Are We There Yet?

sometimes I miss las vegas. It felt honest in way nowhere else I've lived has. Honest in the ways it hated you and tried to kill you. Honest in that everyone was on meth or running from meth. Honest in that tourists and locals viewed each other with open spite and tried to avoid each other at all costs. Honest in that if you just picked a direction and walked all day and laid down to sleep you'd never get back to civilization and would probably die of thirst. You don't get any of that in the pacific northwest

Everyone who lives there wants to escape, but it mutilates you, learning to live there prepares you to live nowhere else on earth. It's a place where ambition goes to die. The casinos are all laid out to draw feet into their gravity, implosive forces on a tremendous scale. Twisting the orbits of daily life like an occult star. You walk into a convenience store, a laundromat, a pharmacy, and there's always someone there up front, by the slot machine, just gambling everything away. Usually smoking, often retired. They'll run out of money and just sit there for a while, not looking at anything. Every day feels like poison in the bloodstream, blackout curtains drawn against the oppressive light of the sun, wall AC caked with frost, dark all the time. Light is for outside. The lights outside are so bright you could walk onto the street with a book at midnight and keep on reading. Keeps killing birds, knocking them out of the sky. They used to detonate nuclear weapons under the earth, keeping their eye sharp for the end of days. They used to set them off above ground, too, and I imagine those people at the up-front slots, dead eyes catching distant reflections of hydrogen bombs, not even paying attention - pulling the arm, pressing the button, winning big, and going back to the busy work of losing everything