost.
Actually I saw a forlorn man holding a sign to my left and an SUV behind me.
The man stood stock still and straight as a plank seemingly frozen in place like a scarecrow in dirty, gray well worn sweats. He stood at attention with his six inch piece of hand cut piece of cardboard blaring a message of desperation my middle aged eyes could not make out without putting on the reading glasses in my pocket. The image was so powerful I was going to take a picture and post it with this blog when the light changed and the demands of traffic, everyday life and employment overrode the demands of art and statement.
One of Sin City’s sign holding denizens from a photo taken in late December. Not the person I saw this week….Photo by Royal
Further down the road I spied a nice looking couple dressed to the nines in holiday silliness paper hats, expensive jewelry and all. Sometimes you can tell its an act…Sometimes you can tell there is no true desperation, but this guy looked like the shadow of reaper himself. If it was act he should really get an agent and start showing up for casting calls in Hollywood because man he looked like a ghost in the making.
No punch line just an observation and my only mildly activist statement for this first day of the New Year.
The Song Remains the Same in the City of Sin
by Royal Hopper
As I stood on Las Vegas boulevard in the cold waiting for the countdown to the New Year to start, I looked around at the sea of party hats, costumes, blinking neon glasses on the closed off boulevard waiting what amounts to a huge street party gathering for New Years Eve in the City of Sin.
There was also some guy from Germany who thanked everybody he saw for the good time he had in the City of Sin, ( I didn’t want to know what that meant and still don’t.) I paused to think. No not really its was just freaking cold and my mind started to wander and think about the week and the year.
An improving economy put a small dent in the unemployment rate here in Sin City not a big one, in fact it was a tiny one and home foreclosures went down a little. Home prices went up a little and the fashion sense of the area’s homeless improved considerably.
This week in the week leading up to the New Year I finally saw something in Vegas I had never seen before. I saw a man striding down Las Vegas boulevard with a carpet on his back.
I mean to say he was wearing a carpet like a pancho, like a big blanket draped over his shoulder trying to keep warm I suppose or perhaps modeling the latest in used area carpets for joggers on Las Vegas Boulevard.
Two men, perhaps Thrift Store employees arrange a thrift store sign on a Sin City street in late December_ Photo by Royal
Still it has been a rough year for the City of Sin.
We were invaded time and time again by cowboys, drill teams of pool playing malt liquor fans, and punk rock grannies.
Roller Derby girls. hordes of mullet wearing, gray-haired hippies named Frank and hordes of younger Hipper hedonists who made fun of them while they pushed up their Faux hawks, adjusted their $300 sun glasses and gave their kids a quarter to play the nearest slot machines were among the waves of invaders.
It is a rule in the City of Sin that many. Many of its visitors are lost in time and space and meaning and 2012 was no exception. Many mullet wearing Sin City Denizens were sighted wearing that decades bright colors and others seem to have forgotten The Ramones and The Clash disbanded years ago.
They wore real brightly colored Mohawks in the absence of any evidence that anybody much under the age of 45 would do anything but giggle at them. The guy in the Led
We saw a a Diamond David Lee Roth wannabe bringing the 80s alive and New Years Eve a guy with a Zepplin T-shit with the gray almost white pony tail continued this questionable tradition.
There were at least five Elvis sightings the night of the New Year so don’t expect this tradition to discontinue anytime soon.
Incidentally what do you tell a hotel guest who smokes so many Doobies ( 70s slang for Ganja, Chronic, Grass, etc etc) that their pot smoking neighbor complains about the smoke. Do you a.) kick him out of the hotel, b.) lecture him about courtesy to his neighbors in a non smoking section of the hotel or cal the police and let them handle it. The proper City of Sin answer is none of the above…You check to see if he has space on his credit card for a surcharge that he eventually agrees to pay.
One of Las Vegas infamous yellow news stands- Photo by Royal
Being rolled is not a good thing
Being rolled in Las Vegas is not a good thing. It doesn’t mean you had a roll in the hay or are rolling in dough. It means you took a girl to your room and she said something like “honey why don’t you take a shower and I’ll wait here for you. and you believed her .
Of course when you got out of the shower she was gone with your money, your Id and your ID by the way and your car keys and eventually your car. It is an old Vegas story that has been going on for years and years and years. Here’s a clue boys and girls and yes it does sometimes happen to girls too. You are not all that. You are not so irresistible that the Pros just want to cuddle up to you because your so hot or you look like the favorite poodle. If they get a chance, the denizens of Sin City will rip you off.
People had fun this week. They stole carpets to sleep in, they stole money from each other and stared at dancers butts while their wives and husbands were
getting tickets to the late show. People in wheelchairs toting oxygen bottles were pushed to slot machines by family members and very little of consequence changed in the life of the City of Sin.
Rock on fellow Sinners and
And may your 2013 be peaceful, prosperous and plentiful
Jogger report:
There weren’t many joggers this week. As the temps got colder the fair weather runners moved indoors to watch reruns of Lord of the Rings and all but the most serious of fitness freaks stayed away.
A few links from my email about this year
Royal's Sin City Journal 