Behold The Pulsing Heart of America And The Bile It Spews Into Her Veins On The Road Part VI

There is no one story that quite captures what Las Vegas is. Not even Fear and Loathing does the mirage in the desert true justice. You are surrounded by pulsing lights and cigarette smoke in every corner of the city. This place should not exist. It cannot exist. Yet it does. It is the most American City on this planet. The gas stations have fucking slot machines, as do the bars, the laundromats, the restaurants, the hotels and one presumes, city hall. I forgot to mention the best part! The city of Las Vegas is not technically where the strip is! No, the most peculiar American invention to avoid pesky taxes and local control is to create a fictional city that only exists on government documents, a tradition that the most romantic version of Americana, Disney World, employs. All of the benefits of claiming to be Vegas while not actually being in Vegas. Local government officials might get notions, and we can't have that. The drying lake responsible for this affront to God is drying up, as are lakes across the West as we burn our way back to the planet's past. We were given a paradise and we burned through it to sell neon theft in the middle of the desert. Not even the fake shopping mecca of Scottsdale compares to my hatred of Las Vegas. Over the last few years, as sports gambling has proliferated and been shoved into every crevice of sports media, I have come to realize how Las Vegas is the most American city that exists. Each and every business is dying to take your money from you in exchange for the minuscule chance that you will strike it rich. For a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, this catnip is hard to resist. We took this land from someone that was here before us and turned it into a machine that takes the pittance we receive for breaking down our minds and bodies for 40 plus hours a week. I've been told that Vegas was at some point a deal for families and the middle class, yet everywhere I went, all I saw were twenty-five dollar cocktails and entrees for thirty-five dollars. A restaurant next to Meow Wolf's Omega Mart had cocktails for thirty dollars. What a fucking country we have here! This city is built for corporate drones with money to burn and it treats itself like it. The only silver lining for this wretched town is that a majority of the workforce is unionized, which means that all of the casino employees that spend their days inhaling second hand smoke have better than average health care to heal their lung cancer they will develop ten to fifteen years down the line. The city, much like the country it represents as an avatar, is in a precarious state. The Canadian tourists it is so reliant on are staying away from a suddenly hostile America, and the average worker is priced out of damn near every experience Sin City has to offer. The world we are burning has made a Colorado River that no longer reaches the sea, and a desert that is burning far hotter than it has in multiple millennia.

Despite my existential horror at spending time in Sin City, I was able to use it as a home base to visit Death Valley and experience the joys of Furnace Creek at a mere ninety-three degrees Fahrenheit. The sun cuts through you the same way the wind of a Midwestern winter cuts through you, and you're cooked to a fine crisp before you realize it. The park, much like Joshua Tree, is for the real sickos. Camping grounds out in the windswept sandy valley see use year-round despite the ever increasing heat each summer, and the night sky stargazing is amazing, so I've heard. My desire to see the stars was negated by my desire to not drive through the Mojave at night in a national park, so sadly I did not experience all that sky that the park had to offer. The park unfortunately exists as a training ground for the US Air Force, so my enjoyment of the stunning vistas of the mountain range in the park was trampled by jets screaming overhead. Hooray for the death march of imperialism! After my car travels in the park were over, I headed to the ghost town of Rhyolite following the advice of a waiter I met at a cafe in the park. It only existed for two years, but out there in all that sand and in all that sky those old quick building still stand. I even ran into a train enthusiast amidst the ruins. Truly the West takes all types. After taking a good haul of photos, and staring at the various odd sculptures that have been placed here among the rocks and the sand, I drove back with the sunset at my back to the neon oasis in the Mojave. The people digging the foundations and the wooden frames of the stone and wood buildings at Rhyolite must have thought the town they were building was going to last forever. So too do the people who run the neon skylines of Las Vegas, with its endless list of false promises and thrills.

I thought, briefly, of posting my photos from Death Valley here. However, I do not want to besmirch my experience of this land's natural beauty by putting it on the same page as the tumor in the desert. So one will have to use their imagination, and think deeply of warm sands.