Are You Kamphey Approved?

what am I doing here? golly.. if I were as well hung as Hunter S. Thompson I would be going on a binge, staying up all night either drinking, hot tubbing, or spending exactly what I would make on this trip in the poker room or at the slots.  Or even better I would get as much free coffee as I could wrangle from the housekeeper and stay up all night writing then in the early morning before she came back to work, sneak over to her cart in only my underwear and steal some more free coffee.   Either way it would be more fun than my pathetic situation in my hotel room emailing friends to find out if they have friends in the area. which of course I don’t know any single person who has ever been to Michigan… wait…

Except that a friend from the cruise ship is in Detroit and would have come over to spend the weekend but he instead has to actually go to the ship TODAY. And another friend from the ship, a dancer from Detroit, now lives in Las Vegas and even she knows of not a soul of a person in the Mt. Pleasant area.  One of the Casino employees can’t even think of having a mini-golf course in the area.  (there is one… but nobody knows for sure where it is, just that it’s by the college.)

but what am I really doing here? well from noon to 8pm today and tomorrow I run the controls of a game show, a promotional tool for the casino. I’m working for Game Show Gurus. We’re doing a Deal or No Deal type show, drawing casino patrons randomly every other hour to play. It’s not that fun because from where I sit I can’t see the stage and of course out of every 6 or 8 HUNDRED casino patrons will be one person within 10 years of my age and then out of every 30 of those will be a good looking person to ogle at.  And ogle I do.  It’s my 2nd favorite pasttime. leaps and bounds ahead of jogging and a close second to reading.

My third day here at Soaring Eagle Casino in majestic (not the right word) Mt. Pleasant, Michigan starts with waking up three hours before I set my alarm. Three hours later while writing this blog post which started as an email to a friend, my alarm goes off.  I smack it. It tumbles to the floor and somehow I messed up.  Radio Squelch fills the room it’s not tuned to any station but I didnt’ turn the radio on.  I fumble around for the button to find that the radio is turned off.  I turn the tuner to find a station but give up because it’s too loud.  I just turn the volume to zero.

Last night I almost fell asleep at the ice cream parlor on my laptop.  About 11pm I wander down there to sit around and try to write, try to be a productive person in this ambient time.  Pondering over the fuzzy math of the managers I realize that a single scoop is $1.25, a double scoop is $2.00 and a triple scoop is $3.00.    It also says an extra scoop is $.75.  They are charging more for the third scoop than they should be.  Is the third scoop exponentially more dangerous?   I recall second grade math class and wonder how many scoops I can get for 10 dollars.   It’s 12 1/3 scoops.  So for $10.50 I can get 13 scoops. Would they even give me that much?  That seems dangerous.  After all this math I want to go to sleep but I press on to find the amusement in this hallway between the hotel and the casino.  Two old fat ladies sit down next to me.  Now I can get my mack on.  They chose to sit at the very end of the tables, a good 30 feet from the Ice Cream but now wonder what flavors they have.  I read the sign aloud to them listing the names of 8 different ice cream flavors.   They thank me and then proceed with their normal conversation.  An hour later my eyes are closing and my mind is going numb from over hearing them discuss losing $10.00 on the slot machines.  I inform them of the number of scoops they can get for that.  My eyes widen and I get scared a pure feeling of terrified when I see that it’s also $.75 for a cone.  I know I should be going to sleep when small things get me to shiver and shudder from fright.  But that is one less scoop if I choose the waffle cone.

My head crashes into the three soft pillows on one of two queen sized beds in my hotel room.  Lights out, except for the large neon sign outside my window illuminating two immense eagles and the name of Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort. Did I mention I’m afraid of birds?  This can’t be good for my mental health to be intimidated by the resorts signage.

Tomorrow: Hot Tub.