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“Las Vegas Redemption” ain’t easy. It starts with a chase scene: A pitiful old man being pursued by the world’s best-known bible-thumper, Cornelius Tecumseh Coyle III – TV’s Pastor Trey Coyle:

“There’s no delicate way to say this, so I’ll just come out with it: What brings you to Vegas?”

He took his time with that question. The man is no fool. He goes out of his way to look dumb on TV, but that’s just country-dumb – aw-shucks, just-folks, a simple creed for a simple man, y’all.

His show is “Trey Coyle’s Redemption,” if you haven’t seen it. He’s a third generation revivalist – tent-show Carneys made good – but his theology, to the extent there is any, amounts to a sort of confectionery Calvinism: If god doesn’t love you, why did he make you so rich?

And he might seem to be the worst possible messenger for that notion – but instead he’s the best.

Trey Coyle is a first class nerd, which should disqualify him entirely as a TV evangelist. He’s tall and thin with a long, lean face, and he has the nervous mannerisms nerds bring to everything – the sort of ground state habituated fear that suggests that gravity itself might fail were it not for their constant oversight.

His grandpappy was Cornelius Tecumseh Coyle, this because his real name – Charlie Coyle – was too well known in the taprooms of Philadelphia. Standing on the roof of his old Ford Woody with an amplifier plugged into the cigar lighter, the O.G. Pastor Coyle thundered his way down to Harris County, Texas – that’s Houston to you.

And say what you want about revival preachers, Coyle the eldest was a hard-working dog. He worked his way up through tent-shows and ‘special-guest’ church appearances, eventually setting himself up with a small church and (more…)

I was working on a farce set in Las Vegas when the town got shot up. It’s a Willie story, a #MyKindOfBenedy called “Las Vegas Redemption: Pastor Trey Coyle and the reincarnation of Sarno’s Ghost.” It publishes today as a Kindle book, an hour-long read. Writing it was a tonic for me, and I hope reading it is for you, as well.

Here’s the promo copy from Amazon:

Want to get back to Las Vegas when it was FUN? Pastor Trey Coyle has father issues – while Sarno’s Ghost, his partner-in-Sin-City-slapstick, just has issues…

The trick to being a trickster is not trickiness, it’s persistence. You’ll never get a better laugh than the one you reap from simply tickling someone who trusts you. What’s the secret sauce? The indescribably-delicious comedy magic? Keep tickling.

“So I race in the back of this casino, and there’s your friend, and he’s on his knees and I swear the man is praying to these giant statues of… I don’t know what to call them… The Pride of Lubbock, maybe.”

I grinned. There ain’t no snob like an East Texas snob. “You were at Harrah’s – and, yeah, I think Sarno’s Ghost was playing with you. The gods of his idolatry are Buck and Winnie Greenback, and their little dog Chip.”

It’s a gorgeous piece of statuary, for what that’s worth, public art expressing this subliminal marketing message, in its abbreviated form: “And the horse you rode in on, Jasper!”

Buck and Winnie are dripping with money, first because that’s just what happens when you come to Vegas, and second because, “Who the hell are you to call me gauche?” Buck is settled, satisfied with his spending displays, but Winnie is just about to ask an I-hate-to-be-a-bother question: “Is there anything else people can do at casinos – besides, you know, winning?”

The simple, subtle message? Throwing away your earnings at Harrah’s is the perfect revenge to take on all those snooty know-it-alls in your life. The casino takes your money as your ransom on your own (more…)

I got Vegas out of my head yesterday, which is helpful, because right now I need to see Las Vegas as it was in 2013. But meanwhile, I want to say goodbye properly to Tom Petty.

How? With a game, of course:

The practical ontology of Tom Petty.

You can play along if you like. The game is simple: The Tom Petty song that matters to you most is the one you have sung the most. Not listened to. Not rhapsodized to others. The song you have actually sung the most times – along with the radio, in the shower, all alone with your best-beloved. Which one won’t your heart keep quiet about? That’s the one that matters.

This is it for me, “The Waiting.” It’s an endless shaling for the full-on storgic love of a fulfilled family life, and I love every piece of that. Big blue balls, like all good rock ’n’ roll, but it’s love, marriage, family and hanging-in-there, all of that – good love for a good father.

And that’s the way I love it: I sang it every night as a lullaby to my children. I still sing it that way, when I am lucky enough to have a snoozy kid in my arms. I sing it to Cathleen, too, because The Waiting’s balls are even bluer than Pretty-Pretty-Pretty-Pretty-Peggy-Sue’s, but it’s always been a song about the whole family for me, not just the baby-making business.

So that’s mine. You have to figure out what’s yours. You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to, and you cannot hope to hide yourself once you have revealed what your ever-secreted self can’t shut up about.

But it pays you to answer the question, anyway: Which Tom Petty song sings loudest from you? Work out that simple little bit of practical ontology and you will have learned something (more…)

So here’s a theory of the crime for Sunday night’s Massacre at Mandalay Bay. No, that’s over-stating things. What I have is less a theory than a backstory, a way of explaining how this could have happened.

This is all strictly conjecture, but I thought Video Poker might be the problem from the first.

A ‘Local’ in Nevada is someone whose gambling addiction is daily and constant, not simply periodic and episodic.

Are there non-gamblers in Nevada? Plenty, including the world’s third biggest supply of Mormons.

Do (non-Mormon) non-gamblers move to Nevada by choice? Not so much. When people move to Nevada by choice – not in the military, not for a job, but as a freely-chosen relocation – it’s likely they are doing so for Nevada-ish reasons.

At a minimum they may be genial Georges, people who get a kick out of paying better for better service. Georges are lonely, and it is often the case that the people they are essentially paying for companionship are the only semblance of family they have left.

Yes, that is de facto prostitution, but you don’t have to go to Nevada to find it. Every waitress with a cadre of daily regulars is banking on her smile – and making the world richer for it.

Georges gamble, too, of course, but their prize is the companionship, not the gambling. Most of the people who move to Nevada by choice are true Locals – people who were already coming to gamble a lot and who relocated so they might gamble at will.

And the game of games for Locals is Video Poker. It’s the game all the toothless addicts out in the Vegas Valley cadge quarters for, and it’s the game that solitary Georges deploy at any stakes – anywhere – to stave off the boredom of dissipation.

All gambling is negative-expectation: In the long run, your net return-on-investment will always be lower than your initial investment. The ‘hold’ – the negative interest rate, as it were – can be small or large, but this loop, illustrating a 3% hold without all the hoopla

while (MyBankroll * .97);

terminates when MyBankroll equals zero – which (more…)

Let’s start with this idea: You are a sovereign soul. I have a lot more to say about the nature of the self throughout my writing, but, in a political context, this is the most important fact of your life: You cannot be governed.

All of human history, ultimately, is an attempt to contravene and negate and obviate this simple fact, and it is for this reason that every human civilization – so far – must be rated a failure. Some have been better than others, of course, and I sing the praises of the Greeks not just for what they did in the Hellas of old, but for what they are still doing all over the world. The Greek idea – each man has the right and power to own and control his own life and property – undergirds the best approaches we have seen – so far – to truly human civilizations.

And the United States – for a while – was the best-ever expression of that Greek ideal, the freest civilization ever yet seen on the earth. But like the polities of the Greeks before us, American society carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the horrors visited upon you every day in the news are those seeds bearing their full fruit at last.

Here is the problem, for the government of the United States and for any would-be governor of human behavior: There is nothing I can do to cause or prevent your purposive actions. I can threaten you or beat you or tax you or imprison you or kill you, but I cannot cause you to do anything I want you to do, nor can I prevent you from doing anything I want for you not to do. You are a free moral agent as a manifestation of your nature as a human being, and there is nothing I can (more…)

How can regional malls survive Amazon.com? By providing on-site residential and employment opportunities for their own clientele. Cities worked when everyday errands had to be walkable. Suburbs worked when driving was unavoidable. Uber and Amazon work because suburban driving sucks – and “public property” reeks. Want the shoppers back? Situate them where you want them to stay: At the mall.

That much we covered yesterday. Here’s another wrinkle: The Corporate Headquarters Campus. Just last week, definitely-not-a-super-villain Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon.com would be building a second headquarters – don’t scratch your either of your heads raw over that impossibility – in a city less afflicted with Seattletude.

I’m inferring that last part, but it’s hard to see what Amazon gains from Seattle: It can do business anywhere, but the future of the company is educated back east, nowhere near the soggy Sound.

Plus which, I think every huge real estate development should be built my way, over a mall, because giant structures chock full of people need decent retail – while that retail is able to prosper because it has a built-in client base. Big duh, huh?

And, accordingly, the coolest thing of all would be for Bezos to build his new corporate headquarters campus my way: As a mall-rooted mini-city, with residential, hotel and office towers all built into the mix. Amazon can house many of its own employees and business partners, even as it proves that it can kill at belly-to-belly retail, too.

And of course I have a location in mind: The Mall at Rockingham Park in Salem, NH. Doesn’t have to be that spot, but it’s ownable big dirt with excellent freeway access. That part of New Hampshire is essentially a suburb of the 495 tech belt, and everything that way is fed out of MIT and the Harvard School of Business – Cambridge talent with New Hampshire government. In other words, Unseattle.

How do you sell relocation to the folks you don’t plan to fire? “Better skiing. Kinder women. Lower taxes.”

Works for me. Why not build a “second headquarters” for MIT while you’re about it?

What (more…)