Sunday, April 26, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Sewage Tunnels on our Honeymoon
We explored these sewage tunnels on an abandoned military base. They were crawl spaces under the dunes, which extended in the dark, dry and musty.
Abandoned Mine outside of Death Valley
Signs and Symbols
Acne pitted mountains, rise away from the stucco and tile valley. these mountains, covered in spiking thirsty joshua trees, white crosses and white earth, were once the bottom of the sea.
we are driving too fast away from abandoned subdivisions, orange clay covered, unfinished square windows, imagining the desolation and depression of sugar addled women with plastic nails, brown babies and broken air conditioned, unwater, drowning in debt, in the desert. money, slinking down elevators, tumbling out of slot machines, dripping out of fluorescent lights. but not in any form you can grab, inaccessible money,built into the shimmering skin of blue green glass, unbreakable patterns in the dust, flickering in the pool water. You can’t have it. She works two jobs, her pitted brown face hopefully thin, her hair bone straight and pressed flat, no indian waves, no mexican curls, straight like a blond girl, straight like a stripper. pushing oily touchscreens and then touching your processed food and sour milk at starbucks. She avoids eye contact, and stars past you at the talking casino machines, the constant blinking of computerized lights, patterns of communication to mask an inconstinent and chaotic gamble.
Slumped over, plugged in, a plastic chord attached to card, he is connected to the main frame like a phone charger. In the hive, the white middle aged bees sit at loose slots and breath life into the honeycomb. Watery expensive whiskey sour in hand, glasses on his decrepit nose, skin made of paper and desert dust, cigarrette ash and dead sirloin for breakfast. We have 21 years left on our lease, the old sign beneath the monorail reads. 21 years he will spend, plugged in, pressing buttons, peering at the icons. Each one with meaning, a language of signs and symbols that he believe he alone understands, he deserves, he grasps. His low dopamine from a quick life of stock symbols, jack in the box, pizza hut, taco bell, bank of america, Walmart, Heinz. A pre packaged life which started with beatings by a distant father and was marked with the motions of correct expenditure, graduation, wedding 1, wedding 2, birth of a son in a sterile windowless place, death of a mother in graveyard which veritably hissed with automatic sprinklers. Now, life is winding down, he has found his layer of hell and it is the 2nd floor of Harrahs, near the faux marble rest room. He has settled like dust, like flakes of dead skin which fall to accumulate on any object with an angle. He has settled on this machine, and may someday die sitting up, plugged in with his players club card fastening him upright.
Leaving las vegas he said, and I see why. We too are leaving las vegas, where the older woman’s skin is red like jerky, dotted in freckles and age spots, her tattoo that she got at the fair in 1981 barely visible, covered in sun’s lines and markings. She has kept the signs and symbols of sex appeal, bleaching her hair, which grows in her sleep, the color of the desert earth, the flaky and meaningless white and yellow of nordic people. wearing makeup that pretends she has features, painting on a fellini lie of her swollen and dripping face. Her darting eyes are blue and red, the red of sleepless nights and drinks and lines, taken in the back of the rest room, her place of rest, where she inhales a powdered dust of dopamine, it absorbs through her frayed nasal membrane, and she can go all night, pouting, talking, pouring, her mirage of a physical body deteriorating in the 3rd level of Hell at the Rio, or in Caesars, she can keep up with the game.
Dopamine, the God of vegas, the dopest dope, the liquid soma of the nucleus accumbens in the very center of a human brain. Dopamine, making us stream shoulder to shoulder past wig shops and walgreens and starbucks and strip joints. Dopamine, pouring like water from a resevoir in summer, gushing out with each line and drink and blowjob, pummeling the synapses of the young, and speeding on the superhighways of addiction in the neural pathways of the middle aged. They’ve let the water out in the heat of drought, most of it evaporates on the way down, trickling in rivulets down the sides of the casinos, streaming like mascara trails down her face.
The Hoover dam above the modern babylon, stops and stores the decadence of the modern rome, hiding it, hoarding it from the rest of the world, even from california. And then, to be unleashed in the valley of Las vegas, in a torrent, like an inhalation of glass, of methamphetamine. Pleasures of the flesh, proven to follow the same neural pathways as pain. The rush of feeling he gets when he wins 1000 credits, is like a burst of neon light, it is not unlike the lights which illuminate the night. The dying transplanted palms are awash in lights, the tourists bath in it, the dancers strip in it. But nobody loves it, nobody see it rise. They fight the desert, they pour the water on dead earth. They unleash their vital resevoir or pleasure on scorched sand. They funnel the water of the west into the 9th level of hell, where it evaporated upon the fires of unquenchable desire.
Yes, My second visit to Vegas. The first time, I was A child in a hotel pool, circus circus, this is me at nine. Waist deep in water at night, watching the moon, watching my plastic watch. When is it? When is it? Not old enough to gamble, or to see a show, I am fascinated by the illusive patterns in the carpet, not the machines. I am remembering what i saw on the cover of my father’s newspaper at IHOP at breakfast. The last lunar eclipse of the century, past my bedtime. I beg to stay up and see it. I wait in the hotel pool, shivering in my too small swimsuit, it’s plastic fabric pearled and peeling, from swimming underwater, belly on the rough cement pool bottom, I am hiding like a bottom feeder, holding my breath.
I wait and wait, but can not even see the moon disappear, because the lights of the city at night, obscure the night sky. Go to bed disappointed, under bleached out sheets and heavy brocade, not knowing which way my head is pointing.
North and south disappear in the circles of hell, down down down, in, in in.
Leaving on 1-15, we pass whole neighborhoods in foreclosure. Adobe boxes deteriorating, vacant, catching whirlwinds of garbage, plastic bags, gloves and wrappers twirling in delicated spirals above for sale signs. Empty strip malls, torn up carpet, childlike grafitti on half built foundations. Skeletons of planned communities, reduced to atom bomb ruins. All of this decay, on the edges of the galaxy, the epicenter, the black hole of light and water, which is the Vegas strip. The nearer you come, the more likely you fall in, sucked into the bellies of vast casinos, reduced to human fodder for the engine of greed. American flags waving in tatters from the heavy winds which blow off the desert above all this vacancy.
Dopamine, dust and death. Our skin in the sun, first burns, chaps and flakes away. Run your finger on your mantle, and it is your skin in dust which coats your print. We are shedding, snakes in neon holes, slithering into our own shade. Eating our tails, choking on our mercury. I can drive away, but I can never truly leave. It spat me out, and I flee on rubber tires. But I am not free.
21 years left on our lease.
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