So... Las Vegas

(With apologies to Otis for borrowing his title.)

Back from Cebu. A good time, as always.

Coming home from any trip always makes me question why I live in Vegas. There's nothing about Vegas that feels like home. In fact, just about anywhere feels homier. Even Cebu, with its abject poverty and the filth that often accompanies it, has a certain charm that Vegas lacks. Back in April, upon coming home from NYC, I remarked that New York is a city of dreamers and Vegas is a town of losers. It's a sentiment I haven't been able to shake since.

Vegas is driven by image, the kind of place that creates an Andre Agassi (remember his "image is everything" line of camera commercials?). It's where you go because your ego demands that you be a big fish in a small pond or because you care too much about what other people think. When you don't feel "cool" enough, there's always a person, a place or a business in Las Vegas that you can (over-)pay to make you feel like a rock star. It's a town of escapism and a city of emotional bankruptcy.

None of that appeals to me. Which begs the question of why I remain here, putting aside the question of why I came here in the first place.

The problem that Vegas people like me run into is that the town allows certain freedoms and a certain lifestyle that is difficult to duplicate in other places without either completely ripping up the social fabric of the place or large bags of cash. That's the trade-off that some of us, for the moment, have accepted about Las Vegas, the reason we hold our noses, steel our emotional centers and continue to putter about the valley.

Make no mistake: Vegas is not a real city. It may not even be a real place, for all I know. It could just be a desert mirage created by fake businessmen -- gangsters -- and taken over by juridical people -- corporations. At some point, I'm going to blink and Vegas is going to be gone.