The Bedazzled Forest
From the back seat, my father's voice, unmistakably nervous:
"Wow, this is...this is incredible. I can't believe it."
The light turns green. We lurch forward in our road salt-seasoned Ford Taurus, having just exited the 515. My brother's aggressive driving keeps pace with the race down South Las Vegas Boulevard.
"Look," I point with a snap of my fingers. My brother slaps my hand from in front of his face. "There's that pawn shop from TV!"
There is a long line on the sidewalk in front; people waiting to get in, sporting the double-edged dream that a) their 1987 Minnesota Twins World Champions Wheaties box might be worth a small fortune, b) somebody will tell them all about it on television.
"You've seen that show, right Dad?" I say.
"What show?"
"Pawn Stars," I reply, "on the History channel."
"Oh, yeah..." he mutters. I can hear the distraction in his voice. Not from disinterest, but for some unfathomable reason, unease.
As we pass, I scan the interior - a one-second glimpse through the front door glass.
"I think I saw Chumlee!" I cry, with an exuberant pump of my fist.
I'm joking (er, for the most part), but my dad doesn't catch it. His mind is elsewhere.
"Wow, this is weird..." he repeats, "it's so built up from the last time we were here."
My brother and I exchange a quick glance, like Gannon and Friday on Dragnet. We've taken this detour to Vegas from Laughlin for him, mainly; given his penchant for all things gambling, thought this might be kind of like a trip to the oracle. But he doesn't seem to be enjoying himself all that much.
As we head further south on the Strip, the build-up that has him so mystified intensifies. Close-knit traffic jockeys for position in what has become a frenzy of lane-changes, hard brakes and fast accelerations, granting grudging right of way to a thickening swarm of pedestrians pooling up at every curbside precipice, waiting for the light to turn green and almost always starting to cross before it does. Beanstalk-worthy giants loom on either side in increasing numbers - The Stratosphere, the Sahara, Wynn, Caesar's Palace, Treasure Island, Venetian, Bellagio, New York-New York. They are the grand redwoods of this bedazzled forest. They drip brightly-colored candle wax down the side, on the dried flakes of which a thick parasitic underbrush of smaller bars, restaurants, casinos and attractions thrives. Together the components of this unnatural ecosystem conspire to create a visual short circuit, a flicker of color and constant movement so frenetic and intertwined, you suspect at any moment it could congeal into a single wall of white light.
"There's where they have that fountain show," I say, pointing toward the Bellagio.
"Oh my God...!"
My dad's voice billows from the back seat more forcefully. His exclamation is apropos of nothing, but anxious, like the puff of smoke from a condemned man's last cigarette.
My brother and I glance at each other again, grin a little. "Dad, you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," he replies. "This is just...just not what I remember."
"It's the Vegas Strip," I shrug. "Isn't this what it's supposed to be?"
"I guess..."
"Has it ever been any different?"
"Yes," he declares, determinedly if defensively. He's quiet a moment. We cross another intersection. "No, this is weird. I don't remember it ever being so..."
His voice drifts off.
"Sooo...??" I prompt.
"I don't know," he mutters, "so city-fied..."
It's a significant remark, considering the last time my dad was in Vegas was not 1960, or 1970, but 2001. I was not with him then, so I really don't have a frame of reference as to what he thinks is different between then and now. My first time in Vegas was '07, on the eve of this country's economic meltdown - the three decades of unprecedented economic growth (spurred by low taxation, minimal regulation, and the greatest surge of technological innovation the world has ever known) falling out of the sky and hitting the ground in a fantastic explosion that took out whole neighborhoods of our way of life, and continues burning to this day.
In the ten or fifteen years before that happened, a huge development boom came to Vegas, particularly the Strip and outlying residential areas. It's quite possible that what my dad sees now ten years later might be vastly different from what he saw then. Chronology and perspective are inextricably linked, though, because while he can't believe how it's grown, I can't believe, having been here just four years ago, right before the shit hit the fan, how completely that growth has ground to a halt.
Boom to Bust
Construction projects on the Strip that were just starting in '07 are in some cases still going on. Or, their long abandoned skeletal remains bear decaying witness to the real estate bubble burst, at the hands of which Vegas has suffered a truly medieval beat-down, especially in the residential sector. I remember driving out of the city in '07, gazing at the shag carpeting of condos and town homes that stretched as far as the eye could see, the bright new paint not yet completely dry, and thinking, 'Man, how are they going to find enough people to fill all of them?'
The answer turned out to be: they couldn't. Today along the same route, those ant colonies are still there, but half-filled. Some look abandoned now, yards unkempt, streets unnervingly devoid of vehicles. I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet many of these dwellings were never occupied, neighborhoods hastily thrown together on the promise of some future demand that never materialized. And the projects whose developers were lucky, or bullish, enough to actually find buyers have long since been foreclosed on.
Las Vegas is a city left gagging on the smolder of an explosion and an implosion, both of which happened within the confines of a single moment in time. A universe beginning and ending in an instant.
It's not just my imagination, either. Much has been written about the Vegas bust, and the sheer absurdity of the development that preceded it, the way lenders preyed upon people's desire to see themselves living some kind of high life, belief that they should be, and willingness to take on ill-advised if not impossible debt to make it happen, to pursue the new American dream - which for a while had become living nakedly outside one's means. Information released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics just in the week I'm writing this places Nevada among the states with the highest unemployment rate (12.4%). People have been hit hard by this recession everywhere. They've lost jobs, lost homes, been unable to find work, watched their unemployment run out, received neither help nor hope from Washington. In places like Vegas, which by its very nature foments as hearty a distinction as it does symbiosis between those who come to visit and those who stick around and try to make a living, it's been especially hard.
Yet, cruising down Las Vegas Boulevard with my parents it seems to be business as usual. Vegas is as vibrant as ever here, in this narrow and securely cloistered fantasy land. The city was able to market itself to an increasingly younger set in recent years, early twenty-somethings not nearly as affected (or bothered) by the economic crunch, able to successively brand its cachet as the party, marriage and sin capital of the world, and capitalize on it. People may not be coming in the numbers seen in 2005 or 2006, and they may not be staying, moving into town homes, but they are coming. The constant movement, the flicker and flurry of traffic both behind the wheel and on foot on this 'any old weeknight in January' is evidence of this.
Er, Vegas baby...?
To be honest, it isn't just young twenty-somethings here. The Strip is really a people-watcher's dream, offering something for everyone...something of everyone.
There are the cliches you'd expect to find - the middle-aged businessmen in blue suits, the kind who arrive on company retreats ready to party like rock stars like they did in 1991; the college frat boy crews, ready to party like they did last week.
But there are also soft-spoken elderly couples strolling along with their drinks in hand (saw one lady with a 100-oz margarita, and why not; you can drink openly on the street here), sight-seeing, dreaming of the Rat Pack days perhaps, lamenting never getting to see Sinatra sing (or Elvis...does Wayne Newton still perform...?).
There are raucous bachelorette parties moving in and out of the bars and casinos everywhere, constantly, living some Bad Girls Club fantasy...(or maybe the Kardashians), that's par for the course in Sin City these days. But there are also equally loud-mouthed menopausal women, in their early to mid-fifties, whooping it up, women who back in their hometown - Ames, Iowa, say - might never get crazier than their Red Hat Society meetings every Sunday morning at Perkins, but are here enjoying a week-long girl's night out.
There are old hippies and young hipsters and outcasts with tattoo sleeves.
There are Goth princes and princesses with unnaturally black hair, their faces poked and prodded with all sorts of piercings like the top shelf of a tackle box, as well as perfectly normal-looking couples in various age groups, the kind you might be able to picture you and your wife going to Applebee's with on a Friday night.
There are old toothless men who lost it all in '77 and never left, and the old toothless women who love them.
There are bikers, bands of ballsy brothers in denim and rockers, swaggering along or making their way up or down the Strip on their hogs with an ear-splitting rumble.
There are women who might be prostitutes, never openly propositioning anyone, but unusually attractive for how alone they seem, gazing at certain passers-by or certain cars with an expectant expression (I imagine if one is in the market, one knows for sure...), and ethno-centric groups of people from all over the world - Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, Hispanic, German, Norwegian.
And of course, there are the loners - the proverbial mysterious loners - striding purposefully amidst the crowd like Jackson Browne on the cover of The Pretender, or sometimes lingering in a single spot purposefully, soaking in the desert air, above the fray but happy to swim in it, writing poetry in their head. Fellow people watchers.
There are the hotties too, a beyond-requisite number of good looking women who know they're good looking, sure beyond a shadow of a doubt of their ability to get some visiting college kid tripping over his tongue because he's never seen anything like it back in Peoria, or La Crosse, or Flint. They usually come striding along in a celebrity-looking entourage, and always a comparably attractive man on their arm.
I've rarely seen a woman by herself in Vegas, come to think of it, other than the women I think might be prostitutes. (Yikes! What does that say about me!)
There are also quite a few families with children picking their way through the pedestrian stream on the Strip. My impulse is to question this a little; and I can't possibly be the only one. But the kids I see always appear happy, never look like they're being dragged into some determinedly selfish adult's nightmare.
The truth is, for all its glitter this and glitter that and 'what happens in Vegas' posturing, Vegas is not a terribly sleazy place. It's actually pretty sanitized, the aforementioned 'cachet' now an artfully enhanced contrivance. It's like any other tourist trap; a caricature of something that it used to be, or was thought to be. Corporate-branded 'sin' is for sale, surely, and there are the day-workers who stand at each corner and offer porn pamphlets/guides, slapping their wares into their hands with a persistence designed to get your attention, but they're easily ignored. It's no more inappropriate to bring your kids here, really (for parents who keep it together anyway...act like parents) than New York City, or Miami, or DisneyWorld...or your average county fair for that matter, where scantily clad teenage girls, menacingly raucous teenage boys and the creepy carneys who eye them up might be more contrary to what you want or expect your young children to be exposed to than anything on the Strip.
And there are family options in Vegas. Quite a few of the casinos offer things for kids to do, notable among them Circus Circus and the Stratosphere. Thrill seekers with nerves of steel and/or a secret death wish might consider checking out, if not staying at, the Stratosphere, which features four bad ass amusement rides at the top of its famous tower, two of which send the rider shooting out over the edge, dangling one thousand feet above the Strip.
There are attractions off the Strip, as well. Vegas has an impressive Chinatown (who knew...?), and there's always the old downtown, specifically Fremont Street, which was closed to traffic some time ago and turned into a pedestrian mall. Today it's not quite where the action's at, but it's worth a look, historically speaking. Anyone over the age of 35 will recognize 'Glitter Gulch' as the face of Vegas in every movie and television show back in the day. A host of iconic casino locales line a four or five-block stretch - the Golden Goose, the Pioneer, the Golden Nugget, Binions....
City of Lights
I've always considered myself a small-towner, more or less, but I love cities, and despite my dad's misgivings, I like what Vegas is (or has become). I love being immersed to the point of not existing in a thick cross-section of people, love homing in on a three-second snippet of someone's conversation, snippets of lives passing me by in an instant; I love sitting somewhere unnoticed and watching what happens, just watching the high drama without words, taking in true candor while deeply rooted in the kind of anonymity only a city can provide.
Any city can provide this anonymity, some more than others, but in Vegas, you get it with an unmatched light show, and that's what I really love about this place: all the blinking lights. Sounds simple, but lights have been spellbinding, soothing and occasionally stupefying me since I was a kid. I loved them all then, and still do: Christmas lights, VCR lights (particularly the bright red one that appeared when something was being recorded), the mysterious white-blue bar of light beneath my feet as I stepped off an escalator, porch lights, street lights, stoplights, movie marquee lights, the purple glow of someone's bug zapper, lights across dark bodies of water that separate sky from shoreline, white garage lights across the alley or white farm lights on the other side of a valley, stars in the sky, our star in the sky...lights have informed my mood and state of mind, spurred my thoughts, inspired my writing, more than any other external visual.
The Las Vegas valley viewed at night, from the Stratosphere observation deck is something beyond imagination.
The weather continues to leave much to be desired on this trip. As the sun goes down, it starts to actually feel cold. But still, people are out and about, as though it's Saturday night and 78 degrees. As though it isn't winter. As though we aren't on the brink of a double-dip recession. As though there is a job for everyone. As though there are no wars. No worry for tomorrow. Fret over yesterday.
Vegas can make you forget all of it, whether you've come to 'sin' or not. It's one of those places I'd never go unless I'm on vacation, and so, when I'm here, whatever I'm doing, I feel insulated by that pleasant, uber-vacationey sensation I remember as a kid traveling with my parents. And now, I'm glad to be here with them. Not a recipe for partying like a rock star, perhaps, but I'm too old for that (or too upright, or something...) and my parents aren't getting any younger. Tempus fugit. I'm glad to be sharing the experience with them. I just wish my dad were having a better time.
"You don't regret coming, do you?" I ask, as we pull into the parking garage of the Venetian (on the site where the Sands once stood).
"No, not at all," he says. He smiles and winks. "I could be home staring at the wall, like a lot of people my age."
There's a moment of silence, the significance of this absorbed. Then my mom cuts in from her spot next to my dad in the back seat.
"Sooo, wait, I don't get it. Who is Chumlee?"
From the back seat, my father's voice, unmistakably nervous:
"Wow, this is...this is incredible. I can't believe it."
The light turns green. We lurch forward in our road salt-seasoned Ford Taurus, having just exited the 515. My brother's aggressive driving keeps pace with the race down South Las Vegas Boulevard.
"Look," I point with a snap of my fingers. My brother slaps my hand from in front of his face. "There's that pawn shop from TV!"
There is a long line on the sidewalk in front; people waiting to get in, sporting the double-edged dream that a) their 1987 Minnesota Twins World Champions Wheaties box might be worth a small fortune, b) somebody will tell them all about it on television.
"You've seen that show, right Dad?" I say.
"What show?"
"Pawn Stars," I reply, "on the History channel."
"Oh, yeah..." he mutters. I can hear the distraction in his voice. Not from disinterest, but for some unfathomable reason, unease.
As we pass, I scan the interior - a one-second glimpse through the front door glass.
"I think I saw Chumlee!" I cry, with an exuberant pump of my fist.
I'm joking (er, for the most part), but my dad doesn't catch it. His mind is elsewhere.
"Wow, this is weird..." he repeats, "it's so built up from the last time we were here."
My brother and I exchange a quick glance, like Gannon and Friday on Dragnet. We've taken this detour to Vegas from Laughlin for him, mainly; given his penchant for all things gambling, thought this might be kind of like a trip to the oracle. But he doesn't seem to be enjoying himself all that much.
As we head further south on the Strip, the build-up that has him so mystified intensifies. Close-knit traffic jockeys for position in what has become a frenzy of lane-changes, hard brakes and fast accelerations, granting grudging right of way to a thickening swarm of pedestrians pooling up at every curbside precipice, waiting for the light to turn green and almost always starting to cross before it does. Beanstalk-worthy giants loom on either side in increasing numbers - The Stratosphere, the Sahara, Wynn, Caesar's Palace, Treasure Island, Venetian, Bellagio, New York-New York. They are the grand redwoods of this bedazzled forest. They drip brightly-colored candle wax down the side, on the dried flakes of which a thick parasitic underbrush of smaller bars, restaurants, casinos and attractions thrives. Together the components of this unnatural ecosystem conspire to create a visual short circuit, a flicker of color and constant movement so frenetic and intertwined, you suspect at any moment it could congeal into a single wall of white light.
"There's where they have that fountain show," I say, pointing toward the Bellagio.
"Oh my God...!"
My dad's voice billows from the back seat more forcefully. His exclamation is apropos of nothing, but anxious, like the puff of smoke from a condemned man's last cigarette.
My brother and I glance at each other again, grin a little. "Dad, you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," he replies. "This is just...just not what I remember."
"It's the Vegas Strip," I shrug. "Isn't this what it's supposed to be?"
"I guess..."
"Has it ever been any different?"
"Yes," he declares, determinedly if defensively. He's quiet a moment. We cross another intersection. "No, this is weird. I don't remember it ever being so..."
His voice drifts off.
"Sooo...??" I prompt.
"I don't know," he mutters, "so city-fied..."
It's a significant remark, considering the last time my dad was in Vegas was not 1960, or 1970, but 2001. I was not with him then, so I really don't have a frame of reference as to what he thinks is different between then and now. My first time in Vegas was '07, on the eve of this country's economic meltdown - the three decades of unprecedented economic growth (spurred by low taxation, minimal regulation, and the greatest surge of technological innovation the world has ever known) falling out of the sky and hitting the ground in a fantastic explosion that took out whole neighborhoods of our way of life, and continues burning to this day.
In the ten or fifteen years before that happened, a huge development boom came to Vegas, particularly the Strip and outlying residential areas. It's quite possible that what my dad sees now ten years later might be vastly different from what he saw then. Chronology and perspective are inextricably linked, though, because while he can't believe how it's grown, I can't believe, having been here just four years ago, right before the shit hit the fan, how completely that growth has ground to a halt.
Boom to Bust
Construction projects on the Strip that were just starting in '07 are in some cases still going on. Or, their long abandoned skeletal remains bear decaying witness to the real estate bubble burst, at the hands of which Vegas has suffered a truly medieval beat-down, especially in the residential sector. I remember driving out of the city in '07, gazing at the shag carpeting of condos and town homes that stretched as far as the eye could see, the bright new paint not yet completely dry, and thinking, 'Man, how are they going to find enough people to fill all of them?'
The answer turned out to be: they couldn't. Today along the same route, those ant colonies are still there, but half-filled. Some look abandoned now, yards unkempt, streets unnervingly devoid of vehicles. I don't know for sure, but I'd be willing to bet many of these dwellings were never occupied, neighborhoods hastily thrown together on the promise of some future demand that never materialized. And the projects whose developers were lucky, or bullish, enough to actually find buyers have long since been foreclosed on.
Las Vegas is a city left gagging on the smolder of an explosion and an implosion, both of which happened within the confines of a single moment in time. A universe beginning and ending in an instant.
It's not just my imagination, either. Much has been written about the Vegas bust, and the sheer absurdity of the development that preceded it, the way lenders preyed upon people's desire to see themselves living some kind of high life, belief that they should be, and willingness to take on ill-advised if not impossible debt to make it happen, to pursue the new American dream - which for a while had become living nakedly outside one's means. Information released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics just in the week I'm writing this places Nevada among the states with the highest unemployment rate (12.4%). People have been hit hard by this recession everywhere. They've lost jobs, lost homes, been unable to find work, watched their unemployment run out, received neither help nor hope from Washington. In places like Vegas, which by its very nature foments as hearty a distinction as it does symbiosis between those who come to visit and those who stick around and try to make a living, it's been especially hard.
Yet, cruising down Las Vegas Boulevard with my parents it seems to be business as usual. Vegas is as vibrant as ever here, in this narrow and securely cloistered fantasy land. The city was able to market itself to an increasingly younger set in recent years, early twenty-somethings not nearly as affected (or bothered) by the economic crunch, able to successively brand its cachet as the party, marriage and sin capital of the world, and capitalize on it. People may not be coming in the numbers seen in 2005 or 2006, and they may not be staying, moving into town homes, but they are coming. The constant movement, the flicker and flurry of traffic both behind the wheel and on foot on this 'any old weeknight in January' is evidence of this.
Er, Vegas baby...?
To be honest, it isn't just young twenty-somethings here. The Strip is really a people-watcher's dream, offering something for everyone...something of everyone.
There are the cliches you'd expect to find - the middle-aged businessmen in blue suits, the kind who arrive on company retreats ready to party like rock stars like they did in 1991; the college frat boy crews, ready to party like they did last week.
But there are also soft-spoken elderly couples strolling along with their drinks in hand (saw one lady with a 100-oz margarita, and why not; you can drink openly on the street here), sight-seeing, dreaming of the Rat Pack days perhaps, lamenting never getting to see Sinatra sing (or Elvis...does Wayne Newton still perform...?).
There are raucous bachelorette parties moving in and out of the bars and casinos everywhere, constantly, living some Bad Girls Club fantasy...(or maybe the Kardashians), that's par for the course in Sin City these days. But there are also equally loud-mouthed menopausal women, in their early to mid-fifties, whooping it up, women who back in their hometown - Ames, Iowa, say - might never get crazier than their Red Hat Society meetings every Sunday morning at Perkins, but are here enjoying a week-long girl's night out.
There are old hippies and young hipsters and outcasts with tattoo sleeves.
There are Goth princes and princesses with unnaturally black hair, their faces poked and prodded with all sorts of piercings like the top shelf of a tackle box, as well as perfectly normal-looking couples in various age groups, the kind you might be able to picture you and your wife going to Applebee's with on a Friday night.
There are old toothless men who lost it all in '77 and never left, and the old toothless women who love them.
There are bikers, bands of ballsy brothers in denim and rockers, swaggering along or making their way up or down the Strip on their hogs with an ear-splitting rumble.
There are women who might be prostitutes, never openly propositioning anyone, but unusually attractive for how alone they seem, gazing at certain passers-by or certain cars with an expectant expression (I imagine if one is in the market, one knows for sure...), and ethno-centric groups of people from all over the world - Japanese, Chinese, Indian, African, Hispanic, German, Norwegian.
And of course, there are the loners - the proverbial mysterious loners - striding purposefully amidst the crowd like Jackson Browne on the cover of The Pretender, or sometimes lingering in a single spot purposefully, soaking in the desert air, above the fray but happy to swim in it, writing poetry in their head. Fellow people watchers.
There are the hotties too, a beyond-requisite number of good looking women who know they're good looking, sure beyond a shadow of a doubt of their ability to get some visiting college kid tripping over his tongue because he's never seen anything like it back in Peoria, or La Crosse, or Flint. They usually come striding along in a celebrity-looking entourage, and always a comparably attractive man on their arm.
I've rarely seen a woman by herself in Vegas, come to think of it, other than the women I think might be prostitutes. (Yikes! What does that say about me!)
There are also quite a few families with children picking their way through the pedestrian stream on the Strip. My impulse is to question this a little; and I can't possibly be the only one. But the kids I see always appear happy, never look like they're being dragged into some determinedly selfish adult's nightmare.
The truth is, for all its glitter this and glitter that and 'what happens in Vegas' posturing, Vegas is not a terribly sleazy place. It's actually pretty sanitized, the aforementioned 'cachet' now an artfully enhanced contrivance. It's like any other tourist trap; a caricature of something that it used to be, or was thought to be. Corporate-branded 'sin' is for sale, surely, and there are the day-workers who stand at each corner and offer porn pamphlets/guides, slapping their wares into their hands with a persistence designed to get your attention, but they're easily ignored. It's no more inappropriate to bring your kids here, really (for parents who keep it together anyway...act like parents) than New York City, or Miami, or DisneyWorld...or your average county fair for that matter, where scantily clad teenage girls, menacingly raucous teenage boys and the creepy carneys who eye them up might be more contrary to what you want or expect your young children to be exposed to than anything on the Strip.
And there are family options in Vegas. Quite a few of the casinos offer things for kids to do, notable among them Circus Circus and the Stratosphere. Thrill seekers with nerves of steel and/or a secret death wish might consider checking out, if not staying at, the Stratosphere, which features four bad ass amusement rides at the top of its famous tower, two of which send the rider shooting out over the edge, dangling one thousand feet above the Strip.
NO, I MEAN INSANE - This ride at the Stratosphere in Vegas shoots the rider a couple hundred feet up, from a platform...well, just watch...
There are attractions off the Strip, as well. Vegas has an impressive Chinatown (who knew...?), and there's always the old downtown, specifically Fremont Street, which was closed to traffic some time ago and turned into a pedestrian mall. Today it's not quite where the action's at, but it's worth a look, historically speaking. Anyone over the age of 35 will recognize 'Glitter Gulch' as the face of Vegas in every movie and television show back in the day. A host of iconic casino locales line a four or five-block stretch - the Golden Goose, the Pioneer, the Golden Nugget, Binions....
City of Lights
I've always considered myself a small-towner, more or less, but I love cities, and despite my dad's misgivings, I like what Vegas is (or has become). I love being immersed to the point of not existing in a thick cross-section of people, love homing in on a three-second snippet of someone's conversation, snippets of lives passing me by in an instant; I love sitting somewhere unnoticed and watching what happens, just watching the high drama without words, taking in true candor while deeply rooted in the kind of anonymity only a city can provide.
Any city can provide this anonymity, some more than others, but in Vegas, you get it with an unmatched light show, and that's what I really love about this place: all the blinking lights. Sounds simple, but lights have been spellbinding, soothing and occasionally stupefying me since I was a kid. I loved them all then, and still do: Christmas lights, VCR lights (particularly the bright red one that appeared when something was being recorded), the mysterious white-blue bar of light beneath my feet as I stepped off an escalator, porch lights, street lights, stoplights, movie marquee lights, the purple glow of someone's bug zapper, lights across dark bodies of water that separate sky from shoreline, white garage lights across the alley or white farm lights on the other side of a valley, stars in the sky, our star in the sky...lights have informed my mood and state of mind, spurred my thoughts, inspired my writing, more than any other external visual.
The Las Vegas valley viewed at night, from the Stratosphere observation deck is something beyond imagination.
The weather continues to leave much to be desired on this trip. As the sun goes down, it starts to actually feel cold. But still, people are out and about, as though it's Saturday night and 78 degrees. As though it isn't winter. As though we aren't on the brink of a double-dip recession. As though there is a job for everyone. As though there are no wars. No worry for tomorrow. Fret over yesterday.
Vegas can make you forget all of it, whether you've come to 'sin' or not. It's one of those places I'd never go unless I'm on vacation, and so, when I'm here, whatever I'm doing, I feel insulated by that pleasant, uber-vacationey sensation I remember as a kid traveling with my parents. And now, I'm glad to be here with them. Not a recipe for partying like a rock star, perhaps, but I'm too old for that (or too upright, or something...) and my parents aren't getting any younger. Tempus fugit. I'm glad to be sharing the experience with them. I just wish my dad were having a better time.
"You don't regret coming, do you?" I ask, as we pull into the parking garage of the Venetian (on the site where the Sands once stood).
"No, not at all," he says. He smiles and winks. "I could be home staring at the wall, like a lot of people my age."
There's a moment of silence, the significance of this absorbed. Then my mom cuts in from her spot next to my dad in the back seat.
"Sooo, wait, I don't get it. Who is Chumlee?"
