Hit me, dealer

When I was a grade school pipsqueak growing up in Lewiston, a video arcade called “Aladdin’s Castle” set up shop in a local mall. For nerds, it was a watershed event. Mine was the first generation to become obsessed with video games, and a video arcade is to gaming what a movie theater is to film: A way to transform a home entertainment offering into a legitimate outing, something requiring a car ride and clean pants. Our parents didn’t get it -- they were of the go-play-outside generation -- but we kids were enraptured. The loud noises, the colored lights: It was like stepping inside a giant disco ball filled with glittering jewels, and if you were handy with a Skee Ball you could leave with a big plastic dinosaur. Kitschy, but fun.

Las Vegas is sort of like that, only it pulses with mutant strength and scale. Imagine a video arcade that doesn’t end. Garish neons and deep shadows battle for space on the casino floors, rolling beeps and pings banish the silences of the night, and every face is lit by the glow of something artificial -- the screen of a slot machine, the lonely spotlight over a gold-rimmed blackjack table. There are even plastic dinosaurs, although most of them are either wearing bikinis or holding giant pot leaves.

Seeing it all in person for the first time last week, it occurred to me that Vegas is basically a mammoth video arcade for adults. Adults with vices. And disposable incomes. And a hankering for bazooka-sized chili dogs.

Granted, my perception of Sin City was limited by my mission and duration of stay. This was no vacation. I was in town for work, spending most of three full days in the Sands Expo, writing stories based on coma-inducing Powerpoint presentations, and taking photos of expensive ties knotted around wealthy necks. Paying the bills in a most bizarre fashion. What I saw of the prototypical Las Vegas experience was snatched in odd moments of free time, mostly at night, when you could stand in front of a 20-foot-high CVS sign and get a suntan from its near-nuclear glow. I’m convinced the city is powered by a secret underground sun.

My admittedly intermittent exposure to the nightlife seemed like an accurate impression regardless. The first full night I was there, I arrived at Planet Hollywood to meet some coworkers for dinner. I’d gotten there early thanks to a cabbie who had no respect for traffic laws, so I found a bar near the casino and nursed a beer while I waited. Nipping at the bottle as I passively watched a basketball game on TV, I was distracted at one point by the guy sitting next to me, who was hunched over a video poker device installed directly into the bar. He was muttering to himself in a manner that suggested deep mental instability, and rubbing at his forehead as though he expected a genie to pop out of his skull. His other hand kept pumping in dollars, punching buttons, pumping in dollars, punching buttons. He was clearly losing money, and I was about to feel sorry for the dude, but then I was approached by a waitress wearing fishnet leggings and a corset. One wrong move and certain anatomical features would have come tumbling out like the inflatable slides on the sides of airplanes. I think she asked if I wanted another beer. I’m not entirely sure.

As she was leaving, I looked from her back to Poker Guy and thought, “Well, I guess this is sorta what I expected.” Gotta give the city props for truth in advertising.

Technically I shouldn’t be sharing any of this, because what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay there, isn’t it? Any minute now some brass-knuckled goon will materialize in my living room and snuff out his cigar on my forehead. There’s a code. Only I’m pretty sure I’m exempt from all that, because this was business, not pleasure; I showed up, I wore a suit and said words like “synergy” and “analytics,” and then I left. This lent me an objectivity that not a lot of people in Vegas can boast. When I checked out of the hotel I spied an old man in the casino cranking on Lucky Strikes and blankly pulling the lever on a slot machine. This was at 3:30 in the morning. Did the old man realize how bizarre and vaguely sad this whole scene was? Probably not. But I did. I was unique in that I was sober and could still afford to buy socks.

It’s a strange town. The bad things you hear about it seem to be mostly true -- the tackiness, the audiovisual assault, the $12 snowglobes. Despite all that, there’s great stuff there if you do a little digging. Midweek, I was assigned to shoot photos of a private event at Madame Tussaud’s famous wax museum, which features sculptures of people who make way more money than me. It was closed off to the general public for the night, but since I was a fancypants media person, I was privileged to duck in ahead of the crowd and set up shop. It was creepy from the onset, but in a cool way. With the shindig still half an hour away, I found myself alone in a room with fake Will Smiths and Sandra Bullocks staring at me with inanimate eyes, giving off a faint zombie vibe that would have been right at home in an epic haunted house. Larry King smiled at me over a pair of wax suspenders. The moment was so surreal, I had to chuckle to myself; in the midst of the glitz and hubbub, there existed a moment of serenity so unexpectedly perfect that, for a while, I didn’t mind all the neon and cheese. It’s an offbeat culture, but it’s culture nonetheless, and there’s value in experiencing that kind of thing.

As magical and gratifying as Aladdin’s Castle was, it’ll never top that.

In the zone

Time zones are a gigantic pain in the butt.

They’re necessary. Without them, there would be one slim strip of Earth that experienced normal, sensible times -- a sunny midday noontime, pitch-black midnight, evening sunsets -- and everywhere else would be a tangle of disorientation. Ethiopians would go to bed at 10 in the morning, the Chinese would eat breakfast at three in the afternoon, and students in France would see the sun rise about midway through algebra class, assuming they’re not nodding off over their cheese-and-baguette lunches. C’est dommage!

We need time zones to make sense of it all, to ensure most people have a shot at getting into the flow of a normal day. That doesn’t mean I have to like them. I’m generally not affected by time zones, but every once a while you travel somewhere and have to engage in an activity so unpleasant it should be banned by law: mental math.

Ugh.

Time zone mental math goes something like this. Say you’re traveling from Portland, Maine to Las Vegas, Nevada, and you’ve got a layover in Chicago. Portland to Chicago takes about three hours in the air, but by the time you land, only two hours have passed, because you’ve crossed from the Eastern to the Central Time Zone. The layover lasts about an hour, and then the final leg from Chicago to Vegas is about four hours. That’s five hours total, but as you enter Nevada airspace and look out the airplane window onto the neon-colored strip below, you realize the past five hours have gone by in three, an eight-hour day has gone by in five, and it feels like midnight even though it’s 9:30.

If you can read the preceding paragraph without getting a major headache, I will personally mail you a cookie.

Technically this constitutes time travel, but time travel is supposed to be way more fun. You’re supposed to see dinosaurs or laser-swords or something, and have a bunch of wacky adventures, altering history so now your dad is rich and has a mustache. Instead, you’re sitting at an airport bar holding a cocktail to your forehead, wrestling with the conflicting urges to either go to bed or stay up five more hours playing Blackjack. Not once in my many viewings of the “Back to the Future” movies did I ever see Marty McFly with jetlag.

Logistics get more complicated the farther from home you venture. I went on a trip to Australia when I was 15, and during that time, if anyone from the family wanted to chat they had to catch me in a hotel room at about six in the morning, Aussie time. Back in Maine, my parents just wrapped up that conversation about a week and a half ago.

For a world that’s so small, it sure seems big sometimes.

Maybe that thought crossed the minds of the old 19th century railroaders, who were largely responsible for establishing the early time zones used in adolescent America. A handful of semi-local time zones were in use before then -- like in southwest England, where it’s extremely important to know when to sip your daily tea -- but in the States, it was rail transport that changed everything. It’s important to keep strict and accurate time when you’re transporting dehydrated pig eyeballs from Baltimore to Los Angeles. If you’re a railroad company going by everyone’s wildly varying local times, you can’t exactly keep track of scheduling. It’s surprising more trains weren’t booked on the same rail heading in opposite directions. Can you imagine two trains colliding head-on, one carrying hog meat, the other toting scraps of iron? The whole scene would smell like burning motor oil and dead animals. At least you could use the track fire to cook the meat.

These “railfolk,” as I’ll affectionately call them, have been dealing with time zones for a long time. Being a jet-setting, transcontinental traveler is a newer beast, and it amplifies the whole effect just due to the sheer speed in which a person can zip from one coast to the other. Long-range ravel used to require months crammed into a stagecoach, and by the time you got to your destination, four family members and a pet dog had died and you were traveling with your aunt Evelyn and a crate of preserved beans. Plenty of time to get used to the whole sunrise/sunset dynamic. Now the same trip is a day’s travel, and it’s an unspeakable inconvenience not to have a pillow and an in-flight viewing of “The Peanuts Movie.” You simply step off a plane and the time, climate and culture are all radically different. It’s a special kind of whiplash brought on by physics and the trappings of advanced civilization.

Which brings us to this moment. I’m sitting in a conference room in Nevada at what’s supposed to be 9:15 in the morning, but my body knows the lie. With breakfast still gurgling in my belly, it’s saying, “Hey, isn’t time for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and an apple? Get your act together, fool!” Not that my body can always be trusted; it also seems to think that blueberry muffins and milkshakes constitute proper nutrition, and that beer is one of the major food groups. I take what my body says with a grain of salt. Which is another thing it likes.

I know what’ll quash its protestations, though: good ol’ Eastern Standard Time. It’s been said that home is not a location but a state of mind, and that’s mostly true, but my state of mind wants a siesta and a midday Facebook break. Travel is wonderful, and an experience necessary to a fully-rounded life. Yet what greater relief is there than stepping off that plane and feeling familiar ground beneath your feet?

Dorothy was right, man. There’s no place like home.

The ghost and Mr. Beer

There’s a band called Muse that’s become pretty popular over the past several years. They’re not really my cup of tea -- too much pop, to little grit and growl -- but every time the singer opens his mouth I have to smile, because his falsetto sounds like someone’s bad impression of a prototypical ghost.

Think Casper singing over bad rock music, only alive and with a crooked upper lip. That’s Muse in a nutshell.

The thought occurred to me as a friend was showing me smartphone video he took at a recent Muse concert in Boston. This particular “musing” (zing!) caught me off guard, because with the obvious exception of Halloween, I never think about ghosts. Ever. Not even when I’m watching old movies starring actors who have been dead longer than disco pants.

Because I don’t believe in them, see. I consider ghosts to be as fictional as Huckleberry Finn and bad doughnuts. A human invention no different than Willy Wonka. A myth.

Which isn’t to say they’re not cool. They are in fact quite pleasing, in a goosebumpy, flesh-crawly kind of way. Belief in ghosts dates back to ancient times, appearing in Homer’s “Odyssey” as well as the old Hebrew Bible, so the whole concept has a very old-world feel to it; when your imagination attempts to explain what’s going bump in the night, you’re tapping into something that has a lot of collective weight and human history behind it. There are times when I sort of wish they were indeed a real phenomenon, until I remember that fiction usually portrays them as menacing creatures prone to possessions and terrorizing. Then I realize they’re jerks and turn my attention to tangible concerns, like the guy who walks through downtown Portland with the bush-like Duck Dynasty beard and the “Gone Fishin’” trucker hat. He’s a lot scarier than any ol’ ghost, trust me.

I’ll say this: I sometimes miss believing.

Flash back about 20 years or so and I wasn’t such a skeptic. One February I was staying up late at night in my friend’s basement; basement hang-outs are how a lot of ghost stories start. We were celebrating his birthday with a small coterie of fellow dweebs. I say “dweebs” because our idea of a party was playing car racing games on a Playstation and depriving ourselves of sleep to the point of drooling delirium, fueling ourselves with case upon case of the highly-caffeinated soft drink Jolt Cola. Jolt Cola is also how a lot of ghost stories start.

The later it got, the loopier we became, and the more we started swapping stories about “things we’d seen” (or heard or felt). Those types of conversations always seem goofy during the light of day, slightly embarrassing in fact, but past the witching hour anything goes. One of us could have dropped the dubious revelation that we’d played gin rummy with the ghost of Sigmund Freud, and the rest of the gang would have stared at him believingly: “Yeah, man, I can totally see that happening!” Like, whoa. Far out, dude.

Approaching three in the morning, there was a collective sense that all of our respective skins were crawling at roughly the same intensity. Adding to the chill factor was a sliding glass door to an outdoor pool area, which showed us the stillborn night at its deadest and blackest. The tales were getting taller, our eyes a little wider. “Joe” remembered hearing the ghost of his grandmother traipsing across the living room carpet one wintry night. “Logan” thought he once had a sighting in an old New Hampshire graveyard.

As typically happens in these scenarios, we eventually fancied there were muted ghost sounds issuing from within that very house. This was the point at which fatigue and caffeine conspired to make our brains thrum like little window-mounted air conditioners. A creak from the floorboards above our heads and a dozen eyes all snapped to the ceiling, our breaths in silent limbo behind our lips. A hiss from the radiator and we flinched like startled cats. A faint sound of wood settling on the basement steps and we were all up on our feet, limbs akimbo, rushing to the stairwell to peek up at the heavily-shadowed kitchen door. And for a millisecond, we all could have sworn we saw a shape: a colorless, translucent old lady in an evening gown, silently looking back at us over her shoulder before dissipating in an ethereal, tea-kettle mist.

Did I mention we’d all eaten a ton of cake, too?

Tellingly, these “sightings” always take place when our minds are at their most impressionable. There’s a story my father loves to tell about a night when he arrived home late after closing up shop at the tavern he owned. Walking in at around 2 a.m., he noticed a man in the living room with his feet propped up on the recliner, watching an infomercial on television. Dad didn’t think much of it at first; my grandfather was known to pop in unexpectedly in those days and plop himself down in front of the boob tube, so it wasn’t an altogether alarming sight. But after packing away his things, my father approached the man, only to see his form slowly disappear, vanishing like water vapor -- leaving a propped-up footrest and a flickering TV screen as the only evidence he was there.

It’s a cool story. It’s a story you want to believe. But what Dad always leaves out is that he used to pound Heinekens by the case. You’d see some ghosts too if you had a 12-rack of suds in your gut.

I remain unflinching in my disbelief, but there’s a part of me that still hopes to see an apparition, draped in chains, leaning against a basement boiler or trudging through mud-black cemetery gates. If nothing else, it’d make for one hell of a story. In the meantime, there’s always Muse.

Toon goon

Perhaps the best feeling in the world is waking up late on a Saturday morning. Eggshell light trickles in through the scant slit in the curtains covering your bedroom window. You flex and stretch the muscles in each limb, one at a time, making sure all systems are fully operational. You sigh. There’s no hurry. You’re not working today, there’s nowhere to be, and there’s nothing to do, really, except feed the cat and eat Fruity Pebbles until your stomach feels like a giant sand-filled snow globe.

The second best feeling in the world is flicking on the TV to catch your Saturday morning cartoons.

And there’s a limited shelf life to this particular pleasure, because past a certain point, cartoons seem about as childish as pacifiers and picture books. The feeling starts to creep in once your age hits double digits, and by the time you’re in your teens, you’re horrified that you could ever endure this saccharine-sweet fare. Talking chipmunks and ducks? Cats that swordfight with ghost pirates? What is this, some feverish malaria hallucination?

Oh, but think of how glorious those days were, when a flying dog with a cape was all you needed to get through a morning. That brief window seems increasingly distant as you hit various stages of life -- college, career, family, mid-life crisis, AARP. It’s entirely possible you have young children at the moment, and now Saturday mornings are all about them and their particular viewing habits. Is there any jealousy there? A feeling that you wouldn’t mind swapping places with them for a couple of hours? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself sometimes when I wonder what it would be like to have kids. Then I realize I have the freedom to curse really loudly and drink milk from the carton and I stop wondering.

Cartoons are created for all ages and demographics now; “The Simpsons” injected its turbo juice into that trend. Yet they hold a special appeal for kids, and it’s easy to see why. If adults are all about hard-headed practicalities -- bills, groceries, premium cable packages with special nudie channels -- then children are all about escapism and fantasy. That’s why girls hold tea parties with button-eyed ponies and boys break lamps re-enacting scenes from “Iron Man.”

Animated offerings tap into that mentality because they’re not confined to any real-world rules. Any cockeyed whimsy can serve as a perfectly acceptable plotline. Let’s say you’re staring at stormclouds one listless Sunday and an idea for a story pops into your head: A powerful king, who also happens to be a giant mutant iguana, passes a law in the animal kingdom prohibiting all species from dancing to Billy Joel songs. This is troubling because Billy Joel is extremely popular among most animals, especially manatees, who can’t dance but are obsessed with intricate piano arrangements. Several animal species band together to form a resistance, and attempt to take down the mutant iguana king with a combination of political subterfuge and mixed martial arts, taught to them by a robe-wearing cheetah who’s allergic to waffles and chain smokes Pall Malls.

This couldn’t be a live-action series without some major changes. Animals have difficulty delivering lines since they’re mostly dumb and can’t talk, so instead of an interspecies political movement, you’d have to re-envision that part of the story -- maybe have disparate tribes on a remote island join forces to stop the evil island king, who can still be a mutant but is probably not an iguana. And the martial arts master couldn’t be a cheetah, which is vexing, since in a perfect world all martial arts masters would be cheetahs.

So the whole thing would be one big compromise, a watered-down shadow of your original conception. It’ll be lame. It’ll be weak. It’ll draw a zillion viewers in the premier.

Make it an animated affair, however, and you wouldn’t have to change a thing. You could make it even more outlandish, perhaps throw in a kamikaze pilot who’s also a hard-drinking hippopotamus. Or a general who can’t salute his troops because he’s a Beluga whale.

Two zillion viewers and a line of action figures and bedsheets. That’s my prediction. Only don’t steal my idea, ‘cause I’ll totally sue.

When I really stop to think about it -- which is probably a bad idea, mental health-wise -- the fare I watched on those distant Saturday mornings wasn’t that much crazier than the mutant iguana king premise. There was “Garfield and Friends,” a show about a housecat who eats mutton chops with his hands; “Ducktales,” about a wealthy, monocle-wearing bird who dives daily into a giant bin filled with gold; “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” about reptiles who gobble pizza and stab robots in the neck; and “Talespin,” about a bear who’s a bush pilot running an air cargo freight business. The common theme among all these shows, if they can be said to have one, is that they feature cartoon animals who do things real-world animals can’t, which means the creators were either loaded with psychedelics or they understood children very deeply. Kids love animals and they love adventure. Like chocolate and vanilla (or chocolate and anything), it’s a winning combination.

Talking to various parents, I can tell that not all adults have lost their appreciation for goofy kids’ fare. Some moms and dads are as obsessed with animated princesses and penguins as their offspring, and this is heartening. It means they’re still in touch with something close to their core. People are like Russian nesting dolls -- the older we get, the more layers we add to ourselves, and the more our gooey centers get obfuscated and buried, lost to time. Those of us who retain a kinship with anthropomorphic ducks have a pipeline to those first couple of layers, which for me were calcified during languid Saturday mornings, wrapped in bedsheets, a remote control in hand. Would the heroes in a half-shell defeat the dreaded Shredder? Probably, but I’d follow their journey anyway, submitting myself to a waking, fantastical dream.

Hey, maybe the iguana king is a fire breather! I can smell the licensing rights already.