Have you ever experienced nostalgia for something you’ve never had? I’ve got a bad case of the “faux-stalgia”(yep, just made it up) going these days. Someone once told me that the feeling is a remembrance of a past life, or even a peek into a future one.
I hang out with a lot of hippies.
It happens often when the holidays begin to roll around. I “remember” pulling vegetables out of my garden to roast for Thanksgiving dinner, or driving into the forest to cut down the family Christmas tree. I “recall” fetching kindling for the fireplace, or watching the season’s first snow fall from the porch, hands warming around a mug of cocoa.
You might be asking yourself, “What does any of this have to do with Las Vegas?” You know, if you’re the kind of person who reads blog post titles.
The truth is that I can recollect pulling into the city limits on a summer Friday around sunset, top down on my Chevy, warm desert wind whipping the hair around my face. I drive down the Strip and Nancy Sinatra comes over the airwaves and sings that her baby shot her down.
The air is hot and there might be a pistol in the glove box.
Night falls and I pull into the Wynn Las Vegas and the valets scatter with my bags and I head up to the room to wash the desert away. I sit in the marble bath and contemplate what to drink.
By the time Monday morning has come, I’ve dined and I’ve gambled, I’ve drank a little too much and laughed a little too hard, my skin is crisp from days spent poolside, and I’ve had the kind of Las Vegas weekend that one is prepared to hold on to for old age. I slip my boots on, go down to my car, and drive for the northwest. I don’t have plans for what comes next.
Maybe I should call these supposed memories for what they really are – daydreams – but they’re so vivid, so radiant and brilliant and gleaming in my mind, that they’re more valuable than simple castles in the air. Really, our dreams are the bricks to our existence.
I’m off to chase them now across the booking platform.
Photography Credits: One and Two.