Not much to report today. We had our first lie-in of the trip and went down to MGM Grand food court for an overpriced brunch before spending the next four or so hours vegetating at the hotel pool. Sometimes, this is what’s needed. We’ve been abroad for a week – there’s been a lot of travelling, a lot of late nights and early mornings. Though I didn’t want to go into the pool myself due to the atomic heat of the sun, I was happy to sit in the shade and attempt to write. I’ve got a manuscript due for the end of April (a self-imposed deadline that may prove to have been overly ambitious) so I thought I should at least try and get some work done. As it turned out, the heat was just a couple notches too high to properly focus. I’m not generally a precious person, but my brain seems to be very particular about the conditions under which it will enter a flow state. The ideal situation for me seems to be a brief bus ride into Cambridge, a coffee and cake at a café (bonus points if it’s a library or bookshop café), and then cup after cup of red berry tea until I either finish for the day or go bankrupt. An undervalued feature of the café environment is air conditioning, something I –after three nights in the desert – will never take for granted again. Even though I was physically at rest, trying to write was like trudging through mud, so I gave it up as a bad job and tried to read. The only trouble is, reading a good book makes me want to write. I’m reading Butter by Asako Yuzuki, a story which is getting better and better with every chapter, so I couldn’t focus until I felt like I’d made some decent progress on my own work. I went upstairs to get my notebook and wrote out the rest of the chapter in shorthand bullet-point form. Using a word processor always triggers my perfectionism, possibly because its visual resemblance to a finished draft, so I thought if I couldn’t get rid of the heat, I would get rid of my mental barriers. Writing in a notebook is much easier. I feel none of the same pressure to get things right on the first pass. I can write in the margins, between the lines, draw arrows. It’s like breaking a dam in my mind and letting the ideas flow without judgement. Finally satisfied, I could return to my book and allow myself to get engrossed.
The only distraction from then on was the pleasure of seeing Brother making friends in the swimming pool. Mum was valiantly trying to get him to wear his sunhat (sun + black hair + reflective pool water = bad news) but he ended up playing a game where some of the lads would do underwater handstands and try and catch an American football, thrown by another boy, between their legs. After so much gaudy, impersonal Vegas glitter, amidst bejewelled May-December couples sunbathing without speaking to each other, with enough Botox between them to mark them safe for recycling, there is something about seeing kids having fun that breaks your cynicism for a moment and makes you remember what holiday resorts are for. I do wonder if my knee jerk response to Vegas was a little unfair. The Strip is a kind of commercial purgatory, yes, but there is a whole city beyond the Strip, the largest in Nevada. There must be kids having fun out there, too; families being raised, communities of people with shared interests. If it exists, I’d like to see that side of Vegas. Real fun, not just the expensive performance of it.
Hard to stay on gloomy lines of thought when the weather is nice and there’s a drink in your hand. After the pool, we went up to the room to cool off, were briefly exposed to the horror that is Fox News (the less said the better) then went out into the city for dinner, sharing a pizza and salad at Giordano’s (very yum). We wandered further in search of a pirate show my dad used to love, but we discovered it had been discontinued since 2013. There have been a few moments like that, where my Dad’s fond memories of Las Vegas have been confronted with disappointing developments. It’s been a crazy stop, and not a bad one at all, but I do feel bad for my Dad. Vegas was his idea, but his idea is twenty years or so out of date. Much has changed since then. The cost of everything has skyrocketed, and everything from pleasant diversion to basic amenities are locked behind extra fees. But we’ve had a relaxing day and a good meal as a family, and that’s what we’ll remember when Sin City is far behind us.
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