The blue Viagra is actually an apple green energy drink containing at least a red bull, curacao, and sour mix. It is served at Shadows, a bar in Ceasars palace featuring naked dancing silhouettes. The blue Viagra was recommended to me by the waitress as the most popular of the energy drinks. It tasted as would be expected of an apple green drink, like mouthwash.

I kept hoping the naked figures would stop dancing and make shadow art like the barking dog, the parrot, a giraffe or George Bush. Apparently that isn't included in their mandate as shadow dancers.

Brian, Kari and I had taken to the city to do some exploration before returning back to the MGM to visit Studiio 54 later in the evening. Our tour was fairly lame because everything was closed for one reason or another. The fountains at Bellagio were closed because the winds were too high. The white tiger habitat at the mirage was closed because the tigers were sleeping or chewing on Roy or something like that. TI, the modernized and supposedly now risquee rebranded casino was just dull.

In order to manufacture something of interest we broke into the Ceasars pool area to see what it was all about. I would like our pool in Marshfield to approximate this magnificent pool. The pools are filled with mosaics and are lined with marble. One pool has a central area only available by swimming in the water that made me imagine what it would be like for an archeologist to find the remains of Las Vegas.

They would say something like:
“Las Vegas was a central trading post that allowed certain merchants to rest in lavish hotels enriched by a gambling business that sought to milk money from the merchants. It became a confluence point and rebirth for many cultures including the venetians, the romans, french culture, and a tribute to american capitalism in New York. We don't know why these people went extinct but it may have been that they never could get learn that the odds were always against them.”

We stopped at a piano bar that was starting to play New York, New York and had two cute women as the dueling pianists . So I yelled in “go red sox, yeah!”. The pianists briefly switched to “I love that dirty water” and made the astute observation that the piano part is nearly identical to the theme song for the muppets.

I wonder who robbed who. I would bet that Henson had it first. He was way ahead of his time. The muppets are a work of true genius. Imagine how great television would be today if Jim Henson was alive today.

The music was abruptly and rudely interrupted when a disgruntled Yankees fan dropped a twenty on the bar and asked them to play anything else. The song went back to New York New York. Then the piano girls started taunting the crowd to pay 21 bucks to sing a song about Boston. I led our crew to leave in disgust.

The Red Sox and the Yankees were in a historic game last night. It was all primed for drama with Kurt Shilling coming to pitch with two red blotches on his ankles supposedly from shots to numb and strengthen his ankle enough to pitch. The two extra inning games before had showed Bostons toughness and a seeming impossibility to eliminate them.

This was all great but I was assigned to man a trade show booth while the game was progressing with the objective rapidly becoming to collect business cards from people who wanted a golf club and to listen to a couple of complaints. My complaint was that I couldn't see the two televisions brought into the room to keep everyone from boycotting the event on account of extremely dramatic baseball games.

The game delivered well and I got to see the key and bizarre plays including a homerun from a slumping Mark Bellhorn that was initially called a ground rule double even though the hit clearly bounced off of the stomach of a woman wearing a black cloak in the front row about three feet above the top of the wall. There was also a grounder where A Rod knocked the ball out of the glove of the first baseman as he was tagged that was called interference on the Yankees. The backlash and anger towards the umpires was so bad that riot police came and crouched by the sidelines to keep the peace.

Finally, as the game approached the bottom of the ninth a swell of conference attendees including mostly Sox fans but a few Yankees fans gathered around the television chanting, cheering, and clapping as if they were at the game and in the stadium until they erupted in cheers when the last Yankee batter struck out. This game was a landmark as no team in baseball history has ever forced a seventh game after going down by 3 games.

Tabu was open last night and we passed it on the way to Studio 54. The sign in front of Tabu said “dress code: upscale fashion”. The women outside of it were wearing corsets or what looked like underwear. The guys had standard armani uniforms of whit and brown shirts with long collars, pin stripe pants, the male model hair do, and expensive yellow fashion sun glasses. I would have been entertained all night to just pull up a lawn chair and watch people in line for Tabu.

I imagined how hard it would be for me to get into that club.

Doorman 1: Oh my god do you smell poverty? Look at those shoes, did he get then out of the garbage or do they make him wear those to punish him for a crime.

When we got to Studio 54 there was a line-up and Brian took it as a cue to separate from us and go to sleep. Once in the club Kari realized she was going to need a drink in order to dance and she would need one fast. I tried to order two tequila shots but what came back were two shots of jaegermeister with red bull chasers. We drank those and after dancing for a minute Kari felt too hot with her sweater.

Since we were in the MGM we decided to go up to her room and drop it off. So we went up together. She disapeared into the bathroom to reengineer the strap on her bra. I sat there on the couch waiting and thinking about how great it would be if she came back out in her underwear and jumped on top of me. I had the same naughty nervous feeling in me that I had when I was eight and Suzanna and I stopped at her house together because the snow storm had gotten us cold. I considered grabbing her when she exited the bathroom and throwing her onto the bed pinning her beneath me.

But when she exited the bathroom she was just in a bra without straps under the same shirt she was wearing earlier and the reverberating sound of the toilet flushing synched me back to reality.

We got a bit drunk after that on two rounds of tequila shots back at Studio 54. The oxygen in the casino, the red bull, and the adrenaline of dancing kept me wide awake. I wasn't dancing the way I would like to with Kari. She wouldn't let me get close to her and backed away, ducked, or turned whenever I gave it a drunken try.

Eventually I switched modes from feeling connected and wanting to be connected to feeling disconnected and wanting to feel more disconnected. I barely noticed when Kari left at 3:30 and I continued to dance alone and enjoying being disconnected until the dance floor was nearly empty. The dance floor was like an atom and men and women were electron proton pairs and I was just a neutron vibrating and shaking to my own beat.

I figured there was no need to go right to sleep so I joined a blackjack table. There were some hockey fans and a Canadian yammering about the strike. The Canadian from Toronto also was saying something about the girls from New Brunswick being easy lays. The hockey fans were pissing me off by pushing me to bet fives for the dealer all the time to tip him to get good karma. I don't believe in that crap.

 uckily they left because I wouldn't play their way and my crew were all chinese people who didn't speak much english. I left the table up three hundred bucks. The cards were playing well giving me good hands when the low cards were flowing and signaling to increase my bet to take advantage of the high concentration of face cards.

At the airport I was in sorry shape. I hadn't slept in 24 hours and my shoulder was still killing me from the handspring I had done two nights before and carrying the worlds heaviest laptop in my backpack. I looked around the airport a bit for a vending machine that might have narcotics in it like oxycontin, or morphine but apparently they are either hard to find or a figment of my imagination projected into reality when I start dreaming while awake. I didn't sleep until I got situated on the plane.

When I transferred in Denver I snuck a picture of a guy photographing his garden gnome in front of the window looking out onto the plane..

The blue Viagra is really green. All advertising is false. Go figure.