Notebook

C.’s flight home from the Middle West was delayed due to some tornadoes that were tearing up Missouri, so I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987: corridors of neon, spaceship aluminum, slot machines, and burgundy carpet.

Eager tourists queued up to photograph themselves with the new Vegas slogan. A few years ago, Vegas decided to shake off the sleazy implications of What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. So they hired an advertising agency to drain the English language of any meaning until it became a cheap koan that belongs anywhere: What happens here, only happens here. I pondered this phrase until it became terrifyingly existential.

A tattered man settled into the bench next to me and surrounded himself with a fortress of plastic bags and the weather of the street. He launched into a litany of muttered theories about the government and a man named Bobby. I would have given him a dollar or two, but I never seem to have any cash these days. It might be worth carrying some for these moments. Because I’m goddamned lucky. A few tweaks in the timeline could have left me in his seat, haunted and alone. Hell, it could still happen. Two airport cops eyed the man for a while, then kept walking.

Time stretched into a crawl while my neighbor’s muttering downshifted into a snore. Eventually, the big screen said C.’s flight had landed, and I scanned the faces that passed by, each defined by the simple fact of not belonging to her. When I finally spotted her at the other end of the terminal, she gave a little wave, and time resumed again.

We live in the far southwestern corner of Las Vegas, and it’s a strange nexus between the extremes of nature and civilization. Four miles to the west, there is no cell service, and the temperature begins to drop as the mountains rise. Six miles to the east, there’s, well, Vegas: manic neon, skyscraper-sized screens, and the fever dream of end-game capitalism buffed and polished to a synthetic sheen.

The first three months of 2023 have been the coldest in Las Vegas in over fifty years. But yesterday was pleasant, so C. and I headed into the mountains. You can tell a lot about a relationship by the way couples hike. A sunburnt man raced ahead, screaming at his partner to hurry up, while others ambled and murmured, lost in their private worlds. C. and I just tend to get lost. We’ll climb onto a boulder, scan for trail markers or cairns, and realize we’ve wandered into god only knows. Straying from the prescribed path makes me antsy, but the whole point of dealing with nature might be learning to let go of the little maps and well-worn paths in my head.

The desert silence baffles my Midwestern mind. No birds chirping, no insects buzzing, not even the faint hum that I associate with humidity. It feels like I’m on a movie set, a manufactured world, and sometimes my hand reaches for a boulder, expecting it to be made of papier-mâché. This fleeting confusion between the genuine and the artificial captures my sense of being alive these days.

The winter gloom has receded from Vegas, leaving behind electric blue skies punctuated by a few Super Mario clouds. I’ve been working on touching my toes because I worry I’m getting creaky. Last week, I could barely reach my knees, but now I can almost brush my shins. I don’t want to become one of those grey men who struggle to put on their socks or sigh when they drop a pen, knowing it will be a significant event to retrieve it. I need to find a way to do the same with my brain because the future is coming fast and weird, and I’ll need a limber disposition to survive it.

“Soon we will find ourselves living inside the hallucinations of non-human intelligence,” said some big thinkers in The New York Times. It’s already made an incursion into my classroom. A student wrote, “I cannot describe the last advertisement to influence my behavior because I am a machine-learning model and I experience the world differently than human beings.” How do you respond to this type of thing? That night I stared at the ceiling, worrying about a world where writing becomes so cheap that reading is pointless and frightened by the havoc that will occur when these systems inevitably converge with the personal data harvested from us over the years. Technology might have peaked with magnetic tape: mix tapes and movies on VHS—perhaps that’s all we ever needed.

A delightful sense of slippage occurs when you can’t decide if something is brilliant or awful, which is how I felt the first time I heard Deux, a French synthwave duo who recorded a handful of tracks in the early 1980s before disappearing. In a dimension light years away from whatever their synthesizers are doing, Cati Tête and Gérard Pelletier mumble-sing to each other about how it might be time to dance, and they sound effortlessly cool, an effect enhanced by the photograph on the cover of Golden Dreams. The two of them look so young and hopeful and French, smoking in a way that makes me miss cigarettes terribly. There’s a tenderness to this snapshot: forty years have passed, and Pelletier passed away in 2013. Thanks to the indispensable Minimal Wave label, their music has earwormed into my day-to-day life. In addition to “Golden Dreams,” I highly recommend the android grind of “Lassitude,” the spiky bop of “Game and Performance,” and the terrifyingly catchy “Decadence”.

At what point does a walk become a hike? C. and I often ponder this when we find ourselves on a dirt path or crossing a parking lot. We’ve decided it requires a bit of an incline and enough time to demand a granola bar.

We have interesting discussions when we wander into nature. If dehydration became life-threatening, would you rather drink your own urine or someone else’s? The car was still in sight when this question came up. Or if starvation was on the table, would you rather eat your own finger or a stranger’s? This inspired some lively debate. On the one hand, we know where we’ve been and what we’re made of, but God only knows the ingredients of a stranger. Then again, consuming oneself has an ouroboros quality that feels demonic.

A few years ago, our friends dragged us on a hike through a New Hampshire forest, and they moved with terrifying urgency. We sat down at the first scenic viewpoint and let them continue crashing through the trees so they could exorcise their ghosts and satisfy whatever hunger was pushing them onwards.

But now that we’re in the desert, we want to engage with the scenery beyond the windshield. So we drove ten minutes to Red Rock Canyon and suddenly we found ourselves hiking. We leapt across creeks, shimmied up ledges, and at one point, we clung to the sheer face of an action-movie boulder over a canyon that plunged into the center of the earth. I can’t believe the government allows its citizens to risk their lives like this.

At first, I hated everything about it, this scrabbling across the rocks like an animal. Everyone else wore grippy shoes and backpacks stuffed with equipment I couldn’t even guess at, and as I scrambled after C., who was weirdly talented at hopping from rock to rock, I was convinced I was about to become a local news item. When we finally reached the summit, we were rewarded with a view of Vegas that reinforced my theory that this city is a mirage. Then I needed to sit down as a bout of vertigo took hold.

On the way back down, I moved more confidently. That sheer drop into the center of the earth was actually only four or five feet, and I felt surprisingly good and accomplished. Like I’d satisfied a hunger I never knew I had.

Heavy skies here in Vegas, and the wind has been ferocious. I had no idea there was so much weather in the desert. By now, I thought I’d be begging for a cloud.

“I can’t wait for summer,” I said, and the lady cutting my hair shushed me as if I were summoning a demon. She gave me a long talk about hydration while she snipped away. Not just plenty of water, she said, but also salads and cucumbers, and you should never go outside in daylight. By the time she finished, I was convinced a cup of coffee in July would send me to the emergency room.

“I love the summer,” said the man next to me. “Especially the nights.”
“Because it gets cooler?”
“Because it’s hot and dark.”

Among all U.S. states, church attendance is lowest in Nevada. But I think this is where I’ll really learn to pray. The other day C. and I went to a zen temple behind a strip mall for a beginner’s meditation session. We removed our shoes and stepped inside to find a dozen bald elderly people in red robes chanting in Burmese. We edged backward out of the room and quietly closed the door.

The wind is still howling, but the cold is finally gone. Forty-mile-per-hour gusts out of the southwest spill over the Spring Mountains after soaking California with another atmospheric river and a collapsed bank.

Saturday night in Death Valley was wild. Ninety-mile-per-hour curves and a thirty-degree temperature shift as C. and I dropped out of the Spring Mountains, hooked a left at the opera house, and motored toward Zabriskie Point, where the wind tore us to pieces. Fifty-mile-per-hour gusts blew the lifeforce from our bodies as we surveyed the dramatic rocks of Red Cathedral and teetered back to the car. 

We looped around for fifty miles, hunting for some famous sand dunes, but we couldn’t find the damned things. But Death Valley is a place where ten thousand acres of scenery can easily go missing. The area spans over three million acres, and it is a zone that can only be understood by extreme measurements: elevation, wind speed, precipitation, and temperature.

Maybe we’ll find the dunes next time, we said as we dropped down into Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. Next time. Maybe even next weekend because it’s only eighty miles from our place. Later that night, a friend in New Orleans called while I waited in a Vegas parking lot for some Singapore mei fun.

“What’s in Death Valley?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “And everything.”

Tim Hecker – In Death Valley

Konoyo | Kranky, 2018 | Bandcamp

Las Vegas is 2100 feet above sea level and surrounded by mountains. The highest peak is 11,000 feet. Right now, snow covers most of the ranges, which I did not expect when I moved to the desert. But I should look at the mountains instead of the news. The New York Times has a story about “the power of instant pudding mix” next to horrific photos from an endless war.

My office has three little whiteboards that tell me what to do, and I rely upon them entirely because I’m a nitwit in the morning. The dust doesn’t shake lose until noon. I also have a large plant I’m trying my best not to kill.

Yesterday I ignored my whiteboard and watched the profoundly unnecessary mid-2010s remakes of Total Recall and Robocop. It must have taken a heroic effort to destroy all the joy that made the original versions so iconic. (It’s called “Robocop,” for fuck’s sake, how can you not make it fun?) Even the winks at classic moments such as the Two Weeks Lady or “I’d buy that for a dollar” were delivered with furrowed brows among grayscale scenery. Now granted, Paul Verhoeven is a uniquely bonkers director, but the gulf between his 20th-century sci-fi camp and these glum 21st-century remakes might be the clearest example of the condition that has infected so much contemporary television and film, in which grinding ponderousness is mistaken for prestige entertainment. I hope the darling of the moment, The Last of Us, marks the vanishing point for these dour fantasies, and we can make robots and zombies fun again.

Another vanishing point: I know I’ve reached a tough spot with writing when I find myself dithering over whether to use a serif or sans-serif font for my blog. I cannot overstate how much this decision pains me. It is philosophical, perhaps ethical, and certainly reflects a point of view.

Sans-serif makes good sense on screens. Dull typefaces like Arial and Source Sans have become the invisible carrier waves of email, Wikipedia, and search results; they are Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet of the digital age, and I feel obligated to embrace this future. Serifs, however, are willfully defiant of the pixel, reaching instead back to the days of chiseling letters into stone. This emphasis on the manual rather than the mechanical gives serif text a sense of warmth and ease. So I’ve switched my stylesheet to serifs because I could use some of that. Although by the time you read this, I may have changed it back again.

Now I should return to my whiteboards, which are admonishing me to finish revising the last sixty-eight pages of my manuscript—and to do it with pen and paper so I don’t wind up in typographic cul-de-sacs or lost in stories about instant pudding mix.

It’s cold in Vegas, and strange material is falling from the sky, a plasticky hybrid of snow and hail called graupel that takes a long time to melt. Meanwhile, I’ve humbled myself and purchased a pair of reading glasses.

I’d been frowning at fine print in the kitchen for nearly a year. Lists of ingredients and legal clauses would swim before me, just beyond the bounds of legibility, and I told myself it was a trick of the light rather than the result of the grey in my beard.

A few months ago, I was waiting for C. at the superstore when I pulled a pair of reading glasses from a rack by the register, and I was astonished by how much sharper my immediate world became. How else was I needlessly suffering? But I did not buy the glasses due to a potent mixture of denial and pride. There was nothing wrong with squinting. I was probably just going through a phase.

Yesterday, I finally purchased a pair of ugly reading glasses for six dollars, and I gritted my jaw and held my breath as I swiped them at the self-checkout station, bracing for a dramatic leap into middle age. Now I need to wear them.

On Flamingo Avenue, a stranger told me a fable about a traveler who climbed a mountain to ask a wise monk the secret to happiness. “Do not argue with fools,” said the monk. The traveler said he disagreed. The monk smiled and said okay.

And on the subject of foolishness and aging, here’s a thirty-year-old staple from my youth transformed into a glacial blur on the new compilation from the top-shelf Ecstatic imprint. I keep waiting for the beat to drop, but it never comes.

Yesterday C. and I took a break from our screens and drove into the Valley of Fire, a surreal stretch of geology an hour northeast of Vegas. From the passenger seat, C. told me this was where they filmed Total Recall, and our journey became a pilgrimage to a time when entertainment was fun and science fiction still felt far away.

Towers of red rock loomed over us like a beautiful threat. It was the first warm day of the season, and the trail was crowded. Shuffling through nature’s silence with strangers felt oddly intimate. Voices carry. Every lover’s whisper and family squabble. Every count to three for the camera. We spread ourselves across a sheet of red sandstone, two dozen clumps of humanity from all corners of the world, each searching for an untouched vista that felt like the movies.

Back in the parking lot, I admired a man slouched in a lawn chair on top of a battered Winnebago. He wore mirrorshades, had a gnarly beard, and smiled down upon us like someone who might cheerfully tell you the end of days were nigh. He seemed to have his priorities straight, like he’d made peace with something I was only beginning to grasp, and I thought about him while I drove home to check my inbox.

Nature is noisy tonight. The wind is howling with 70-mile-per-hour gusts, and the temperature is crashing. Flights have been grounded, and several roads are closed due to blowing dust. But I like to think that man in mirrorshades is still on top of his Winnebago, untouched and unruffled, the unmoved mover at the center of the storm.

Meanwhile, Erika of Ectomorph has delivered a much-awaited second album that functions as a perfect soundtrack for a midnight desert storm. Highly recommended.

Erika – Desert Red

Anevite Void | Interdimensional Transmissions, 2023 | Bandcamp

An old friend from Boston visited the other day, and we sped into Death Valley to see the desert, stopping by the old opera house before we looped back to the city. The appearance of Vegas is always a shock to the system: so much electricity where there shouldn’t be.

In the evening, we hit the Strip because my friend wanted to gamble. The only game he wanted to play was the coin pusher, those old arcade machines with a metal arm that nudges a pile of coins toward the edge. Coin pushers aren’t a big draw in Vegas. As we scrolled past the roulette and blackjack tables, the atmosphere shifted from scented lobbies and luxury malls to cigarette smoke and stained carpet, and the themes became increasingly blunt. Beneath the eye of the Luxor’s pyramid, plastic pharaohs gazed down upon us, and I pondered the idea of a Vegas-themed casino until I gave myself a headache.

We found a bank of coin pushers in the Fun Dungeon of Excalibur, a casino that feels like getting kidnapped at a Renaissance fair while on dirty hallucinogenics. My friend diligently plugged tokens into the machine, where they joined a delicate web of coins so close to falling over the edge that I held my breath. Here was suspense and possibility in its most concrete form. Eventually, the coins fell, and my friend collected a small payout of tickets that could be traded for candy, which he gave to a small boy and his father.

Metaphors and lessons abound.

These are days of shooting down unidentifiable objects in the sky. Yesterday they shot down “an octagonal structure with strings” over Lake Huron. It’s a delightful story, even though it’s probably a trial run for something more sinister.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas is a city of suddenness and extremes. The other day, C. and I raced along a blank desert parkway that felt like driving across a blank sheet of paper. Then we hit a glossy miracle mile to run some errands. IKEA, Home Depot, and Target: the reassuring cadence of living in the sprawl. At Barnes & Noble, a man hollered into his telephone about how they had no right to make him take a DNA test.

As we inched eastwards across the city, we took random turns just to see what was there, and soon we were lost in a maze of service drives, scrapyards, and sun-battered strip clubs beneath ancient billboards of fading flesh and thongs. We hooked a left on Deliveries Only Road and landed the car in the parking structure for the Bellagio, mainly to take advantage of the free parking for Nevada residents, partially to check out the casino’s elaborate diorama for the Year of the Rabbit.

We wandered the corridors of an airport-sized replica of a Mediterranean villa until we collided with a three-story Chinese god of wealth who lorded over a network of plastic bridges and artificial rivers with dancing fish and rabbits. Digital fireworks exploded across the walls, and I admired how so many pieces of space and time had collided here in the most plastic way imaginable.

I caught the same thrill the other day at a Szechuan joint when a man loudly proclaimed that Moscow has more airports than Los Angeles over the vocoded chorus of “California Love.” Or this morning at the Korean market as Hank Williams moaned on the PA system while we hunted for a tin of panang curry.