Vegas: The 4 Corners of the Apocalypse
1/31/02
The 4 Corners of the Apocalypse
Which Vegas did I find last weekend?
The glittering spiritual landfill and backofbeyond lot where lost souls are temporarily yet eternally warehoused & exhibited & buried & married & ferried. Here the blinking neon makes the void in each tourist's hand look all the blackjackier. Here are the desperate, the clueless, the enanddisenfranchised refuse of Bushamerica shipped in by the planeful. Here are they marched through the gates of McCarron, where the overarching credo shouts: You Cannot Beat the House. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here, Fall Down Upon Your Knees and Console Yourselves with Worship of the King, Ol' Blue Eyes, Buddy Hackett, Tom Jones, Siegfried & Roy, Wayne the RootintootinNewton & buffets serving bloody prime ribs au jus. Here find the modern Manzanar wherein are remanded the hopelessly helplessly hopeful, the addicted, the compulsive, those whose imaginations are as sterile and overheated as Area 51 on an August afternoon. It is the deadend, the box canyon, the lethal flashflood of adrenaline in the afternoon of nothingness, the cardiac event, the bolt from the above on the dolt down below, the floorshow from hell, the ground zero of mirthless Modern Man, the White Sands firing range of the impotent, the 4 Corners of the Apocalypse, the Roswell of the Malignly Extra-terrestrial, the tomb of the unknown anti-hero, the last crappy roll of the lowbottlemized proles before--Eyeless in Gaza, Oedipus Wrecked and his K-Mart Shoppermate ball&chain, bursting out of her easy fit stonewashed jeans, limp back to their anti-Vegas, their bungalow, their rabbit hutch, their planned community of pain, their foreclosure, their downsizing, their plaque-ed up hearts and tartared teeth, their lumpectomies, their SUV's & STD's, their imploded 401K's,their prognoses negativos, their PTA controversies and 700 Club Bookburnings, their Smith&Wessons and Undesirable Discharges and dyspepsias and smug bumper stickers and life everlasting and weedwhackers and vague unexpressed yearnings and silent primal screams and bowel yawps and serpent-toothed ingrates and mute mothers and dead fathers and grasping mistresses and groping supervisors---- to resume their slow two-step on their suburban/exurban/urban/Bourbon/rural/rustic/rusting killing grounds.....
The Vegas I found is the Vegas where the die always come up snake eyes and the hookers demand you hurry up and don condoms and cum, damn you! and there are no swallowers, only those who SPIT you on the wall or vomit drunkenly in your lap and the friends betray you the husbands beat you the whores roll you the celebs scorn you the preachers decry you the prophets prophesy your demise the JP's marry you the chorines kick you the cabbies fleece you the troubadors sing you to your ruin the bellboys importune you the deskclerks dun you the one armed bandits fist fuck you right between the eyes the floorbosses refuse you credit and you come to face to face with your own private demons-in-the-desert, your worst fears about yourself, which you more or less held at bay your whole life but which now step forward in the 3 AM of your mind and kick your ass from here to the Bellagio to the Mandalay to NewYorkNewYork to Caesar's Palace.... for which revelation you pay nothing less than your skin, your bones, your skull, your soul, and your last ragged illusions about your future, past, and present.
What have I done to deserve this you squeak and gibber to the merciless desert stars, to the sadistic stares of indifferent onlookers, your fellow inmates, your fellow wearers of the invisible armbands of befuddlement, your fellow herdlings in the stockyards and feedpens of the City with the Empty Eyes. And the answer comes from the hole where your heart used to be, like an echo from a crypt, or a dry well, or an empty, paid out, mineshaft: You dared to hope you would somehow win the cosmic lottery that is always stacked overwhelmingly against you and demands nothing less than your life and your soul. Now climb back on your plane, you 18 carat zirconium loser. Now face spouse and kids with your flattened wallet, your maxed out cards, your double-mortgaged house and barren prospects and wall-eyes fried by the sight of a millionmillion flourescent suns burning on the ceilings of tenthousandfootballfieldsizedcasinos. It's official. Be you Taiwanese or Montanan or Venezuelan or Saudi Arabian, you have walked across the burning coals of your own starved psyche, danced the night away with the dropouts of a billion 12-step fandangos, linked tongues with the Great Harlot Mammon and been given the brainblowingskullfucking blowjob which has left you twin black holes for eyes & cratered your cranium for good. Or at least until you can get another credit card and a long weekend off to see whether your luck has improved, which surely it has, because how can it get worse? It can. It will. Ladyluck will gladly, gleefully, drill you again and leave you for dead by the shores of Lake Powell and your clattering, grinning, dead flat broke skeleton will do a last danse macabre before it falls to white dry pieces under the burning, pitiless, brass bell of a Nevada sun. Halleluia! You have faced your final temptation, surrendered instantly, and found it joyless, savorless, flavorless. It's official, baby. You're a redwhite&blueblooded American, whatever your nationality, race, creed, or religion. You've just done Vegas. And Vegas has just done you.
The 4 Corners of the Apocalypse
Which Vegas did I find last weekend?
The glittering spiritual landfill and backofbeyond lot where lost souls are temporarily yet eternally warehoused & exhibited & buried & married & ferried. Here the blinking neon makes the void in each tourist's hand look all the blackjackier. Here are the desperate, the clueless, the enanddisenfranchised refuse of Bushamerica shipped in by the planeful. Here are they marched through the gates of McCarron, where the overarching credo shouts: You Cannot Beat the House. Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here, Fall Down Upon Your Knees and Console Yourselves with Worship of the King, Ol' Blue Eyes, Buddy Hackett, Tom Jones, Siegfried & Roy, Wayne the RootintootinNewton & buffets serving bloody prime ribs au jus. Here find the modern Manzanar wherein are remanded the hopelessly helplessly hopeful, the addicted, the compulsive, those whose imaginations are as sterile and overheated as Area 51 on an August afternoon. It is the deadend, the box canyon, the lethal flashflood of adrenaline in the afternoon of nothingness, the cardiac event, the bolt from the above on the dolt down below, the floorshow from hell, the ground zero of mirthless Modern Man, the White Sands firing range of the impotent, the 4 Corners of the Apocalypse, the Roswell of the Malignly Extra-terrestrial, the tomb of the unknown anti-hero, the last crappy roll of the lowbottlemized proles before--Eyeless in Gaza, Oedipus Wrecked and his K-Mart Shoppermate ball&chain, bursting out of her easy fit stonewashed jeans, limp back to their anti-Vegas, their bungalow, their rabbit hutch, their planned community of pain, their foreclosure, their downsizing, their plaque-ed up hearts and tartared teeth, their lumpectomies, their SUV's & STD's, their imploded 401K's,their prognoses negativos, their PTA controversies and 700 Club Bookburnings, their Smith&Wessons and Undesirable Discharges and dyspepsias and smug bumper stickers and life everlasting and weedwhackers and vague unexpressed yearnings and silent primal screams and bowel yawps and serpent-toothed ingrates and mute mothers and dead fathers and grasping mistresses and groping supervisors---- to resume their slow two-step on their suburban/exurban/urban/Bourbon/rural/rustic/rusting killing grounds.....
The Vegas I found is the Vegas where the die always come up snake eyes and the hookers demand you hurry up and don condoms and cum, damn you! and there are no swallowers, only those who SPIT you on the wall or vomit drunkenly in your lap and the friends betray you the husbands beat you the whores roll you the celebs scorn you the preachers decry you the prophets prophesy your demise the JP's marry you the chorines kick you the cabbies fleece you the troubadors sing you to your ruin the bellboys importune you the deskclerks dun you the one armed bandits fist fuck you right between the eyes the floorbosses refuse you credit and you come to face to face with your own private demons-in-the-desert, your worst fears about yourself, which you more or less held at bay your whole life but which now step forward in the 3 AM of your mind and kick your ass from here to the Bellagio to the Mandalay to NewYorkNewYork to Caesar's Palace.... for which revelation you pay nothing less than your skin, your bones, your skull, your soul, and your last ragged illusions about your future, past, and present.
What have I done to deserve this you squeak and gibber to the merciless desert stars, to the sadistic stares of indifferent onlookers, your fellow inmates, your fellow wearers of the invisible armbands of befuddlement, your fellow herdlings in the stockyards and feedpens of the City with the Empty Eyes. And the answer comes from the hole where your heart used to be, like an echo from a crypt, or a dry well, or an empty, paid out, mineshaft: You dared to hope you would somehow win the cosmic lottery that is always stacked overwhelmingly against you and demands nothing less than your life and your soul. Now climb back on your plane, you 18 carat zirconium loser. Now face spouse and kids with your flattened wallet, your maxed out cards, your double-mortgaged house and barren prospects and wall-eyes fried by the sight of a millionmillion flourescent suns burning on the ceilings of tenthousandfootballfieldsizedcasinos. It's official. Be you Taiwanese or Montanan or Venezuelan or Saudi Arabian, you have walked across the burning coals of your own starved psyche, danced the night away with the dropouts of a billion 12-step fandangos, linked tongues with the Great Harlot Mammon and been given the brainblowingskullfucking blowjob which has left you twin black holes for eyes & cratered your cranium for good. Or at least until you can get another credit card and a long weekend off to see whether your luck has improved, which surely it has, because how can it get worse? It can. It will. Ladyluck will gladly, gleefully, drill you again and leave you for dead by the shores of Lake Powell and your clattering, grinning, dead flat broke skeleton will do a last danse macabre before it falls to white dry pieces under the burning, pitiless, brass bell of a Nevada sun. Halleluia! You have faced your final temptation, surrendered instantly, and found it joyless, savorless, flavorless. It's official, baby. You're a redwhite&blueblooded American, whatever your nationality, race, creed, or religion. You've just done Vegas. And Vegas has just done you.
posted by mobydoug at 1:01 AM
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