I'm someone who loves and hates writing with equal passion. Whether witty, sharp, funny, smart, serious, powerful, romantic, dramatic or irreverent, writing is an experience that forces you to look inside your own creativity and imagination and produce something for others to read, think about, dismiss, like, hate or pass by unnoticed. Therefore, every writing venture I undertake becomes a journey that more often than not forces me to take a long hard look at my own neurosis and occasionally results in some writing that I think is interesting....

Obviously I take this all FAR too seriously. But that's okay, I take everything too serious, including the fact that I am so serious about everything. The only thing I can do at this point is just plunge into writing without care for where I land. I've been writing now for about thirteen years, have had a few things published here and there, and had my first serious freelance gig for an on-line encyclopedia for the past two years. Who knows where Helium will take me. One day you could see me on the New York Time's best seller list and think to yourself 'Hey, I once read something of his on helium....and hated it! How the hell did that idiot get on the best seller list?'

-NJP

Travel > Travel Diaries & Adventures Travel diaries: Las Vegas

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Driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, as me an my family did one summer, takes you through a vast stretch of rocky desert. Along the way there are random outlet stores and signs for cities and towns hiding somewhere in the distance. As surprising as the privately owned motels that label themselves as "Casinos" and offer you shrimp cocktails and sushi on large, dirty marquees that pop up every so often about hour outside of Vegas, or the entire town not far from Sin City that claims to be the birthplace of the toilet seat, the one thing I did not expect to see on this particularly journey w...

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