"Rex, I don't think moving will make you any happier."

I agree 100%.

I don't have any illusions that moving will make me happy, for the simple reason that I have never been happy. 

From my earliest recollection, I've always had a very introspective and melancholy personality.  Not once in my life have I ever said "Wooo!".  Unless it was a joke, I don't think I've ever said anything followed by the word "baby!".  I've never held up my index finger and screamed "We're number 1!" until my face turned red.  I don't have those genes.  Trust me, there were times when I hated both DC and NY.  The crime, the smelly 6 train, the goddamn road closures when some dickheaded foreign dignitary was in town ...  I never skipped down the sidewalks whistling showtunes, and I doubt I ever will.

If a normal, average, 98'er mood could be measured on a scale of 1-10, the very best mood I've experienced in my life has probably been a 5.  For me, five is a really good day.  Were I to move to a tropical island, populated only by 22 year old virgin women in the top 10 percentile of attractiveness, I'd still be at a five on the happiness scale.  It's just my maximum.  I'd have 30 seconds of sex (optimistically), followed by a week-long refractory period.  Rinse and repeat.  I would have twenty six minutes of intercourse per year, and I would spend the rest of the time complaining that Coconut Cellular had shitty reception near the shark reef.

People have a misunderstanding as to my intentions.  I'm not looking for a place to be happy, I'm simply looking for a different place to be miserable.

"Rex, you have an audience in Vegas and you should be appreciative of it, etc, etc."

Well, I had audiences long before I moved here.  Perhaps not as "VegasRex", but I didn't exactly toil away in a library for 35 years before this.

I enjoy blogging here, and I like (most of) my readers, and I'm not going to abandon them.

That said, there are actually some people out there who think I should fake it by staying in the town 24/7/36.

The problem is, if I stay in Vegas simply to please an audience, then what I write will not be genuine.  I suppose I could stay and still be honest, but seriously, how many more "I hate Las Vegas" posts do you want to read?  You are probably as sick of reading them as I am of writing them.  No doubt I'll fire off a few more "Vegas Sucks" post-mortems before I leave, but I don't want to beat the dead horse forever.

With regards to the daily "Live" stuff,  it will be less, but remember ... I have over one million Vegas photos that the world has never seen.  Yes, a one with six zeros.  I've got enough of my own, unique content to last for decades without repeating a single post.  I've got a thousand unfinished posts that I never found the time to finish.  When it's overcast, cool, and I can think ... I would really like to finish them.

I'm not as into the "Live" stuff anymore.  I was really the first person to consistently do these types of posts, but there are so many people doing the live shot thing with their cellphones now that the entire practice has kind of become pointless.  Ditto for the photo-after-every-paragraph Vegas blogs that have popped up.  I started that blogging style as well.

I've spawned so many copycats that I'm no longer a huge fan of a genre I more or less created.  There are lots of people taking photographs out of their windshields/windows as they drive up The Strip now as if they have somehow tapped into a new form of media distribution, but I was doing this long before Twitter even existed.

Simply put, I'm the Eddie Vedder of Vegas bloggers, and there are a dozen Scott Stapps out there.

It's taken most of the fun out of it for me.  I don't want to share the bill with Creed.  I don't want to give everyone the blueprint.  I want people to think for their goddamn selves and create their own style.  Everyone in this town aspires to be R&R Partners for some reason.

While "The Creeds" have aped most of my style, try as they might, there is one thing Creed can't really steal from me, and that is my words.  Creed can go and take the same picture of the Bellagio, they can take the same awkward picture of the Eifel Tower through barbed wire and pretend like it was their idea, but when it comes to words ... they kind of have to use their own.  I'll still post pictures, but words are more interesting for me at this point.  I'd rather spend my time on things that people can't blatantly rip off. 

Last but not least, I've gotten this one more often than I anticipated:

"Rex, I thought you were going to be the Mayor."

It's true that I was going to run for Mayor at one point.  It wasn't a joke, I was seriously considering it.

The problem is, after a great deal of discussion with some trusted people, we realized that the chances of me being elected were just south of 0%.

Think about it. 

I'm an atheist who liberally pokes fun at racial and gender differences.  I am against illegal immigration while being for the legalization of drugs and prostitution.  Instead of grandstanding and saying absolutely nothing during my campaign, I would try to use actual reason.

Remember Ross Perot and all of his charts and graphs?

Remember the people who laughed at him?

Well, if I was running for Mayor, that would be me.  I would explain very slowly and logically exactly what I would do for the town and .... nobody would understand.  Instead, they would ridicule me.  It does not matter how hard you try, you simply cannot explain calculus to monkeys.

I would pull up a chart of NV Energy rates, I would pull out the Nevada Revised Statutes outlining the duties of the Public Utilities Commission, and I would prove to everyone that the members of the PUC were actively breaking the law.  I would explain very slowly all of the ways I think Las Vegans are being harmed and exploited by their government, I would explain what I would TRY to do about it, and I would lose.  On election day, Summerlin moo-cows would waddle to the nearest polling place and pull the lever for whomever ran the best commercial during airings of The Bachelor.  Deep down, you know I'm right.

The voters do not deserve me.  I would work way too hard for them.  They deserve an alcoholic who defends murderers while espousing the death penalty for petty vandals. 

I used to say that Las Vegas deserved better, but now, I don't know.  I didn't used to believe the old adage that people got the government they deserved.  It was always my position that smart people were duped by evil political handlers and a corrupt financing system.  Now, I'm not sure that people who support the two party system deserve anything but a heaping spoonful of shit every 4 years.  Let them eat it.

One more question I have been getting about my upcoming move is:

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