Day Seven began with pastries at the Payard Patisserie. There are now three pastry shops of absolutely impeccable quality in Las Vegas. I’m not sure how to handle this. Jean-Philippe is the clear #1, if only for the ability to load up the rental car, check out of your hotel, drive to the Bellagio, park the rental car by the correct elevator in the parking structure, exit the elevator forty yards from the shop, make up a parcel for the plane, and get back to the car and to McCarran without losing more than five minutes. Try this with the other two and you are guaranteed to miss your flight. But the quality is the same; six months in Vegas away from a rag on a stick.
At Payard, I sampled the pain chocolat, something with lemon custard, and a brioche. Luna ate a slice of something with the flavor of a banana and the texture of a hologram. We spent the day puttering around, packing up, dozing by the pool, and generally bidding farewell to Las Vegas.
We’re headed back there in a few weeks, for the tenth consecutive year. I have taken to reviewing the trips on this blog, usually long after the trip when I’m desperate for material. This has been a tough year, though. I finished this little manifesto in the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on March seventh, almost two months after I started it. I haven’t been able to write much lately. Why? Hmm. Well.
First, since about the first week of September, we’ve been marinating in death and doom. I have never in my life had such a run of knowing simultaneously so many people who are dying, have been recently diagnosed with something that might cause them to die, and/or actually died. The count, right now among those three categories in the last six months, is eight.
Then in October, the economy of the whole world threw up all over itself, which makes Luna’s life busy and difficult, something I always feel I should be more able to alleviate than I am. Thank God she’s not a Return-Is-Everything broker masquerading as a planner. They’re really in bad shape. We know a number of “planners” in that depressing category, “Names We Wouldn’t Be Surprised To Hear Associated With The Words ‘Self-Inflicted’”. But still. Spending all your time soothing the freaked is not restful.
November: Most of the world was delighted at something that didn’t matter to me the way it mattered to them. Though I was pleased, I was not pleased at the same things, and I don’t have it in me to be a bandwagon fan. (Good thing, too, ’cause everybody who was all fired up for all that change is still waiting for it. Maybe the change we were promised was really the change as in “Plus ça change…“) Between the business weasels and the political weasels, the economy continues sobbing and wringing its hands.
December: In the interest of health insurance and debt service, I added a third part-time job to my repertoire. I am now working seventy to ninety hours a week. Also the holiday season when you’re twenty pounds from losing a hundred is a no-win situation. I am under enough strain to request, as I have done a couple of times before, a short-term Xanax prescription from my GP, which she calls in without talking to me directly. I must have scared the nurse half to death. Still, I like having a relationship with my provider of chemicals.
January: Some business began to collapse. Our Hopeful New God-King decided that scaring the crap out of people was the way to make them do what he wanted. The New Year’s Ski Trip was postponed on account of weather and then allowed to die from neglect on account of the economy. It’s very difficult to find time to do anything sociable when you’re working three jobs and trying not to lose the fitness you spent two years acquiring. One of the eight people on the Watchlist, someone I liked, moved from the Going to Gone category.
And then the truck needed $550 worth of new brakes.
And that was when the creative reactor went critical.
So, as long as I’m paying all this cash for health insurance, I figure I ought to be using it. (A couple of others of you plus Luna also figured that, and I appreciate your noticing and pitching in. A lot.) So I hired a useful person to talk to, who can also write prescriptions for Klonopin. Klonopin is different than Xanax, but also the same. As I understand it. It helps slow a person’s brain down enough so they can think. It doesn’t help with the misery, it just helps mitigate the biological PANIC AND FLEE! PANIC AND FLEE! response. Not like things have gotten better since the first week of February, economically or from a fitness perspective or deathwise, but at least I can think.
In my desperate search for something to hold onto while I wait for the tide to turn — which I know it will; I am told this is a primary difference between situational depression (my kind) and clinical depression — I was hard up enough to turn to something that I have avoided before, but that I know has given a lot of people a lot of solace in the past. I realized it was time to swallow my prejudices and turn to the Good Book for answers. I know, I know. But desperate times call for desperate measures. So I took that little book out of my nightstand, and I started to read.
Not for pleasure or curiosity this time; I was looking for help. And there it was. I was a skeptic too. But Chapter Two, Verse Seven, spoke to me:
“There was also the socio-psychic factor. Every now and then, when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the desert sun.”
And I think I will be all right. Yips, weasels, and heinous chemicals be damned.
In the womb of the desert sun, I will get my fastball back.
I know I don’t have to tell you, cuz I know you already know, but… you know. Right?
I hoping to put an end to the bad year in Vegas too. Keep me posted.
I may even call in sick from Caesar’s, just to kick it old-school (and because I may not have earned vacation time by then, that is, if I get hired full-time).