I’m on a plane to Las Vegas in a few hours for a long weekend catching up with family. I don’t have any relatives out there, this is just apparently how we roll now. I’m have a little trouble coming to terms with the whole thing, namely because I:

1. am not good at gambling.
2. am not good at math.
3. do not completely believe the city exists.

I fully expect the plane to land in something that looks like a town but is more like the fake town from the end of Blazing Saddles – a number of quickly erected backdrops put up for my convenience before some massive trap is sprung. Everything real about the place seems too weird to be true – the gigantic light up cowboy (he’s still there, yeah?), the New York City in miniature – while all the fake movie stuff feels like the actual truth. I fully expect to see Nicholas Cage drinking himself to death while George Clooney and friends steal his shit and his girl. Or Johnny Depp screaming at a hotel bar full of lizard people. Or anything other than the actual city, really.

In addition to my somewhat broken ability to separate reality and fiction, the trip has also brought to the surface all my packing quirks. I over pack, see, but not in the traditional sense – rather than too many clothes, or anything that might actually be useful, I overload my luggage with media. For this trip alone, I’m taking:

- my DS Lite, with all my DS games and seven GBA games
- From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games, by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins
- Labyrinths, by Borges
- a notebook and all the pens I could possibly ever need
- an iPod with something like 96 GB of songs on it and all of Adult Swim’s Frisky Dingo
- my laptop
- the first two tpbs of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory
- the latest issue of Game Developer
- a report on gamer behaviors in the UK done by the BBC in 2005

And I just figured out how to put all of FLCL on my iPod, so add that to the list. Granted, it’s an eight-hour flight both ways, but is this really necessary for a four-day trip? Is packing the results of every “desert island” question imaginable really a proportionate response?

Oh yes. I get bored phenomenally easy, especially on planes and especially on planes traveling the length of the country. That I’ll most likely doze off around the two hour mark is really not important right now – that I pack some form of entertainment for every aspect of my pencil thin attention span is.

So I’m out. Probably no posting for a few days, but that should hardly be too much of a change from normal. See you when I’m back the Wonka factory.

(And did I mention my hotel is a giant circus tent? NOT OF THIS EARTH.)

Filed under: Wreck your life