The Beast of Fertile Plains

We lay down on a small patch of perfectly manicured grass outside a casino. I don’t recall which one, they all blended in to one loud, amnesiac nightmare after a time. “You guys from San Francisco?” A man calls to us from beyond the lawn border. He is wearing a security guard uniform and straddling his mountain bike. We affirmed his guess. I suppose us Northern California types can’t remain in walls of fabricated dreamscapes for too long without losing our sanity. We started to question why exactly we had come.

You can’t cross the busy Las Vegas Boulevard on foot. A taxi could take 20 good minutes between stoplights a block apart. We watched the Bellagio fountain show from the car windows, not quite as spectacular as I’d remembered. Then again, nothing was the same as I remembered.

A couple street musicians were the only saving grace of the concrete overpasses; reflective windows echoed perfume ads in LED lights shining bright as day in the cold, dark desert night; People filmed without permission, and answered no questions.

Old ladies sucked down cigarettes whilst sticking in single dollars to another ambiguous slot machine. They chewed on their cheeks and occasionally sipped a fizzy coctail, eyes fixed on the seducing glow of the game. This sort of thing is to be expected, as sad a sight as it was. A bingo room is a good place to start if you are feeling really down on life. Watching wrinkled sweater-wearing geriatrics with folds over their eyes vigorously stamp a bingo card like an Adderrol prescribed child will make just about anyone realize that rock bottom has a new meaning. It will make you turn your life around immediately.

Sleazebags lurked in dark corners awaiting a heavy pocket or a vulnerable damsel. “Freebies” we were labeled by weathered Vegas prostitutes. I suppose it is to help justify the decisions they have made in their life as to why they didn’t opt for the more traditional life path. They enjoy what they do, even if some are too afraid to admit it. This too is to be expected of Vegas.

Guidos and chotskis, overbulked shoulders and necks supporting seemingly smaller heads. Vegas wins douchiest place on the planet 15 years in a row now, as if there were a douchbag convention every weekend offering free room and booze and too ensure their huffing and puffing up and down the strip. Unlike San Francisco, women are the outnumbered species having their picks of the litter; Unfortunately the mother dog drank cyanide and the three-eyed, two-legged father had a sperm flow blaringly inadequate with the collective IQ of a water bottle. The litter is unadoptable.

Everything that the United States has built upon its foundation of freedom and truth resides in a self-proclaimed successful capitalist state. For better or worse, it functions like a constantly-evolving wheel requiring systematic upkeep. Las Vegas literally means the fertile plains, a defined canvas made to reap what you sew with the proper attention. The seediest and most corrupted aspects of the wheel have planted themselves in some brine on the procreant desert floor in southern Nevada. Fifteen years later, the flower has proliferated into a desire-fulfilling, vice-supporting and soul-consuming human fly trap, one that requires huge costly inputs.

It hasn’t been doing so well no that the economy is on downturn. Maybe people realize is that Las Vegas is the devil of excess, only feeding a few lucky fatcats, and draining the rest of us of our ability to remember what it meant to lay on the grass and watch the stars.