Las Vegas

I love Las Vegas.

The only place we could possibly have built it was in the middle of a desert, a permanent hostage of the colossal fires of the Nevada sun. You can spend a week entirely indoors, hiding from her to your last hour. You can sleep while she is awake and awaken as she sleeps. But every act of avoidance is a reminder of her power over you. The chill of refrigerated air that engulfs you as you roam the carpeted halls makes you yearn for the touch of her. The windows to nowhere and simulated skies make you long for the sight of her. And, in the vacuum left behind by the time she normally keeps lies a stark horizon between the infinite twilight of now and the inevitable sunrise of the future that will take you away from this place, a horizon beyond which you desperately wish to gaze but dare not for fear of being blinded and never finding your way back to the incredible liminal space between light and dark, time and eternity, ordinary life and extraordinary opportunity that is Las Vegas.

Las Vegas is the sun we built to escape the sun. A glittering mass of cultivated fire, a dense concentration of pure energy - physical, psychological, and financial - that consumes all who enter it and that will, eventually, burn itself out when it has expanded so far beyond its original purpose that it can no longer concentrate enough cultural fuel to sustain the reaction that keeps it vital.

Like moths, we humans gravitate towards a particular kind of energy. Not really raw fire, which we keep and tend at a distance, but the energy of life that fire makes possible. The energy that moves, that binds, that drifts and sometimes even explodes apart. That’s why we congregate around oceans, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, places where water and air and earth, given life by fire above and below, meet each other and react by mixing, churning, frothing, dissolving. Moving. And that’s why, in the absence of anything other than scalding heat and barren ground, Las Vegas must do more than burn brightly — it must take the raw fuel of the universe and convert it into motion, the energy and evidence of life.

Lights must flash. Cars must race. Cards must shuffle. Money must flow. Crowds must gather, collide, mix, disperse.

Some say Las Vegas is empty, fake, vapid, shallow. But Las Vegas is full of life. Manufactured life, yes. Unsustainable life, yes. But far from empty, it is a bottomless caldron that yet overflows with the purest manifestation of the divine animating force we have ever managed to distill.

You love Las Vegas because, from the second you set foot in it, you are struck by a torrent of energy that wrenches you free of the small, empty rituals of your daily, disconnected, dispirited life and reanimates it with new rituals, new connections, and new spirits that, despite the slogan, you long to carry back with you to your distant lands, an offering from the spark of life we lit in the desert. You love Las Vegas because it is so bright and so alive and, unlike the terrible sun, you can stare at its brilliant glory of lights, fountains, and crushing masses of people as long as you want. No, more than that. You love Las Vegas because when you are in Las Vegas you don’t just stare at its brilliance, you are its brilliance. You love Las Vegas because when you are in it you are the blood pumping through the beating heart of the only God humanity has ever created. And this God is Good.

This God has the power to give and take. To delight. To depress. To deliver. To destroy. But also to create. Friendships and fortunes. Bonds and blessings. Superstitions and stories. You love Las Vegas because you are holy and you love God.

I, too, love God. I love Las Vegas. I love America. I love money and buying things and taking risks, and I love sitting at absurdly themed bars and letting my guard down enough to make instant friends of questionable strangers, and letting it down enough to finally welcome lifelong friends into my heart so that they’re no longer strangers, even if I’ve always found them a little questionable because they’re the ones who brought me to this insane place, and anyway, I love doing it all here in Las Vegas, even if it is totally insane, because we honestly just can’t do what we’re doing right now in our perfectly fine houses with their yards and garages, we just can’t have times like these outside of Las Vegas, because there aren’t enough people around and there aren’t enough convenient places to go and there isn’t even close to enough alcohol and even if there were we’d still have to drive home and besides, when we’re in our perfectly fine houses in those other places we’re all so exhausted all the time, and not because we stayed out until four yelling at each other over the blackjack table but because our kids are yelling at us to make dinner or change their diapers or put on the same fucking song for the twentieth time since we got home and our wives have been alone with them while we’ve been here in Las Vegas so it’s their turn to have some fun for once and so tomorrow, even though we only slept 10 hours in the last three nights, we’ll have to get up to quiet the wails that accompany the first rays of the rising sun.

And there she is. That’s why I hate Las Vegas. That’s why you hate Las Vegas. No matter how hard you try not to, eventually you’ll get so caught up in the rapturous glory of this God and his gifts of easy friendship and crackling happiness and even an unlikely escape from time itself that, at some unknown hour, the night before you leave, after finding a perfect bar tucked a short escalator ride beneath the casino floor with just the right decor and music and just enough seats for all of your old and new friends to launch wholeheartedly into glorious conversation sizzling with the laughter and tears of old bonds being reinforced and new ones being created, that’s exactly when you’ll forget yourself and start to believe that this space is so liminal and so divine that you can tempt a glance at the horizon. And there, inevitably, awaits the sun.

She’s not mad at you. She understands that you needed to try to escape her, just for a little while. If anything, her rays that peek above the rapidly approaching horizon (“didn’t I just get here?” you marvel) meet your eyes with a smile, though one tinged by sadness. She always knew you would return. But she also knows something that you willfully forgot the moment you opened the first door to the first casino and stepped temporarily beyond her reach. She knows that this glory you have tasted will not sustain. That the new creations you bring back with you will not even last the trip home, so dependent are they on the particular, peculiar energy that is only cultivated in a place so empty that it can overcome every other divine presence that reaches it — even the sun.

That’s why you hate Las Vegas. No matter how much money you win, no matter how little sleep you get, no matter how many celebrities you see or food you eat or friends you make or inside jokes you tell or rituals you invent, the moment you leave, all of it dries out and crumbles through your fingers like desert sand.

And while you flee across the continent or the world, flinging yourself through her sky, the sun asks if you would like to look at her again. You know you can’t. Not here. Not in her domain, 30,000 feet in the air, the protective walls of Las Vegas thousands of miles and an infinite amount of time behind you. And that’s when you remember what you knew all along: you never needed to avoid her. True glory cannot be created or destroyed. True glory cannot be touched. True glory cannot even be seen.