Posted 2:20 AM by Alfred

Ben was outta town, Eddie was getting laid, unbelievable as it sounded, so what the fuck was Don supposed to do? Sure, he was in Vegas, there was really no reason for him to be whining, but he felt like he wanted companionship, and not the kind that rubs up on your dick and makes juice shoot out of it. He wanted to talk, listen, converse, have a real human interaction, devoid of all falsities and concurrences of which he might be worried about what he said. And then he realized that a stranger would be perfect for said project. And if you’re hunting down a stranger, why not make it a hot chick, so then, when you’re done talking and thinking about the true and valid meanings of life, and the layer underneath the surface, well, then you can fuck her. It really was the perfect solution.

He was at the flamingo, biding his time at the quarter slots, dropping money down the chute. There were, obviously, plenty of beautiful women walking around here, there, all over, plenty of ugly ones too, old, young, haggard, perfect, all points in between. The trick was having an excuse to talk to them that didn’t sound like a line. And he was fairly good at that. Not some bullshit out of a movie like some bizarre trick or some such shit, just walk up & say hello, and if it wasn’t working you could feel it right off, and you just move on, but did he really feel like going through the bullshit right now?

If he was going to go with his original idea, of just having a conversation, the best call was to go to one of the bars and pay for a drink. Actually he could play the machine, but, well, no, he wanted to talk, fucking cheap bastard, buy a drink or two, talk to someone. But it had to be random. The whole idea of picking a situation didn’t really appeal to him right then.

He was a little tipsy, about three scotch and waters in. he didn’t really know why he was drinking scotch tonite, maybe the loneliness, a new drink for a new mindset. Don was not good at being by himself. Not that he needed a girlfriend, it wasn’t that, it was more in the moment, he just liked having people around. But those lonely times were nice too, it was the loneliness in a crowd that drove him crazy. Feeling like there’s no one when there are, in actuality, people all around, which was his current situation.

And the secret was just to break through the usually surprisingly thin membrane that separated all human beings until that first moment of contact. After that it was just a matter of breaking it down enough that real communication could be achieved. It was a potentially foreign concept, that people walked by each other all the time and didn’t look at each other twice, we were all people right? Don often wondered, how can all these people just see each other and not see each other? What is our problem? But in light of society, sadly, it made perfect sense. We all just wanted to be strangers, didn’t we? It was imperative that alienation be the keyword in society, that we push the people that may, for all we know, give us the most satisfaction, as far away as possible, to make way for the inadvertent cast & crew that had come into our lives completely out of happenstance.

---