Microserfs

Todd was off all day having ordeals with his parents, and Bug, Sig, Emmett, and Susan walked around hoping they'd "accidentally" bump into Todd in order to eavesdrop a little, but to no avail.

* * *

MacCarran Airport is right next to downtown Las Vegas, and a plane flies over the city every eleven seconds. Karla and I were walking between pavilions and we saw Barry Diller in a gray wool suit (and no name tag). We sat down on a riser near the piled-up plywood freight boxes to rest our feet, and watched the planes fly by. We were both over stimulated.

Karla was fiddling with the Samsung shoelace holding her badge, and she looked up at a plane in the sky and said, "Dan, what does all this stuff tell us about ourselves as humans? What have we gained by externalizing our essence through these consumable electronic units of luxury, comfort, and freedom?"

It's a good question, I thought. I mentioned how weird it was that everybody keeps on asking, "Have you seen anything new? Have you seen anything new?" It's like the mantra of the CES.

Karla pointed out that there's really not that many types of things a person can have in their house in the end. "You can have a stereo and a microwave and a cordless phone . . . and the list goes on a bit from there . . . but after a certain point you run out of things to need. You can get more powerful and expensive things, but not really new things. I guess the number of types of things we build defines the limits of ourselves as a species."

Nintendo's Virtual Boy seemed the most advanced thing we'd seen here. SEGA won the Noisiest Booth award, and that's saying a lot at CES.

* * *

Bug, Sig, and Karla were all a bit annoyed by how "family-oriented" the city had become, and we yearned for traces of its proud history of sleaze and corruption. I mean, if you can't get lost in Las Vegas, then what's the point of Las Vegas?

During a 90-minute between-meeting lull, we decided to go to the Sahara to check out the porn component of the show, a highly secured second-floor salon room chockablock with the latest in, errr . . . cyber stimulation.

There were no empty cabs to be found so we ended up sharing a stray Yellow Cab with the worst transvestite on the planet, Darleena: great big hairy knuckles and five o'clock shadow like Fred Flintstone. Darleena kept on talking about the day last year when she met Pamela Anderson of Baywatch at the Hefner Playboy mansion. For half a mile she discussed breast augmentation with Sig (the doctor).

As a joke I told Darleena that Karla sometimes likes to dress up like a small Edwardian boy, and Darleena got all interested. It was a fun ride.

The porn pavilion itself was creepy. This weird porn energy and lots of women with breasts like basketballs. It sounds so great in that bachelor fantasy way, but then you see it, and you freak out. Actually, pornography really just makes sex look unappealing.

After about thirty minutes we'd reached our limit, and were heading toward the door when we saw the crowd surge in the direction of one particular booth, and we looked, and there was John Wayne Bobbit, dressed in Tommy Hilfiger, like a Microsoft employee, standing amid all of these silconized inhabitants of the planet Temptron 5.

Bug said, "Here it is, one day you're just a nothing buttwipe who cheats on his wife living in the middle of nowhere and then, BAM!, two years later you're wearing Tommy Hilfiger windbreakers surrounded by eleven women with seventy-inch breasts in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the whole United States of America wondering if your dick works."

The real world is a porno movie. I'm convinced.

* * *

I got to thinking about sin, or badness, or whatever you want to call it, and I realized that just as there are a limited number of consumer electronics we create as a species, there are also a limited number of sins we can commit, too. So maybe that's why people are so interested in computer "hackers" - because they invented a new sin.

* * *

McDonald's: "Paying homage to Ronald," said Amy, pulling into the driveway beneath the golden arches.

Everybody tried to remember the last time they ate a real vegetable.

"Pickles or iceberg lettuce don't count."

We were all stumped.

This McDonald's was offering a free 16-oz. soft drink if a student brings in a report card with an A. If they have two As, they get a drink and a small fries - three As, and they toss in a cheeseburger to boot. Amy said, "Look out, Japan!" But then she realized, "Las Vegas doesn't have schoolchildren, does it?"

* * *

Halfway through the meal, Michael said, over his Filet-o-Fish, "Las Vegas is perhaps about the constant attempt of humans to decomplexify complex systems."

"Huh?"