Day 329 - Turn the lights off when you leave

Turn the lights off when you leave

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 

And so, Las Vegas still stood tall. There had been no great heist, no blockbuster hand at the card table, no once-in-a-lifetime-moment that you only see in the movies. Planes came and went. Another day, a different set of tourists. The dreams were dead, but the fantasy lived on. Someone once said “…so there’s a chance.” If a city could be built on that sentence, this was it. Sinatra once sang about a make-you/break-you town. Maybe if there could be two lines intermixed then that could work. The truth didn’t matter. The reality never did. A million people shuffling and bustling about, just like anywhere else, but maybe something was just a little more broken inside while they did it. Not that the tourists would ever notice.

I heard that once, many years ago, a dream almost escaped, but the city reared its ugly head and swallowed it up before it could. I walked down a boulevard of crushed hope and broken backs with empty wallets. The fifty-year-old neon lights were blinding. I watched as a man used a dime bag to mark his shot on the golf course. No one batted an eye. After the last recession the odds went up as if to keep pace with the inflation. Once upon a time a man could get a free room and a steak dinner for his trouble. The last time I saw a common man I was miles from the strip and there were broken windows and graffiti on the boarded-up motel. But the night sky was illuminated by the monstrosities just a few miles away.

I stood on one street corner in one city, and when I crossed to the other side, I entered a new municipality. I crossed again and changed cities once again. Not that you’d know if you looked around. There were no signs, no indications. Why bother the travelers with little details like where they actually were. I’m sure some brain trust knew what they were doing and what taxes they were taking or chopping up or sharing. Someone was getting rich with a system like that.

I spent a century in Los Angeles, watching dreams crumble and die. I ate like a king, sucking the last ounce of hope out of decay and despair. Walking the streets of Vegas, I can’t believe what I was missing. I thought I had seen it all, tasted the tears, grew fat on sorrow. I had barely scratched the surface. The world was once again my oyster. With this type of sustenance, I might make it another two or three hundred years.