A Voyage to Vegas

It is bad luck to be superstitious. — Andrew W. Mathis

Well, it is blearily early. If you’re reading this post when I published it on my website, you’re crazy. Or you’re old, in which case you’ve probably already had breakfast, walked the dog, done a morning workout, and are finishing up a novel.

For me, however, I am struggling to keep my eyelids from giving one another a constant high-five.

Why am I up so early? Why do I so often pose rhetorical questions in these posts?

I’m up early because this is when my flight leaves for Las Vegas. I ask rhetorical questions because it imparts a sense of intelligence where I otherwise lack it. (Plus, this is just the wacky way I think in my head.)

To address the first statement, however, I, along with five good friends, are going to celebrate the Fourth of July (and more importantly our youth and vanity) in Las Vegas for the weekend. And the best part of all: my friends don’t even know I’m coming.

Now, if my attendance on this trip is meant to be a surprise, why am I posting it on my blog way before I meet up with any of them? And once more, why I am asking another rhetorical question?

Well, I said I was going to visit my good friends, not great ones. And because they’re only good friends, that means there is a 95% chance they don’t even know I have a blog—even though I’ve given them all my business card and had numerous conversations about how witty my posts are. As for the rhetorical question…why do you even care?

At first, I wasn’t going to go to Vegas. I’m not much of a gambler. 114 degree weather is uncomfortable. My expendable income stream is…how should I put this? …lacking.

However, when I learned another of my friends, one completely unrelated to the group of five, just happened to be going this same weekend, I took it as a sign. And when I fell into an undisclosed amount of cash, I took that as another sign. And when I asked myself what I would be doing on the fourth if I didn’t go, embarrassing loneliness became a strong motivator.

Plus, this is the first time I’ll have been in Vegas since I turned 21.

So now I’m headed to where a pair of dice is paradise. And with any luck—well, actually a lot of luck, considering that’s what gambling is—I’ll return with pockets heavier than I left with.

And my kneecaps still intact.

Riskily,

jdt