It was cloudy in Las Vegas today. Unlike the blank winter grays of the Midwest and East Coast, these clouds are well-defined, painterly, and startlingly low. Here and there, sunlight escapes and soaks the mountaintops. Each time I step outside, I feel like I’m on a new planet, and I wonder if I will ever tire of the desert.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. This is the monumental first sentence of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it came to mind while I languished at the post office for an hour, waiting to pick up a key to my mailbox. Last night I crossed the halfway point of another Gibson novel, The Peripheral, and I’m not sure whether to proceed. Abandoning a book feels like a failing on my part, but doggedly finishing every book I begin, even if the rewards have diminished, might point to a deeper failing. That said, I’ve enjoyed the big-game future-casting in The Peripheral, and Gibson writes like he knows something I don’t.
A nearer vision of the future, via Ryan Oakley: “And, perhaps previewing of the shape of future wars, automated plagiarism detectors have been deployed against automated essay generators.” I’ve added his novel, Technicolor Ultra Mall, to my queue. And I might go for a long walk into the desert after reading this post from Craig Mod: “Basement solitude — isolated without serendipity, static, stagnant, stuck with your face in a screen, manipulated by the algorithms — is the death of the soul.”
Las Vegas feels like the future, e.g., there’s a new face-slapping league. But I’m also living in the past. I loved working with West Coast clients while I lived in the Eastern Time Zone. Sure thing, you’ll have my files in the morning. Of course we can talk at 9am. But when I wake up now, New York has been busy for hours, sending me things to do.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to ditch the lunatic habit of checking my inbox thirty seconds after opening my eyes. These days I wait until I’m showered, meditated, caffeinated, and I’ve done some writing. Then I pick up my telephone and look at all the little red bubbles. Cultivating this small habit was more challenging than it sounds because my lizard brain craves the neurochemical buzz of new information. Maintaining my morning ritual in the Pacific Time Zone will be harder now that I know everyone elsewhere has been busy without me. But it might offer a much-needed lesson in humility: the world will get along fine without me for a few hours. It’s not like I have the nuclear codes.
Yesterday I returned to running after a three-week hiatus, and it was ugly. Today I’ve returned to working on the novel, and the results are the same. Why am I doing this? Why doesn’t my brain work anymore? What the hell is happening on page 182? What’s the point of fiction anyway? And so on. But this is par for the course. Muscle memory dies quickly, but it also returns. It just requires surfing some waves of doubt and self-loathing to find it.
As I begin to orient myself in Vegas, I know I’m edging too close to the Strip when the plasma donation centers appear. Meanwhile, a record-shattering snowstorm is sweeping across the rest of the nation. According to the news, everyone in the Midwest will be dead by Friday.
The population of Vegas is expected to double within the next fifty years. Last night I talked with a man in his eighties. “The Air Force sent me here fifty-nine years ago,” he said. “I fell in love with the desert and never left.” When I told him where I lived, he said it was all desert back then. He mapped the city with his hand and drew a line down the center of his palm. Everything on the left side was desert. “You had to drive for miles to get to the mountains. Now they’re in your backyard.”
Here are some ritualistic Dutch synthetics from ’82:
It’s the longest night of the year, and I went for my first Las Vegan run. Ordering cheeseburgers through a small metal box for two thousand miles has taken its toll. I looked like an abomination as I hauled myself along an empty avenue, screeching and swearing. The mountains peered down at me, laughing in the dark. It was too late at night to run, I decided, and I turned back after two miles.
It was 4:38pm.
I love the night, but there’s too much of it here. Due to some 19th-century railroad logic, Nevada is the only non-coastal state in the Pacific Time Zone, and Vegas is tucked into the far eastern corner, only thirty miles away from Mountain Time. In December, the sun technically sets a little after four o’clock in the afternoon, but it sinks behind the Spring Mountains an hour before that. For the first time I can remember, I’m grateful we’re going to start making more daylight tomorrow.
Until then, here’s some sludgy cold-running new wave from Japan circa 1980:
Life has been a blur since the night C. and I left our car in the driveway of the little house we rented on the edge of the Vegas sprawl. We flew back to Ohio on a jam-packed redeye to collect our belongings. Traveling on Spirit Airlines is a mythic test of a person’s spiritual fitness, and I spent four hours squished in the middle seat, fighting a gargantuan woman for the armrest.
Four days later, I loaded a 15-foot U-Haul with our furniture and pointed it southwest. I drove alone to spare C. thirty hours in a juddering truck. She’ll fly to Vegas in a few days, probably on Spirit Airlines, and I’m not sure who will suffer more.
In Indiana, I drove past the world’s largest mailbox, and I slowed down to admire the holiday lights on a lone farmhouse in the night. In Missouri, I had a fantastic cup of cinnamon coffee at a Flying J before crashing at a Super 8 somewhere in the Ozarks. I followed the path of Route 66, pushing sixteen hours behind the wheel, and by the time I hit Oklahoma, a fugue state had taken hold. Highway hypnosis. White line fever.
A flipped semi burned in the eastbound lanes of Interstate 44. Hallucinatory signs began to appear: Visit the Infant Jesus of Prague. Exit right for Garth Brooks Boulevard. A billboard in Tulsa demanded freedom for women in Iran. As my U-Haul swerved across nine lanes of Amazon delivery trucks, a neon sign asked Are you prepared to meet Jesus? and I was certain I was going to die.
Billboards across the panhandle told me to find nirvana, win a free furnace, and invest in crypto. The radio encouraged me to purchase Patriot Supplies, a bundle of freeze-dried food that will help me “prepare for what’s coming” because I’ll definitely need at least 2000 calories per day. The radio said a record number of guns were confiscated from Americans this year, and eighty percent were loaded. An earthquake in West Texas sent tremors across Amarillo, but I felt only the shake of the truck. I saw a shooting star and a half-moon blazed in the rearview. A sign flew by like a koan: Gusty Winds May Exist.
By the time I left Texas, my vision was vibrating from the stutter and shake of the interstate. Rowdy families, sunburnt truckers, and teenage gangs crowded the Flying J at one o’clock in the morning. The motels in Tucumcari were booked, so I pushed another hundred miles west to my second Super 8, where I collapsed and dreamt about mileage. I woke up in New Mexico near a town called Las Vegas (pop. 13,157) which felt like an omen. A lone cow wandered down the ramp to Interstate 40. I sped across the Continental Divide and continued into Arizona.
In addition to the usual slate of vintage electro and motorik, I soundtracked my journey with an audiobook of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, one of those texts I’ve always felt like I’ve read even though I haven’t. The desert washed past my windshield as the narrator said, “The entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarves, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silence within.”
A few miles west of Kingman, I hooked north on 93, where I was the only vehicle on a Saturday night. Entering Vegas felt like a dream as ‘Fade to Grey’ played on the dashboard while my headlights swooped along shadowy mountains on a vacant parkway. Then a field of light appeared below me, and I remembered Las Vegas means The Meadows.
Another hectic day of touring rental properties. We stopped for lunch at a Mexican spot, and our timing was perfect. Turned out Mexico was playing Saudi Arabia in the World Cup, and cheers and whistles filled the bar. They scored two goals while I ate a chimichanga. Everyone was so happy, and I’m glad we didn’t stick around long enough to find out Mexico wouldn’t make it to the knockout round and their coach was fired.
As we pulled up to our ninth small tan house of the day, “American Woman” rocked the block, emanating from someone’s backyard. It was a fine soundtrack as we punched in the entry code and let ourselves inside a freshly painted home with chipper decals on the walls from an invisible real estate agent. Welcome home! A kitchen you’ll love! From the balcony, we saw the source of American Woman: a chunky old man in a bathing suit climbed out of his tiny backyard swimming pool and poured himself a big drink at his tiny tiki bar. I want to be his neighbor.
(I never knew The Guess Who were Canadian; the lyrics—American woman, stay away from me—can be interpreted many ways.)
At night, I enjoyed driving along smooth parkways to a fast food joint that served spicy Korean pork in a cup. This place feels like the future, and I tried to capture the gestalt with a blurry photo of my screens reflected against the sprawl. This is a photographic style I’d like to improve upon.
Sunny skies with highs near sixty and lows near freezing. After corresponding with several real estate companies, most of which turned out to be automated systems, C. and I spent the day touring homes for rent. Most tours are self-guided now, with robots texting lockbox codes.
Vegas architecture hides from the sun. Blank walls of concrete and stucco face the south, with windows punched in odd places to allow some light but not so much that it will cook everyone inside. Perfect squares of sky look like a James Turrell installation. As we consider each room, there is much discussion of orientation.
I recently learned most Christian churches sit along an east-west axis, with the entrance to the west and the altar to the east. In most cathedrals, stained glass scenes from the Old Testament are on the north wall, and moments from the New Testament cover the south. “This was a theological statement,” write Gabriele and Perry in The Bright Ages. “In the northern hemisphere, the south-facing side of any building receives more sun, so the New Testament would be illuminated even as the Old Testament remained in the shadows.”
As we continue our search, I find myself studying the sunlight through the windows more closely, hunting not only for moments of shade and aesthetic delight but also metaphysical propaganda.
Las Vegas. The Pacific Time Zone is turning me into a morning person, and I do not like it. When I check my watch, I do a double-take, thinking it must be near midnight when it’s only half past eight. The sun goes down at four o’clock here, which does not help. I feel elderly and feeble, yawning and drowsing at ten o’clock. This morning I woke before seven and had no idea what to do with myself. I tried to work on the novel, but my brain was still filled with cobwebs. So I opened my inbox. The Eastern Seaboard had been sending me emails for hours, so I had plenty to do until noon.
After another dim sum lunch, C. and I began to search for a place to rent. We want a box at the edge of the sprawl with a big room with hardwood floors where C. can paint and a small room where I can write. After so many years spent writing in libraries, lobbies, and cafes, the prospect of my own office feels like a luxury, even a little obscene. But the possibility of a dedicated place where I can tack index cards to the wall like a real writer gives me a happy little buzz.
Hundreds of listings cluttered our screens, all variations on the same tan townhouse. We gave them names to keep them straight. Tomorrow we’re seeing Crazy Stairs, Fake Ash Zen, and Astroturf Fire.
The line for the dim sum joint spilled into the parking lot, so C. and I drove two blocks down and went to another spot with excellent bean curd and taro puffs the size of your fist. The exterior was a hellacious strip mall in the 1990s style; the interior had picture windows overlooking a soothing vista of acacia trees and Italian cypress with pink mountains in the distance. This felt like a metaphor.
We tooled around the city’s perimeter, marveling at its sharp edges. A neighborhood is backed against a mountainside. A retaining wall shields a grocery store from the desert rolling behind it. The parkways are pristine and feel particularly futuristic at night. Instead of dead grass and fallen leaves, topiaries and swept gravel fill the medians like an endless zen garden.
Just before midnight, I stepped into the small yard of the house we rented and savored the unfamiliar flora and stillness. There’s something so tranquil about an illuminated palm tree, a science-fictional kind of calm.
C. looking cool as she gets into the car after photographing some dramatic scenery.
Woke up in Grand Junction and kept pushing west. We dipped down to Moab because the name rang a faint bell. The mountains gave way to Martian cliffs, and I enjoyed delicious French toast at the Canyon Steak & Waffle House. The people around us looked healthy and ready for adventure, but we weren’t about to pay $30 to enter the park and look at some arches. We returned to the interstate.
A small green sign said No Services Next 106 miles. It’s the most desolate stretch of interstate in the USA. A spray of clouds sent the light pouring down over the cliffs. “It looks religious over there,” said C.
As we crossed the Nevada state line, fireworks bloomed in the parking lot of a Chevron station. We made good time and hit Vegas a night earlier than scheduled. “Warm Leatherette” played on the dashboard as a sea of light appeared in the valley like a hallucination, and we booked a relatively cheap room on the strip. There are televisions in the bathroom because we should not be alone with our thoughts, and I felt very modern, watching protests in China while I showered in a glossy Vegas hotel.
When I woke up this morning, I struggled to remember the state I was in. Then I looked out the window and saw the Rocky Mountains in daylight.
C. and I needed a break from the road, so we enjoyed the Denver Art Museum this afternoon. As I wandered through an exhibition of Flemish art, I better understood their neurotic obsession with glistening grapes, intricate lace, and water beads on lobster tails. They believed every facet of the world belonged to a divine logic; the closer we look, the nearer we might come to God.
An exhibition of Japanese women calligraphers was filled with exquisite work and shocking stories. After her stepfather chopped off her arms, Ōishi Junkyō taught herself to paint with her mouth. When a monk told Ryōnen Gensō she was too beautiful to become a nun, she burned her face with an iron and wrote a poem: In this living world / the body I give up and burn / would be wretched / if I thought of myself as / anything but firewood.
A fingernail moon rose over the Rockies as we crossed the Continental Divide via the Eisenhower Tunnel, the highest point on the Interstate Highway System at 11,158 feet. We coasted through Vail to admire wealthy families in nice sweaters before pushing west to Colorado Springs, where we had an excellent meal at a Nepalese restaurant surrounded by Christmas lights.
Thanksgiving Day. We woke to the melancholic stillness of a holiday morning somewhere in the middle of America. Even the International House of Pancakes was closed. We sped west into Kansas on an empty interstate, and heavy rain gave way to blinding sun over the plains.
From the passenger seat, C. entertained me with tantalizing facts. The world’s largest Amoco sign was back in St. Louis. The first Pizza Hut is in Wichita. A bone from St. John the Baptist’s finger sits in a museum in Kansas City.
The flatness gets to you—the eye darts around for any point of interest or frame of reference. A lone tree becomes exciting. A sign for the National Agro-Defense Facility fires the imagination. As night fell, the fields of wind turbines turned sinister. Hundreds of red lights blinked on the horizon, pulsing to the drumbeat that filled the car, and I felt like I was in a music video that I wanted to last forever.
After twelve hours on the road, we crashed out in a hotel by the Denver airport. 764 miles to Vegas.
2017 miles from Ohio to Vegas. We cut across Indiana and Illinois and sped through a sea of dead grass and November browns. The billboards we passed felt like chapters from one big story: automatic weapon rentals, bulk ammo, Jesus Christ, and lawyers. Wrongful death? Call Ken! Mid-season leagues are now forming at the laser-tag facility on the south side of Indianapolis. An exit sign for the Ronald Reagan Ameriplex Parkway.
We hit St. Louis too late to visit Cementland, an unfinished amusement park at an abandoned cement factory. Its creator, Bob Cassilly, died while working on the site. They initially thought he was killed in a bulldozer accident; a medical examiner later concluded he had been beaten to death. America is filled with strange dreams and violent endings.
Dinner at Cracker Barrel, where C. and I discussed whether coherent new styles in art and music are possible now that our screens have erased the technological, geographic, and temporal constraints that yielded everything from Dada to Detroit techno. The cold/new/minimal wave tracks from the early 80s that are soundtracking our journey still sound more future-forward than most music today. Perhaps movements are a relic of the 20th century. Maybe I’m just getting old. But I enjoyed discussing Tristan Tzara, Simon Reynolds, Basic Channel, and vaporwave while eating Grandpa’s Country Fried Breakfast.
Tonight we’re staying at a Holiday Inn Express on Mid-American Industrial Road fifty miles east of Kansas City. It’s nice. There’s an Arby’s across the street. 1456 miles to Vegas.
