2022/12/08 - Day Zero: Long Walk

My father, brother, and I arrive at the airport three hours early for a 1715 departure. I guess it gives me, my dad, and my brother P——— a chance for a parking lot beer. We gulp down what feel like the hoppiest most crispy of lukewarm pilsners imaginable and ingest medicinal herb infused brownies in hopes it will aid sleep on the flight. It does not. We grab a second beer a short ways away from our gate in a different terminal, who enjoys flying sober?

Uncle C——— and Uncle C——— find us at the bar. They seem agitated at us for having made them take a Long Walk. Unsure I notice, or care. My attention lapsed in the usual nomadic airport traversal but is now focused on the whereabouts of my brand new and currently misplaced, $100 Apple Pencil that’s supposed to be accompanying my also brand new iPad Pro. My heart is sinking at the prospect, I’m upset at myself for my usual carelessness. I might also be focusing on this mishap to distract myself from the impending issue of my uncertain future. The ramifications of which are entirely self-inflicted, but after years of hindsight, absolutely necessary.

I return my senses to the situation developing between the old men and it seems they’re now trying to get back to the gate. There is a stubborn refusal to do the Long Walk through the terminal again, so we attempt to take the shuttle outside the adjacent automatic sliding doors. Attempt, because the bus skips our terminal, due to construction of some sort. The incoherent jeers from the old men of my family towards the bus driver as we ride past fail to win over his sympathy. We are thus forced to take the Long Walk anyway.

We meet up with the bachelor; J———, and his brother, M——— at the gate. As I watch everyone greet each other it suddenly dawns on me how comical this large group of grown men traveling alone together, is. Just then, my Uncle C——— calls me out regarding the multiple bags I brought, I’ve always been the butt of jokes in the family. It was just my camera bag, I still don’t see the issue. Though it seems I was only called out so Uncle C——— could win the competition he started, having showed up with all 3 days of belongings in a single reusable grocery bag. Enabled by the fact that the man wears tank-tops and athletic shorts exclusively, and honestly, I admire his minimalism. P——— must’ve come in second place with a singular deflated Jansport backpack, but doesn’t cause a stir about it.

J——— and I talk about our homelabs and Plex servers in an effort to avoid any more competitions with my Uncle C——— before boarding the plane. I tell him that I plan to quit my job tomorrow. I think he thinks I’m joking. My dad got us exit row seats, and I’m between him and P———. I find P———‘s hubris in ordering a double rum and coke on the plane, twice, somewhat reckless. Yet admirable, considering we just got a whole speech about having to help in an emergency. On the other side of me, Pops is a little fidgety, I know he hates flying. We both do. The pilot comes over the intercom and welcomes us aboard before giving us our scheduled flight itinerary and briefly mentions that the plane we’re flying on is “Brand new and only a couple months old!” A general groan from the cabin lets out. “Great” my father mutters with the collective. I have the same thought. With near perfect comedic timing, my dad reaches for the overhead reading light and the lens cover pops off. We exchange both worried yet sarcastic glances that say; ‘I sure hope the rest of the plane was built better than that.’ But don’t say anything.

As we fly over the patchwork farmland of middle America I see on my iPad that my Apple pencil is still appearing as a connected Bluetooth item. I take comfort in the knowledge that it’s tucked away, hidden in my duffel somewhere. I put on Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon but can’t focus on the film, I can only think about my plan to quit my job tomorrow. 

Interlude about the Job I’m quitting

I work, rather, used to work for a famous photographer. You’ve seen his most iconic picture on the cover of a certain magazine, I’m sure. I got the job after I responded to a sketchy looking craigslist advertisement regarding an internship for The Photographer’s studio in the few months after I graduated from college. The interview was in some very normal casual looking office complex by my childhood shopping mall. It was a bit of a let-down to find out that He did not work in this particular studio. He was located, where other than New York City. We were essentially a remote satellite office, working on back-end studio workings. We did a lot of shipping, fan correspondence, and storage of exhibition material. We also contained a duplicate copy of his digital assets. My job, as the intern, was to manually type in keywords to old scanned film images on the server that did not yet have them. It was exciting to see this surfeit of contact sheets and b-sides of this entire film photography archive for such a well-known photographer. It was also absolutely dull at times. Seeing the same pictures hundreds of times in a row, but slightly different, in such ways you still needed to be on your game and not make mistakes, because you did not want to make them. In an early instance, normally we would have caption and date info in a spreadsheet for each image to input, but in the case of a handful of random images from the 80’s, I did not. When saving my keyworded image with no date, I tried to give the software a ‘null’ value. I supposed that since we the software was set to require the EXIF data be collected, it simply did not allow a ‘null’ value for this input and automatically input the existing EXIF date the scan was created. The year two-thousand and whatever. When the boss of this satellite studio, The Photographers older sibling, made a search with the same date the scan of those particular images was made and saw these old pictures with my name attached to them, I was swiftly informed of how displeased they were of the inaccuracy. They did not appreciate me shrugging it off with my supposed technical explanation and definitely not my preferability of finding a Moving Forward solution (i.e. simply allowing ‘null’ values by removing the ‘required’ parameter in the software settings) over being disgruntled with an employees poor performance. The inaccuracy is not ideal, I understand, but not the catastrophe it felt like it was being made to be. I recall having a short process to look for caption info for adjacent-looking images, but it often turned up nothing. It didn’t help that the metric you were graded on was not quality of keywords, but quantity. These two things, the blowing out of proportion and quantity over quality, should have been my the first red flags, but they were tiny then. One off’s. Until they became so magnified they became the theme of my employment, and the cause of relentless anxiety during this time. Young and excited at the prospect of being so close to greatness, I eventually was offered and accepted full time employment and the responsibility of managing his digital assets and stayed for 7 years. Over this time The Photographer ended up moving out of New York City during COVID-19 and into our studio, eliminating the New York City studio entirely and putting essentially double the amount of responsibilities on us. Our quality of life in all aspects collectively plummeted. All of us were now essentially on call, every day. These types of jobs seem to be, but are never actually fun, specifically in the amount of fulfillment you expect it to provide. That was always my main issue. This could have been a fun work environment, and they would have gotten even much more out of me if they had let it. There are at least two other photographers who’s studio’s look and sound amazing and fulfilling to work in, who’s studio I wish I landed an internship for instead. So I know it’s possible. It still was the coolest job in the world, I’ll never do anything that cool again. It just had bad owners. It came down to the fact that you didn’t know what was coming each day you walked in the door. At a certain point a person simply reaches their own personal limit of voluntarily taking oneself to that sort of thing each day.

Day Zero.5

We land in Las Vegas. As all of the iconic signs of Las Vegas pass in our taxicab window, I feel as if I’m in a movie, it doesn’t feel real sometimes to see things you’ve only ever seen in pop-culture for nearly 30 years. The hotel welcomes us with its twinkling incandescent lightbulb strewn Excalibur Hotel and Casino sign. Its minarets—cartoonish in both color and design—stand tall on seemingly haphazard spots of the hotel structure. The whole castle theme gives off a trashy 80’s mass-market-paperback fantasy novel aesthetic. We walk inside into the cacophonous echo of beeping and dinging. Bright candy colored touchscreen slot machines dazzle our retinas through a smokey haze. Each machine is a distinct, highly marketed theme. Many seem to be racially questionable. Many more are highly protected trademarks like the Monopoly guy, Wheel of Fortune, and even FarmVille, the mobile game. Beloved Trademarks near and dear to our collective hearts. We stand in the wrong check-in line for too long and the three of us, pops especially, get collectively irritated when another disheveled looking couple gets into the correct line, now ahead of us. Once we are in possession of our key cards we, and mostly my dad, starts to relax. P——— and my dad are now excited at the prospect of smoking everywhere. I stopped smoking almost 4 months ago, I have always had the best timing. Heading upstairs to drop our stuff off we walk past the bar where drunk chain smoking cowboys in town for the rodeo yell and laugh over each other. Saucer-eyed young men in unicorn costumes giggle as they exit the elevator and float around the casino floor as they Fear and Loath in Las Vegas. A tattered looking couple smoking cigarettes hold the hands of their toddlers peer over longingly at card tables. Just One More Hand. A man wearing sunglasses indoors offers to sell me cocaine by the escalator. I put up a hand and solemnly decline. I see a man wearing a white t-shirt with green lettering that states: “I’d cash out but I’m not a quitter”. I will be one tomorrow.

I’m no stranger to hotel rooms. I’ve done my fair share of debauchery at hotels in various first class cities across the Northeastern United States like; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Port Chester, New York; Burlington, Vermont; and many more. Simply walking through the hallways here in Vegas you get the ‘if these walls could talk’ sense that the hotels in this city have much different stories to tell than those in Port Chester or Scranton. I found no better evidence of this than the bright bleach stains on the carpets in the hallway every 15 feet. The room itself smells like a failed attempt at covering up cigarette smoke with cheap cologne. I wish there was a way to tell them not to even bother.

Once we get back downstairs we take a moment to explore. P——— lights a cigarette. After flicking his Zippo closed he makes his way towards the dinging, flashing lights of the hazy maze of slot machines. As I watch him begin his weekend assimilation with the rest of the Vegas regulars, I find solace knowing I have a guide to this unfamiliar subculture. The family gathers in the lobby downstairs and we all grab dinner together from Johnny Rockets. Yum. Uncle S——— and my cousin S———, whom I haven’t seen in well over a decade, are there too. I want to be excited and lively with everyone but it’s getting late. I can see the disdain for this job pouring out of a courteous but clearly exhausted teenager at the counter, as I give him my pathetic order of nuggets and fries. I try to envision myself doing it instead of the job I’m about to quit. Maybe I should consider myself lucky. I used to use this coping mechanism to feel grateful about my career whenever I was anxious about work while I went to the dying mall next to our old office to buy lunch. I’d see miserable people working at Subway or Five Guys or Chick Fil A dealing with miserable customers in the food court and be grateful I could at least put my degree to use and work for someone with such stature and historical legacy in my field. I can’t this time. It no longer works. It is simply not enough anymore to make me grateful for the job I’m plan to walk away from. The entire time we’re in Johnny Rockets the line of tourists never ends. Does this place close? When is this poor guy’s shift over? I don’t understand how people live and work normal jobs in destination cities like this. Or why so many people want Johnny Rockets right now, it can’t be the only place open. We finally get our food and shoot the shit with each other. It’s the first time the men on this side of the family have gathered like this before in my lifetime. Vegas’s reputation precedes itself, and there’s big talk about weekend shenanigans, but deep down I think we all know we are getting too old to get into any real trouble. M——— is already making friends with various hucksters like himself and making money playing video poker at a separate bar. I forget how to play poker. We disperse, I’m half tempted to find the guy with cocaine, though in reality I’m not far from bed.

I stand in our hotel room window admiring the nightscape. The focal point of which is the face of David Copperfield hanging on a banner off the MGM across the street. As if he was peering into our room, watching over us like our very own personal guardian angel of Las Vegas. I meet his eyes and then lower mine onto the strip below. My mind wanders and let this iconic city, it’s characters; it’s reflection of our culture, nestle into my psyche and try to allow it to open up…something, so I can experience what one of the most quintessential American cities has to offer. And I do, I start to feel free in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

12/09/2022 - Day One: Peacocks

We wake up early and I’m grumpy for no apparent reason. The first order of business while with my brother and father is of course to buy beer. We begin our walk of the Vegas Strip. Before my eyes can even adjust to the desert sun less than one block away from the hotel we are stopped by two of the ubiquitous feather laden peacocks who walk up and down the strip at all hours to find unsuspecting rubes such as ourselves. With practiced maneuvering they get into a posing position before we even have much time to dismiss them. Pops thinks this is hilarious, and P——— is in love with these two creatures. I’m not amused. I relent. I lose. P——— and I pose with them for a snap. After the picture they demand $20 each. These people are worse than the people who dress up as Spiderman in Times Square. I refuse. My dad pays up and him and P——— enjoy the brief conversation they have with the girls. I wish I simply had my dad take the picture with them. Now that would have been worth my $20. Beer is finally acquired and cans start cracking. They go down way too easy. I carry my soft REI cooler full of beer like I’m Indiana Jones protecting his latest artifact in his satchel. The insane construction and architecture of the Louis Vuitton, Gucci, & Prada stores we pass exude a gratuitous display of American excess. We enter the Bellagio and appreciate the massive scale of such an ostentatious construction. “Look at all these statues with tits man.” P——— says. And he’s right.  P——— takes an unexpected detour and says “You wanna go through peacocks again man?” when I start to question it. He’s referring to the show girls. He’s right again, I don’t. We successfully avoid them the rest of the trip. He’s always had my back.  We spend our day walking the Strip. Nearly the entire length of it. I don’t think my dad has ever walked this much in his life. This day still holds my step-count record, as a matter of fact. We explore the Venetian after the Bellagio and marvel at the architecture and the people all gathered here to partake in American Excess, including us. We pass a man in a trenchcoat holding a posterboard sign with a list of activities: “Shoot a 50 cal” “Fly a helicopter” “Drive a Lamborghini” with accompanying pictures of each object like it’s a middle school science presentation. This is a place where dreams come true.

When we get back to the hotel I mull over what I’m about to do. I think about the feeling of despair and hopelessness I have in my chest and stomach each day in that studio. I think about my near resignation in January of 2020; and how much I’ve done for them during these two years of Covid when the world was shut down and I continued coming in to keep the next book on schedule. On that day, my resignation was typed up and my finger was on the send button before my partner stopped me. This time she’s supporting me. I think about whether they’ll actually let me leave. I’ve never done something like this before. It feels like it’s the only option. I think about all my unrequited efforts, all the times I went the extra mile when they wouldn’t even meet me halfway. This time, I hit send. I’ve never thrown a wrench into a machine this big. I guess dreams do come true here. But right now it doesn’t feel like it. It’s not as freeing as I thought it would feel.

I go for a walk to get a drink so I can take the edge off. Music plays on a loudspeaker overhead: “Ain’t nothin gonna break my stride, ain’t nothing gonna hold me down! Oh no - I got to keep on moving!” plays with reassurance. I do my best to believe it. There’s not enough alcohol in this city to calm my nerves right now. I am both full of excitement and regret. I hate causing problems. Between the peacocks that morning and now this, I’ve now made this weekend something other than what it was supposed to be.

The Flyers vs Golden Knights game with everyone is the main attraction of our weekend. They lose but I can’t help but notice how staged and lifeless this brand new stadium feels. The escalators are terrifying, absolutely without a doubt the tallest ones I’ve ever been on. The arena itself has banners of every NHL team because they know most people are from out of state. The jumbotron kept showing attendees with what appeared to be freshly manufactured NHL-branded jerseys. Literally emblazoned with the logo of the league. I conclude they must be actors; people picked up off the street and placed in seats so the stadium would be full. I don’t believe anything in this town is what it seems anymore.

12/10/2022 - Day Two: The Bomb

I was really looking forward to the Atomic Museum. A small historical museum educating visitors about the history of nuclear bomb testing in and around Las Vegas with a collection of mid-century atomic themed memorabilia as well. Though nothing could match the bomb I dropped yesterday. The background anxiety was making it difficult to find museums fascinating the way I usually do. Instead I lost myself in taking pictures. A rather cathartic exercise that gives me something else to project my anxieties on to. I still look fondly at the pictures from this trip and that day. They might not be my best, but they helped me stay grounded. We all gather for dinner to celebrate my cousin J———. No one really knows I just resigned from my job. I’m a tattered anxious mess barely holding it together. I don’t have much of an appetite. My dad is the one mainly funding this trip, with his insistence. I’m being stingy, for the obvious reason of having lost my income. I’m not arguing. In a well intentioned manner, he tells us to go crazy with our order. My Uncle C——— hears the interaction and calls it out immediately. Something about us being old enough to buy our own food. It’s embarrassing, but he’s right. It feels like another weird tally of embarrassment on an already embarrassing few days. We celebrate J——— and talk about the Flyers, the wedding he’s about to have. P——— got snubbed twice by the establishment. They forgot his drink and messed up his entree. They’re comping him a drink to make up for it and I find it particularly amusing, the guy who exclusively drinks Miller High Life took this opportunity to order a somewhat expensive cocktail. My dumbass would have ordered my usual, something cheap. I forget how smart he is sometimes. And how dumb I am most times. Much like I am now, being insolent and petulant, feeling like the child I’ve always been around these people.

As the rest of our family leaves to go to a show, my dad, P———, and I sit at the bar and chat with the bartender. She notices P———‘s Flyers gear and starts talking hockey with us. It finally feels like our first normal conversation with someone in this town. The booze flows and conversation continues as we talk hockey. As she works we watch her movements morph into a robotic rhythm. The cued laughing between her own jokes as she cleans glasses the way bartenders do on TV gives off the eerie rehearsal of an animatronic Chuckie Cheese character. Soon the conversation turns from hockey to aggressive right wing politics and hate speech about liberals and gay people with the same casual inflection she was just talking about hockey with us with. Collectively, my father, brother, and I are forced to remember we’re not in Pennsylvania anymore. Everyone here is weird. Or is it me? I want to go home.

We can’t though, not before visiting Fremont Street. The classic and truly quintessential part of Vegas. And what a truly miraculous part of the city it is. This is Las Vegas. It’s at a distance from the Strip, filled with the classic iconic casinos instead of the big ones that have duopolized the strip. You can pop in and out of these ones much easier than in the insane mazes of endless underground corridors that connect certain casinos and hotels together on the Strip. Those that are engineered to keep you lost and drunk so you must gamble your way out. Above us on zip lines fly people who paid too much money to do so, under a massive technicolor LED screen. The street is full of drinking people, buff shirtless juiced up men hold up very excited women. In one of these random small casinos, P——— lost his phone. We circle back quickly and find it. Now I have his back. An Uber driver offers us a ride without involving uber in the ordeal, and it piles on to my anxiety. I’m positive we’re going to get taken to a warehouse in the desert and have our kidneys harvested. I’m a stranger in a strange land, after those peacocks I trust no one here. P——— and my dad seem all too lax with the situation, while my flight or flight response is tingling. But we make it back. Everyone’s just trying to earn their keep here, it seems.

We dodge slot machines through the maze of the smokey casino floor yet again and Vegas is out in full force. I’ve done my small share of traveling around the country, and each place I’ve been to has its own vibe, and its people. People who love Las Vegas seem to morph their identity around it differently than any other place I’ve been to, and around understanding it. Maybe in hopes they’ll come up big the next pull of the slot machine lever? Or the next roll of the dice? Or the next hand of cards? I overhear another interaction between two regulars at a grouping of pop culture branded slot machines arranged in a circle. “No luck man? You gotta check out this new wheel of fortune.”

My dad and P——— really want me to come to the strip club, how else do you cap off a trip to Vegas. Except I really don’t want to. I’ve been so lame this trip. It wasn’t the party I thought it’d be. And I’m the reason I prevented it from being so. After much persuasion on their part I dig my heels in deep this time, and they reluctantly acquiesce and head out without me.

I stumble from the casino bar to the sports book area, headache finally setting in from the crappy beer all weekend and sit in a big comfy leather chair until I get bored of looking at the plethora of screens showing sports I do not care about from all around the country as betting odds on an adjacent screen update in real time. Once I realize I’m about to fall asleep in public I decide it’s time to end this sad excuse of a party. At what I believed was the entrance to the hotel elevators my room is accessible from, I attempt to scan my key card, and it is not working, I’m trapped in this hell hole. I wander more until I find the right one, identical to the one in was denied by, and lumber myself through the bleached dotted hallway once more and into bed under the watchful eye of the David Copperfield banner hanging from the MGM Hotel and Casino from across the strip.

12/11/2022 - Day Three: Homecoming

I wake up with a splitting headache and mayhem surrounding me in the hotel room. Sometime after they got back from the strip club P——— lost his wallet when he was playing slots downstairs, and sitting on the edge of the bed stressed about boarding the plane without ID. Pops is huffing and puffing over something wrong with the boarding pass app on his phone.

My partner A——— texted me, the powers out at the apartment. Wonderful.

The reality of the massive change in my life begins to set in as I prepare to face the reality of returning home. I’ve ensured that at least one thing that happened in Vegas will not stay in Vegas. We pack our things and go downstairs to comb the casino floor for P———’s wallet for the limited time we have before we need to go to the airport.

One of us has the genius idea to ask the casino if there’s a lost and found. Thanks to the eyes in the sky, P——— got his wallet back.

A message from A———, power is back on at our apartment. As the morning mayhem settles, and the mess I made of my life only just begins, I have a feeling that everything is going to be alright. 

P——— gets a couple more slots and cigarettes in at the airport in a vestibule with a tiny, but bustling casino inside. It seems Las Vegas hopes and dreams will last as long as you let them. At least, until you board your plane home.