Thoughts from Sin City

LAS VEGAS – Everyone should experience a desert sunrise, especially when the view includes hookers fighting over bread, and soulless men enticing passers-by with offers of delivering loose women. It may only be 6 a.m., but it’s never too early to begin a day of despair and sleaze, especially in a city built on preposterous human ambitions. \nYes, looking out over the city from the fifth story of The Riviera, it’s hard not to sigh, light a cigarette, take a swig of whiskey and throw the bottle out the window at the unsuspecting hookers below. They did, after all, wake me up. As the bottle shatters on the deck of the pool, the ladies of the previous evening scatter like hyenas at the sound of an approaching predator. After breaking out in random song – namely “Circle of Life” from “The Lion King” – I retreat to the casino, drinking cheap gin for breakfast and pondering many intriguing thoughts.\nAround noon, $50 poorer, it hits me, the most profound thought imaginable: Somewhere between Mandalay Bay and Stratosphere (the two hotel-casinos that essentially bound the respective southern and northern ends of the strip) there can be found a frightening amount of similarity between Sin City and Bloomington. Why come to Vegas when the cozy confines of central Indiana will suffice? \nIf you haven’t been to Las Vegas, you’re probably trying to figure out my reasoning for relating the home of the Hoosiers to the home of the hookers. Those of you who have traveled to Vegas or watched several episodes of CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” might see the correlation, at least if you’ve first taken acid and read Hunter S. Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”\nTake, for example, the following stunning similarities:\n• Indiana Daily Student columnist Andrew Shaffer recently made headlines by highlighting IU’s Ora L. Wildermuth Intramural Center as inappropriately named. It seems that Mr. Wildermuth was a teeming racist, as well as a twinkle-toes ballerina (I may or may not have made that up). Ironically, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas has a similarly named building, the Oral Wide-mouth Escort Training Center. \n• Guardian Angel Cathedral, of the Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas, sits just off the strip, within throwing distance of an overabundance of sin and vice. Bloomington has its own haven surrounded by a den of iniquity. St. Paul Catholic Center, located on East 17th Street, sits a quick hop from Jordan Avenue. We all know the evil and wickedness taking place on that street.\n• Buildings in Vegas are notoriously unoriginal, such as mocked-up versions of the Eiffel Tower and the New York skyline. So too does IU mock itself up. The Indiana Memorial Union is an obvious rip off of Bruce Wayne’s (Batman) mansion, and it’s just as creepy.\nSo, think twice before coming to Vegas. The lust, delusions and avarice we so seek in the Nevada desert can be found right at home. Few things, however, can beat a good ol’ Vegas sunrise, just so long as the hookers keep to themselves.