I think you’d agree, that there’s nothing quite as wonderful as a place where big, fill-up-three-plates ham and eggs breakfast-served-all-day specials are readily available for two dollars and forty-nine cents. However, my choice of reading material to accompany this satisfying three-platters-full breakfast has me mystified.

A popular travel writer who seemingly makes his living traveling around the world and being snarky about small towns he knows very little about has just come to the point, interestingly enough, where he has arrived in Las Vegas, where I now sit, on a sweltering August afternoon, temperature 103, sun so bright you’d swear Jesus was half way back, a thousand angels in tow.

At first this person found himself enamored with the bright lights of the strip, the glorious excess and the strangeness of this faceless town, the bulk of which exists due to that concentration of concrete, light and kitsch that extends the four miles of Las Vegas Boulevard.

As he was enamored, so was I. Except very quickly, he soured, possibly due to the fact that he tried the buffet at Caesars’ Palace. However, try as might, I could find little to hate about this bizarre oasis in the unforgiving Nevada desert.

I searched long and hard for life beyond the strip – I found no quantifiable neighborhoods. I found the usual west-coast style coffee houses full of cheery Las Vegans whose smiles seemed genuine, far more so than the bizarrely fake Pasadena Jamba Juice employee replicants I’m used to in the West. But I did not find a city. The casinos are the city, and don’t let anyone tell you different.

But the feeling I’m left with is, hey – so what? Why can’t Las Vegas be the uncontrollably hideous party town that it is, and be left in peace? From what I see, most people seem to want to be here. In the August heat, I can’t see the Eiffel Tower for the lines – the crowds are killer, casinos packed, walking here is more stressful than on Sixth Avenue at rush – mostly because no one here knows how to walk. But there it is, it is what it is, and to my mind, it looks beautiful.

I pored over the options as I lay sprawled on my bed high above the strip overlooking the mayhem, then set out to see it all, covering everything from Mandalay Bay to Arizona Charlie’s, where I now sit, munching on the last of my ham and eggs. The morning prior, I’d chosen a similarly grimy locals casino for a slightly more pricey platter breakfast (a bill totaling $6), which is where I really fell in love. It was the Gold Coast, a delightfully dingy hole in the wall, standing but most certainly not cowering in the shadow of the colorful Rio mega-complex.

As I made my way through the pitch-dusk casino floor to the Monterey Room, the old-fashioned coffee shop with walls that used to be white but are now sort of yellowish for the smoke, I passed bars where working-class locals sat sipping martinis and playing video blackjack or whatever those in-counter games are. I took my seat in the smoking section and pulled out my paper and began to read.

It was like some strange manifestation of nirvana, some dark corner of heaven – where else can you legally get drunk before 10:00 in the morning, lose your life savings, then spend an enjoyable hour bowling, and still seem perfectly normal? It’s not the purest of places, but this absolutely drenched-with-humanity, grungy corner of an increasingly sterile Las Vegas just made me the happiest man alive, to realize, that essentially, what we really are is a pathetic bunch of individuals grasping at happiness and maybe, just maybe, finding it for a moment or two along the way. For some reason, so many seem to think it can be found here.

Maybe I’m shallow and creepy. Maybe it was simply because I didn’t make the mistake of trying the buffet at Caesars’. I don’t know why this place had me right at the first slot machines in the airport. Hey, you know what they say – no one ever wrote a song called ‘Viva New Jersey.’

I did gamble. And I did lose. $65 dollars at the Golden Nugget. It was a valuable lesson – don’t play to win, and all that. But hey, everything evens out. I had a comp for one of those coffee shops that serves $25 Filet Mignon and $7 cocktails in one of the shiny new resorts where the coffee shop isn’t really even a coffee shop. So I got my book out and read some more, and ordered half the damn menu. Someone had to pay for my stupidity.

By the time I was done eating, the writer had written off Las Vegas with a predictable wave of the hand and was already halfway to Los Angeles, which he ended up avoiding all together. Me, I was still in Las Vegas, half drunk on tiny but potent martinis with extra green olives.

Total came to $65.80. An eighty cent win! Not quite beginners luck, but a win all the same. Who said you can't win in Las Vegas.

Email: davidr@lifeingotham.com

Next Update: 25 Sept