Juketown, USA

To be in Las Vegas is to be insane. 

Juketown, USA. Land of the fake-out. Where a Roman bust wears red lipstick and carries a stretch limo cocktail, a neon green cistern that holds liters of liquid animus. Land of free spirits. Spirited away by the sheer volume of alcohol and opaque reasoning. Each boozy tornado is a secret sauce, a maker of faded consciousness that expands to cartoon acid trip proportions. A place where Paris lurks out across a patchwork of cultural wonders reproduced in uncanny versions. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where enormous bath tubs fill with blue tinted water. Where they jet, where swirling stimulants shudder through the upper crust of inhibitions and result in shivering pleasure. Where water pushes people to do crazy things. Where a telephone leans out from the wall next to the toilet, offering plastic communication. Crunchy carpet, unknown meaning, sticky floors. Soft sheets with hospital corners and a sudden urge to take sleeping pills and then fall into a bacchanal-themed dream sequence that unleashes a flood of silver quarters. A dream that bolds the seven deadlies and attaches blinking lights. A dream that includes fountains, pools. Rivers of plastic discs. Reservoirs of liberties taken, pressing and thrusting. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where Greek architecture is recreated using plaster that chalks away in the desert wind. The artifice of American splendor peels up at the corners and smells of disinfectant, lemons and chemicals, false scents, false improvements. Welcome to varnish and worn edges, to illusion made real by decades of touching. Welcome to pixelated walls and laser ceilings that shift the landscape around. Come upon black screens and hollow lamps, screaming holes. Empty shelves that held porn videos, now liquidated. The underlayer reveals the hackjob of half assed artifice. Refreshing bursts of tender reveals, the humans and elements underneath. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where people come to believe that the rules- of money, of sex, of risk- are atomized by the lightwaves from a million of flashing lights and humongous television screens. Red means sin but it also means a mega church of Floridian splendor. Tropical opulence. 

Welcome to excess everything. More steak, more hatred, more particleboard. More boxer shorts emblazoned with loud prints of hotel signage. More angles and plate-glass faces to refract light shows. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where everything is an advertisement. Land of Hell’s Kitchen and white tigers who maul their trainers. Land of bad converts, bad moods, and bad men acting badly on a strip of false logic on a flat, scorched plane. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where a dim rag wipes up the residue left by hotel maids, small women paid so little for so much work that they cannot stop to change the mop water. Maids with peeling cuticles, soft hands, dirty noses, carved backs. Where reception desk attendants are carnival workers, clowns of commerce and gambling. Valet guys who swoop and slide between a spray of cars like a wind or a soapy strip of textile scrubber. People in synthetic blazers with soft shoulders and sweat circles on a satin interior. Interiority is obliterated in a swell of all this mania. 

Lines, lines, and more lines. Green felted tables. Highball glasses with olives speared by toothpicks. Crowds of dissociated gamblers rambling around a room filled with opportunities to score. Drunk people. People who are really wasted, I mean plowed. Dull eyes, orange heads, screaming spittle messages. 

Welcome to Las Vegas, where viruses, bankruptcies, and bad marriages do not exist. The place that bears down hard and asks how far you are willing to go. 

Welcome to unbridled catcalls, throaty and jawed. Welcome to seas of people thrashing through corridors and lobbies, pulled by mechanized currents, pulled by anticipation, pushed by psychological warfare. 

Welcome to the place where I am just as bad as everybody else. Where I hide in my hotel room and contemplate the dusty atmosphere over the eight lane freeway. Where I look out on a bright day of green palm fronds and false-fronted compounds and feel sick. 

Welcome to loss. Loss of orientation, morals, ethics, and hotel rooms. Loss of money. Loss of the ability to choose. Wandering lost on a geometric floor pattern that stays the same no matter the direction. Where loss becomes a religion, a calling, an attitude. Where a rare big win might scald the caution right out of you, turning your pupils into stars or metallic coins. 

Las Vegas is a lost paradise, a place to lose.

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