Devolution Theory

Sunday leaving Vegas is a dark time for everyone. Even if you're a mormon and you spent the entire trip going to shows and laying by the pool drinking milk you feel like shit because it's 130 degrees in Vegas always and it is the only city in the world with 3 suns. And just imagine if you do enough blow to kill a horse and so much molly that you literally are devoid of endorphines. Compound the heat, the hard drugs and about 6 gallons of vodka in a 12 hour period, Sunday is a particularly stressful day.

Well I did some of that stuff listed above and I'm pretty sure I could have gotten through it. I mean a hangover on a travel day is going to suck regardless of the situation, and whether or not you are traveling in a vomit stained sport coat is largely irrelevant. However the lack of foresight to book a return flight home from Vegas is just unforgettable, because no one wakes up and sees that Sunday afternoon flight for $150 and thinks "what a deal."

Or at least I didn't...

See the past 24 hours had gone as follows. I went out hard Friday night because that's what you do on Friday night. I took a limo to the airport Saturday morning because, "hey, I'm a baller, I'm going to Vegas. Fuck it!" I arrive at the airport and run up a 100 dollar tab at a bar watching sportscenter by myself because "Hey, I'm a baller, I'm going to Vegas! Fuck it!" Arrive in town and drink, gamble, order prostitutes, buy outrageous amounts of bottles at Las Vegas superclubs and get denied entry to my own hotel room by my buddy because I was so blitzed that I attempted to bring home a 3...even adding the requisite 2 points for the vacation bonus, she was still under a 6...the requirement to slay in the group suite.

No, I would have had that 150 bucks for that plane ticket home but my buddy decided that we needed to pay $800 to move our table at XS over 20 feet. (Fucking Birdman) I don't even remember most of the night, I was rolling so hard I think I forgot to speak 90% of the time. But hey, Wolfgang Gartner! I don't even really know who he is, but I guess it was fun.

Fast forward to Sunday, I am now dreading my 6am call time at work on Monday and even worse I now have to take the 25 dollar bus to cut my losses on Vegas.

Bad idea. When you are depressed on a bus travelling slowly though the desert you have a lot of time to think.

A few of the thoughts that went through my mind.

I wonder if I have drank my weight in alcohol in the last year.

(The math: A gallon of water weighs roughly 7 pounds, assuming the density of hard liquor is of a similar density I would have to drink 30 gallons in a year to drink my weight in just straight up liquor. That's 60 handles in a year which is 5 in a month, I would have to be taking down a little more than a handle a week...while I might have hit those kind of numbers once, probably not anymore. However if you add beer into the equation, I'm sure I've pounded 210 pounds of booze through my system in the last year. How am I not a raging fat ass...?)

Have I done my weight in drugs in my lifetime?

(The math: This one is ridiculous. There are like 453 grams in a pound * 210 would be about 91,000. But this is the shit you think about when you are super depressed about your life and a Mexican child in front of you is crying. Honestly it was the worst public transportation experience in my life. The girls behind me were strippers that specialized in fetish, I almost asked them the going rate for a foot job because I've weirdly always been curious about that market, but I held my tongue.)

What could I have bought if all the money I ever spent partying, I magically had back?

Now this one is the one that really kills you, because you think about every ridiculous expenditure of your lifetime and realize you have nothing to show for yourself except a few glory days stories with your buddies.

Some things you could afford:
A down payment on a house.
A whole house (in Michigan)
An engagement ring
A year of tuition for your future child at a nice private school
A boat
A car
To put money into a 401k
Groceries at Whole Foods for a year
A year long trip around the world. (to be fair, a large chunk of my money spent partying in life was already in a world tour, but if I had it all back I COULD DO IT AGAIN!)

But...after all of this. After the 4 hour bus ride becomes a 9 hour bus ride because of dust storms, after the Quizno's at the rest stop runs out of Batch 81 sauce when you are next in line...after your roommate picks you up downtown at midnight and you have to be at work in 5 hours, there is only room for improvement.

I mean Monday sucks too...but you got through it. Tuesday sucks too...BUT YOU GOT THROUGH IT. I mean, I sit here typing on a Tuesday evening and there is a rolled up golf score card on my desk. It says I shot a 51 on 9. Not good. And that 51 probably included a few mulligans. But the point is, is it is rolled up because I was likely out of cash and I wanted to snort something.

This is not where I saw my life going when I was a little kid. I thought I would probably grow up to be an astronaut or a famous baseball player or something because I was like the 3rd or 4th best player on my all-star team. It all seemed very realistic at the time. But what I've realized is a Vegas hangover can really be a greater metaphor for life. It's super fucking fun, and there are some bumps along the road but the only thing that matters is you just keep fucking chugging on. I can gladly report that as of this writing, I am no longer hungover. I gave myself a haircut tonight. And I am going to go to the gym so that I look decent enough in the right cut of t shirt that girls will talk to me. And that's just what my life is now. It's a rinse and repeat.

I no longer dream about winning the lottery or marrying the perfect girl and popping out 3 perfect kids, I just know that my life is going to pretty much be me hanging out in Venice drinking on the weekends, feeling shitty on Mondays but plowing through it.

And the cool thing is, those endorphines start to come back eventually and you start to remember, hey if I just stick around long enough and keep not giving up I'll be a tv writer some day, some day not too far away maybe. And then I'll make like 8,000 dollars a week and I can buy all that shit that I could've bought with the money I spent partying.

But I did spend that money partying.

And it was fucking awesome.

And while a rationale person may think I'm devolving, I think my evolution is just beginning. If you keep pressing on everything always works out, that's like the first thing I learned in Kindergarten. In hindsight I should've just dropped the mic and started living my life at that moment. So while my Vegas hangover story is largely fictionalized and it's structure is blatantly obvious (you're supposed to feel sad and bleak in the beginning like you would in a hangover and then be jacked up by my positivity at the end, I could've been a fucking English major) just remember that Monday is always going to end, and you can dry clean that vomit off of your suit.