More Vegas Notes

[mnaz]

The greater fool theory gains ever more traction with me. All ideas, no matter how preposterous, have buyers. Witness this unaccountable desert city in the throes of early July.... this miserable stretch of melted boulevard, random-number-generated sprawl, and intermittent rows of palm trees, listless and not far from combustion. They never consented to this. They were planted here. It's a hundred-eighteen degrees in the shade, in that delusive relief. But shade disappears when the sun is high, and for all practical purposes, the sun has been high for months in a row. The oldtimers assure me that it's unusually hot. They repeat it faithfully whenever I bring up the subject.

I motor on a blistering blacktop river through interchangable stucco, of my own volition, windows down and no A/C, past Burger Kings and pawn shops, doing sixty in a forty-five zone and weaving, trying to make the next light. Must keep moving. A blast of scorched air is better than pointless red light suffocation, where I observe a heat-drunk waver of all things, possibly my next altered state. Mostly I migrate toward a liquid state. But I tolerate this pain more easily than other forms. A glance at the bright tan mountains steadies the ship.

In my room on the Boulder Strip, the air conditioner whines non-stop, managing a comfortable 82 degrees. The Nevada Palace sign reads 99 degrees at midnight-- almost as comfortable. Earth heats up like a brick oven here and releases energy at night. On the porch, shirtless and beered, I listen for sirens and they never disappoint. There is plenty of trouble about, under my nose, but I rarely catch it. I heard gunshots on the second night, though I could be wrong if necessary.

But this is Vegas, with its unlimited upside, and it's another sunny day. I'm holed up in a bad neighborhood, incited by heat. And I will come out again tomorrow for my daily allotment of the sun. Who in their right mind thought to build a major city here? And why a fool's mecca? The answer may lie somewhere deep in air conditioning. This place begs for trouble-- advertises it, in fact. Convenience store clerks offer counsel on the sex clubs. I pop one more beer as flashing lights set in the west; a mindless consistency of trying to escape mindless consistency.

I've been out to the suburbs, way out, where construction and dust know no end.... a peculiar attempt at normalcy spreading out from that same hard-ass core of a city, where history will now be swept under disjointed subdivisions, a few of them "master-planned". This is no reasonable stab at normalcy. It's the type which chews up miles of desert which formerly rested curious over the bright lights on the valley floor. All of it is powered by a church of alternate reality. Can we attain separation of church and state? And how are they distinguishable? A glance at the bright tan mountains steadies the ship.

Las Vegas is trying to build the right fences to neatly confine (and harness) its illusion-based economy and propulsion. I recall lounging in a bargain room behind Circus Circus on the Strip, considering bulbous red light fixtures, a few of them broken. I was a fly on the wall, a paper-thin wall, listening to a crew next door plot their strategy for all-out debauchery. Thirty minutes earlier and three miles away, it was a cul-de-sac and kids riding bikes.

Build as many fences as you want, but the thriving bad idea of Vegas is always here in plain sight. I thought I might work out a compromise with the city because I like where it sits. And the bond between pleasure and risk does have some credibility. And while Vegas is a sworn whore, it's generally an equal-opportunity whore, and one with plenty of jobs. It's the updated Nevada boomtown. Thousands flood in every month to prospect a wild foisting of corporate fortune on the Strip over the last few years. And housing spreads like mild beige affliction, up to and over the foothills; patchworks of jam-packed cookie-cutter tracts, tossed in with shrinking blocks of desert, thrown together approximately overnight. Subdivisions are built in one shot-- hundreds of houses in rows. Builders cannot crank them out fast enough.

And they hook up water meters as if it were understood. Most of the water comes from Lake Mead, which is backed up by Hoover Dam, some thirty miles east. But Lake Mead shrinks. It sports a perennial stripe of bleached rock at its perimeter, eighty feet deep on my last drive up North Shore Road. We're talking quite a few trillion gallons below capacity. But what is capacity? Will this place based on no limits ever be forced to accept its own limits? Suppose Lake mead went dry as legions of greasy developers shoved wads of cash at hapless city officials to obtain their next several-thousand ill-gotten building permits. But the answer, of course, is that I am the greater fool for doubting. A glance at the bright tan mountains steadies the ship.

It's important to remember.... I'm up and then down here and laughing it off, followed by a delayed, half-hearted vow. That is the genius of it. A bastard sort of genius. And from a sixteenth-floor room, I might photograph other conspicuous towers of conspicuous businessmen who understood this bastard sort of genius and pursued it with hyper-aggression. But I won't hold it against them. Not after a 3/4-pound hot dog for a buck, washed down with free beer. Remember also that it's generally warm here under the night sky, on my porch, with the sirens and heat and beer, and that must count for something.

[tinkerjack]

You just floored me



thank you

[Zlatko Waterman]

" The answer may lie somewhere deep in air conditioning . . ." is worthy of Hunter S. Thompson and Frank Zappa, not to mention Michael O'Donoghue.

This is a fine work of art.


I look forward to meeting you down here in the Land of Disney.

And by the way, since I frequently mention Michael O'Donoghue without really going any further, and since most ( or almost all) of the folks here at StudioEight may not know who he is ( was), here's a link to a few of his columns at SPIN magazine, written in the Nineties.

WARNING: These columns are not suitable for persons under the age of eighteen years, Mormon youth counselors, or members of Nancy's Just Say No Corps.

The humor is tasteless, politically very incorrect, cruel and unusual punishment.

It also contains some of the funniest things I've seen on paper ( or a cyber-screen):

http://www.rockdots.com/thingsilike.html


A further note on Michael O'Donoghue, including a hint at his early literary relationship with Charles Bukowski:

http://www.marksverylarge.com/people/drsnakeskin2.htm





--Z

[stilltrucking]

WARNING: These columns are not suitable for persons under the age of eighteen years, Mormon youth counselors, or members of Nancy's Just Say No Corps.

Mark please excuse me.

Professor this place is not for me then. I scare so easily. I am an old man. It is so easy to scare old men.

When lives were lost at the turn of a joke

Guy Clark

done

[Dylan Wiles]

It was 'Bugsy' Siegal's idea. Tell you anything?

Another great addition to my growing MNAZ file. I just LOOK for peices by you.

I felt the heat.

Well done.

Love
D

[mnaz]

Thanks everyone for reading and your replies.... I passed thru Vegas again, recently.... prompted me to weave together some of my Vegas notes.... There's something about the place....

I wish I had more time to both post and read, but library time grows short....

[mtmynd]

mnaz - still keeping up with you while you still keep on keeping up with this wonderful writing. happy trails!