Las Vegas
Day 1
It is difficult not to be intoxicated by it all; the smell, the sounds, the sights. There is, by all accounts, activity every way you look and every where you go. The pursuit of the next score is gospel here, from the men and women pushing calling cards for prostitutes to the grandmothers running nickel slots. It is unashamedly crass, unapologetically commercial. A city built by scammers for suckers, and in Vegas we're all suckers. There is no vice you could want somebody could not grant you. The crush of people is absurd, a thousand sheep all begging to be shown a slice of excess, so they may run home with stories of how luxurious the shopping malls are (the Venetian) and how eye-blasting it is to stare into thr heart of the Flamingo. And it is eye-blasting. Vegas is predatory, and I resent it even as it slowly takes me in.
The movies always show Vegas from the parts you'll never see- in a helicopter, from a massive suite, at an off-strip wedding chapel. Actually walking down the strip is a thousand times different than I had ever imagined. The first thing is the traffic- thousands, even millions of cars, all shiny and spotless as though they had been plucked from a dealership and placed on the road just for our benefit. It is endless, and the battle between pedestrians and drivers is a constant source of both amusement and distress. I watched a drunk man challenge several hundred people to cross the street against the light with him- and when he did, many followed, congesting traffic trying to get through. The second thing about the strip is the navigation. Everything leads somewhere, every door opens to some new marvel. You almost never leave somewhere the way you came in. It is a maze that confounds the senses and defies explanation.
An astonishing number of people are on somebody's payroll here. Drivers, dealers, bartenders, security, gift shops, restaurants. Our tourist trap, our city of sin and lights is somebody's shitty fuck-ass day job. They all go home, flip on the tv, and dream of being the boss someday. They talk to their spouse, they eat fruit loops from the box, they masturbate themselves to sleep and wake up to do it again. The undercurrent of day-to-day eats away the dream- this is the dream. A city of two million living in squalor next to a strip full of casinos built by the impossibly rich, all working for them just to get by. A desert city with a fast-growing water problem (no shit, right?) that is going to destroy them if it gets worse. Every light is always on, every fountain is always running. I told my father my first night here, I would be ashamed to show a Worldvision kid this place- "Here's what we did with our impossible riches instead of saving you, instead of shipping you bread". Fucking disgusting. Fuck the environment, fuck our own species. If there was any money in curing AIDS, and there will be, we will be there and not a second sooner.
This place is mecca for the church of capitalism, the dollar the cent and the holy credit. It is unreal, unbelievable, and ultimately unsustainable. One day the wheel will turn and Vegas will be empty, abandoned for Macao or Tokyo or Shanghai or Bangkok, where everything is just a little more attractive, just a little more exotic. It may never die, but it won't last forever. Nothing does. Just a little more, we yell. For now, we find it in Las Vegas: City of the Depraved. Fuck you Hunter S. Thompson.
These aren't even revelations, somebody has written this all a hundred times before.
