I went to Las Vegas for the first time five years ago. I worked for the brand-new electronic publishing division of an established publishing company at that time, and two weeks before the Comdex convention, my bosses had divided an entire blotter of acid between them and promoted me to the editorship of an entire as-yet-unborn CD-ROM product line and pointed my twenty-two-year-old self west. “Go to Vegas,” they told me, “and take meetings,” and they did that little Grateful Dead dance in my office, and then they went to lie down. And so to Vegas I went. I spent a miserable American Airlines flight to Phoenix wedged into a middle seat between two overweight IT guys who napped on my shoulders while I slogged through seven back issues of PC Gamer, and I deplaned and trudged towards the America West counter, telling myself that at least it couldn’t get worse than that flight; the Muzak in the Phoenix airport drowned out the sound of the air-travel gods cackling at my hubris, and I boarded the connection to Vegas and spent the next hour and a half gripping the armrests and passing through every segment in the green section of the color spectrum as our pilot tested the theorem that, under the correct conditions of air current, a 707 jet will behave like a glider, and as the plane swooped and fluttered onto the McCarran airstrip like a leaf in the autumn breeze, I muttered aloud, “I can’t wait to get to the hotel.”

Again, I planned; again, God laughed. I woozed into the backseat of a taxi and told him to take me to the Continental, and I lay down across the seat and tried to talk my gorge into going back down, and when the car stopped and I sat up, I found myself in front of a hotel that looked like God had stepped on the Alhambra in a fit of pique. After running a gauntlet of Japanese businessmen who mistook me for a hooker – and I guess hookers in Japan wear brown Ann Taylor pantsuits and stack-heeled loafers with sensible two-inch heels – I finally landed in my room, which looked and smelled like those baroque orange fungi that bloom on tree stumps after a heavy rain. I dialed room service, and the food arrived twenty minutes later, on plates. Just plates. No tray; no table. The waiter had to go back downstairs to get me a setting of silverware and a napkin, but not before expressing mild surprise that I couldn’t just make a go of eating the veal marsala with my hands. Later that night, when I went out for a bucket of ice, I saw a phalanx of real hookers converging on a room down the hall, and I scuttled back to my room and turned the volume way up on my television and began counting down the hours until I could get the hell out of there. Four days later, after portaging a laptop and a briefcase jammed full of press releases for a German avant-garde art CD-ROM through every hotel lobby and public space in Las Vegas, I finally made my escape, but not before collecting fifty pounds of business cards, not to mention a terrible cold compliments of a man in the line for the shuttle bus to the convention center who sneezed in my face with such gusto that his retainer nearly put my eye out. On the plane home, my inner ears turning themselves inside out, I honked into a scratchy America West napkin and loathed Las Vegas with every fiber of my being. I stomped into work the next day and wheezed at my bosses that I hated Vegas, that I had seen people walk blithely around a fire in the hallway of my hotel, that I had spent the last four nights with a particle-board chest of drawers pushed against the door of my room, and that I absolutely refused to go back for CES.

Fast forward two months to my second trip to Las Vegas, for the CES convention. One of my bosses – the one who had written “keeping his wife and his mistress from seeing each other coming and going” into my job description, the one who frequently suggested that I entertain prospective clients at strip joints, the one whose voice invariably prompted a battle-stations rush of acid to collect in my stomach and ulcerate as he mangled prepositions in his deceptively jolly German accent – had decided to accompany me, and he acted as though this constituted some kind of favor. “We will stay at the Excalibur, and we will have fun, you will see. Now please take care for the reservations, or I will kill you,” he said, and strode out of my office. My boss threatened to kill me often, usually in jest, but had I known what horrors awaited me at the Excalibur, a.k.a. “Renaissance Faire On Crystal Meth” – oh, excuse me, “Renaissance Faire On Ye Olde Methe Du Cristalle” – I’d have encouraged him to make good on the threat for once. The Excalibur is, in short, the single most annoying place on the face of the earth, and I have spent time in New Jersey DMVs, so I know from annoying places. The Excalibur, which looks like a Playskool castle as envisioned by Sid and Marty Krofft, begins its nimble pavanne on the nerves before paying guests have even entered the building by greeting them with the simulated roar of a giant dragon, and it doesn’t really sound like a dragon so much as like a group of backhoes engaging in unprotected group sex, so suffice it to say that if my boss hadn’t already given me a headache on the plane – which he had, starting when he snatched a glass of wine out of my hand and informed me that I couldn’t drink Merlot with a vegetarian entrÈe and continuing through his exhaustive strategy for winning at craps – I would have gotten a migraine almost instantaneously after stepping out of the cab. Add to this the even-louder-and-more-hallucination-inducing-than-the-standard carpeting, the presence of numerous ankle-biters (the Excalibur is aimed squarely at families with kids), the overbearingly fey medieval theme taken to ridiculous extremes, a pervasive stench of cigar smoke with notes of overexcited-child vomit and roasted pork, and the fact that the faux-brick-tower wallpaper in the room did not line up properly, and you have a uniquely American twenty-eight-story nightmare. Not even the evil thrill of losing three hundred dollars of my boss’s money at blackjack could ease the throbbing in my temples. (Well, maybe a little.) I fled as soon as possible, stuffing my things into my suitcase willy-nilly and diving into a cab, and the Blizzard of ’96 had just hit the east coast and the airline could only get me as far as Dallas, but I didn’t care. I’d just spent the last five days surrounded by blown glass goblins and men wearing purple tights, and I wanted out.

See, you can’t go to Las Vegas on a business trip and expect to have any fun, because in order to enjoy Las Vegas, you have to give yourself up to the elemental absurdities of the place, and that’s nearly impossible to do in the context of networking and pitch meetings. You have to get up at seven-thirty and kit yourself out in a suit and prep your bag with literature and ballpoint pens, and then you go out into the hotel and you walk through the casino and out the front door and into a city that basically functions as a gigantic theme park, so not only does working go against the essential purpose of the city – to have fun in the most rococo way possible – but it goes against the natural rhythm of a city which only starts to wake up at dusk. At night, all the blinking voltage is impressive; by day, it’s a benighted freak show.

I went back to Vegas last week on a “business retreat” (read: get all the Mighty Big TV employees in one place, talk about work for an hour or two, and spend the rest of the time dumping the August revenues into the nickel slots and lolling around eating room service), and I had a ball. Again, Vegas inverts everything – routine, sense of scale, relative willingness to eat mediocre food – and this time I could embrace that instead of trying to impose a schedule on it. The city exists to disorient its visitors, and now I could let it do just that. We stayed up until dawn and slept all day. We spent entire days in our rooms and in each other’s rooms, lying on the floor and smoking and occasionally calling out for room service. We tried to outdo each other for tackiest ashtray bought and scariest eighties karaoke love ballad sung. We cringed away from men with Samsonite tans wearing thong bikinis. We saw prostitutes, brides, Elvis impersonators wearing Skechers. I highly recommend a trip to Las Vegas if you’ve never gone; there’s no place quite like it, and you really have to see it to believe it. Las Vegas is a fever dream: lights flashing, slots ka-chinging, stunned tourists in fanny packs and Elvis t-shirts wandering around the casino, distracting carpeting, and of course no windows or clocks. Half the time, you have no idea of the time, and when you guess, you always guess wrong – three in the afternoon feels like ten in the morning, which feels like the middle of the night, which feels like cocktail hour. The middle of the morning also feels like cocktail hour. Sheena Easton still has a career. You meander outdoors and nearly get knocked down by the heat, which regularly hit 105 degrees last week, and then you come back inside and get smacked down by the air conditioning (around 65 degrees. Kelvin.), and you feel thirsty all the time because it’s so dry. You cannot find a decent cup of coffee to save your soul, and you have tried, but it’s day-old burnt or nothing, so you drink it, and your head starts to buzz, and you can’t tell if it’s from the coffee or from staring open-mouthed at the seven-story airbrushed David Cassidy grinning down at you from a billboard on the MGM Grand. You can pet lion cubs. You can invest in art. You can buy teriyaki jerky at four in the morning. You will buy teriyaki jerky at four in the morning. You will sleep until dusk because you have leaded curtains in your room. You will watch the Keno channel. Somewhere, someone is impersonating Frank Sinatra. A wedgie is considered a career move. Restaurants go on for miles. You can smoke everywhere, so you do. You turn “the Sultan of Brunei” into a verb. You can’t keep change in your pocket; only the pennies persist. You drink for free. You keep a log of the mullets. You forget the day, the date, where you put your keys, whether you have to wear shoes. Then you go to the airport and you check your pockets for quarters one last time and dump them in the slots and rush for the gate, and then you land at Newark Airport in a soupy fog first thing in the morning and you look down at the cars like little beads on the Turnpike as you bank in for the landing, and you feel so happy to get home to a sane place where people know the difference between day and night and just choose to stay up all night anyway, and you can finally sit your ringing ears down with a passable bagel and a cup of coffee and close your eyes.

Go to Vegas. Bring friends. Stay four days; make your getaway in the middle of the night. And don’t stay at the Excalibur.

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