Asylum Vegas.

I don't really know what my situation in life would be without the constant Vegas trips, good or bad. I would undoubtedly be San Francisco stir-crazy. I really don't leave the City unless it's to go to Vegas, outside of one trip last year to go see my mom in North Dakota. I VERY occasionally have to drive somewhere on company business outside City limits but for the most part of my life the last 7 years, say 99%, has been literally IN San Francisco.

When I took my first trip to Vegas in 2011 it was sort of a bucket list thing. I was a couple years removed from a serious heart attack before the age of 40 and I had been forced to come to grips with mortality. It wasn't a big dramatic thing for me, I never felt, even while it was happening, that I was going to die. But there were a few things in the couple years after that I said I wanted to do, and for some reason Vegas was one of them. Ironically I had actually been looking at flights/room in Reno for a get away weekend, just for something to do, really. These packages ended up being MORE expensive than Vegas trips, so I booked Vegas on the cheap (think I only had a few hundred dollars to spend) and set myself on the 13 trip path of the last 4 years.

I've said it before, but Vegas has given me something to look forward to in my sad little life. With the self-imposed "wolf pack of one" life I've chosen, I have little to break up the work/Saturday out/Sunday in/repeat cycle I get into. Vegas is my rut-breaker. I enjoy living in SF for the most part, but I wonder sometimes how resentful of it I might be if Vegas wasn't there to clean the palate every few months. As much as I enjoy the Vegas trips, I do get a great sense of home when I fly back in to the fog and the cold and the familiar old run-down surroundings after the plastic unrelenting newness of Vegas.

That's the positive. Are there negatives? Maybe, depends on how I look at it. Would spending more time out in SF allow me to, oh I don't know HAVE A LIFE HERE? All the saving up for Vegas and going to Vegas keeps me in my Hobbit Hole for weeks or months at a time. Saving up for this trip I haven't been out for the last 4 weeks including this one, and I won't be out in SF until at least the week after I come back, so that's a month and a half. Multiply that by 4 Vegas trips a year as will be the case this year and you're talking a third of the year either staying in to save for or going to Las Vegas. Is that healthy? Does it make any sense?

I could certainly have a different life here if I wasn't spending a quarter or more of my yearly income on Vegas trips. I could have a better apartment. I could have a car. I could afford to go out 2 or 3 nights a week instead of 1 or less and make some sort of effort to build a social circle here. Good sweet Jeebus, could I even have, dare I say, a girlfriend?

Do I want any of that?

I guess the answer right now is no. I usually go through a brief phase when I come back from a trip saying "I'm going to leave Vegas alone for the rest of the year, I'm going to live a life here, get out, see shows, meet people, have sex, blah blah". Then I book another trip a couple weeks later and start the whole cycle again. Whatever gap Vegas is filling in my life or in my mind, I've yet to fill here.

So here we are. 4 days from another Vegas trip, after having been a hermit in my cheap room for the last month saving every extra penny to blow it all in a desert 550 miles away, usually coming back empty handed aside from the experience and the dead brain cells.

Why?

All I can think of, is "because it's Vegas, Baby".