cedar_grove | Reflections on Vegas

From The Book of Awakening: Having the Life You Want by Being Present to the Life You Have.

So long as you haven't experienced
this: to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
--Goethe

We double the pain of living when we try to stop the emergence that all life goes through.

Though this is true it's often difficult to embrace change. It's too easy to get used to something and feel comfortable with it. Is that what we have all done over Vegas? It's a question I've been thinking about on and off ever since we got back, and then of course with the added eye-opener of the trip to Dragon-Con in Atlanta, (oh what madness that was – in a good way)

Yes, there were things that didn't work at Vegas (see

vegawriters I fixed my boo boo) – like the fact that the room was too damn big, the screens too damn small and fuzzy, and the security too officious even for the rep that Creations 'security' people have. It wasn't good to have to walk through several other meetings/conventions to get to the dealers' room either. If you didn't know where it was you might also have thought they didn't have one...

But... is that cause enough not to like the new venue quite so viscerally? Are we all being unfair?

I don't know the answers to those questions; I just know that this is a change that I'm resistant to. For all that there were lots of first time attendees, for all the excitement of trying out a new hotel (and we'll be going back to our regular one now that we know we can get to the Rio by foot).

Maybe next year they'll have ironed out the teething troubles, though I'm not sure how they'd do that. Maybe they need 2 sets of screens, some set further back in the hall to at least give the illusion of caring about those who are not Gold or Captain's Chair attendees – because let's face it, those numbers are finite, and won't support the continued operations of the convention by themselves. They need the masses, so they need to make it worth their while to attend. And while it's all very well to say, yes well they can get photos, and/or signatures, if you come to a convention to see someone speak, perform or whatever, you don't expect to spend the whole convention only able to hear what's going on...

And when you're someone like me, that's afraid of 'authority' and uncomfortable breaking the rules, then doing as we did and moving up to sit in the Hallowed Gold chairs for the performances at least, doing that, while it lets you see, leaves you feeling uncomfortable and on edge the whole time – and having to sit strangely to cover your wrist band so the over-officious security folks don't chuck you backwards again.

There's a lot of stuff that Creation need to rethink for the future conventions at Vegas. I hope they get that thinking right.