I rolled into Vegas on gas fumes. I had barely any money in my bank account and $29 in my pocket. I had driven up from LA, despite my retarded sense of geographical American layout placing Vegas somewhere closer to Tijuana. For three days I visited my friends in Los Angeles who smacked more of distant acquaintances than actual people I knew or could count on, and yet somehow I was able to connect with them more than my own family. After a five plus hour drive through endless fucking desert, overly romanticized by Hunter S. Thompson, I know why he needed so many fucking drugs to even handle the trip from LA to Vegas.
The shit was boring as fuck, especially for someone driving alone through the endless hours of fucking wasteland that was the desert. And dealing with the inane retardness that was the California driver through two lanes of fucking insanity where the left lane was where everyone drove the speed limit in the left lane, leaving the right lane for trucks and those vehicles that may or may not be carrying livestock, as per the signs I witnessed, to just carry about business as usual, that endless parade of brake lights and CA license plates was way beyond what I could handle as a born and bred New Yorker.
Fuck the West Coast and the stream of minorities that flowed from Los Angeles, a cultural Mecca I was led to believe, and their inconsiderate self-serving traffic that impeded my route to MorrisonCon which I was attending as a tribute to Grant Morrison, a comic book writer of significant pop culture import as has never been seen since Alan Moore and his intellectual properties like Watchmen & V For Vendetta. This was a Scottish bastard that embraced the celebrity that writing funny books afforded him for as long as I've known of him, two decades by my calculations.
I had a blast hanging out with the casual friends I had hung out with outside LA that lived within the belly of that West Coast beast. Lucas was super amazing letting me sleep on his couch at his apartment in in Las Feliz, and Liz Angle, a friend I met through casual acquaintances in my new apartment building, who actually cared about what happened to me, who seemed to like me for the simple fact that I was me. There is little pretense behind my meeting up and hanging out with Nick Nix, who I've known since San Diego Comicon circa 2004, when I had given up on comic books and my subsequent success in the field.
But the overly romanticized version of the drive from LA to Vegas by the Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was a hard sell when I had hardly slept the night before on a floor in a guest house in Beverly Hills, and I didn't have access to even a shred of the drugs he had. I see now why a person, 1970's or not, needed a vast amount of drugs to even perpetrate that kind of ridiculousness. It takes forever, and in today's oil warring nation that is the United States, it was a costly and borderline stupid endeavor.
I coasted into the city of Sin on gas fumes, only to find out that I hadn't had the work check from Entertainment Weekly deposit into my bank account, and at the same time receiving a text message from my boss stating that I couldn't bill more hours at my "day job" after this vacation. I showed up to Vegas with $29 dollars in my pocket and just about less than that available on my debit card. An earlier version of me would have been upset and had an anxiety attack about that, but in the end I just wanted to get into my hotel that was already pre-paid for and relax.
I eventually got up to my room, decompressed, and ordered room service. A plate of BBQ spare ribs and a bucket of Budweiser would do the trick, alongside a plastic bottle of the cheapest bottle of whiskey that the liquor store across the street had available: Early Times. It's pretty terrible. But the ribs were good, and it all prepared me for my first real multi-media, cross-referenced friend magick ritual. If it was good enough for Grant Morrison when his comic book (that changed my life and is responsible for the last two decades of my life) was failing and he had his audience masturbate to a sigil in order to save it, well then it was good enough for me.
Though I did do things different. I noticed how I imbued so many objects with immense magical powers when I was younger, my brain wracked with imagination as it was. So I took the program book, which had a comic version of Grant in the center of various icons of his power, and placed my own icons of power on the actual circles on the cover, and empowered myself through various nicknacks, social media, and my own mastubatory hand (a page I took from Grant's audience participation).
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