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The Café
Latte Guide to Bad Karma By Brendan Bouffler ____________________ In spite
of having lived in the Land of the Free [Refill] for the last five years and
having been forced to listen to too many requests from elected leaders for
someone's god to bless America, I've never been a terribly spiritual person.
Recently, though, I’ve started to wonder if the Buddhists are on to something
with their concept of Karma. If it
really is true that bad behavior in past lives gets paid for in the present one,
then I must have spent several cycles of existence as a lawyer, then maybe a
slave-owner or possibly a recruitment officer for the US Republican Party
because I’ve been forced to come to Las Vegas five times now to attend a
convention for work. Catholic penance would never be this severe, so if there is
a higher power in the universe, it's clear to me that he is a vengeful god and
that my name is right at the top of his shit-list.
You see,
every time I fly into Vegas I look out the aircraft window and the frontal lobe
of my brain twists around inside my skull, turns itself inside out, emits a
shrieking noise and makes a run for the back of my head all in an attempt to
avoid dealing with the impossible scene on the ground below me.
From the
port-side window of the plane, I gaze out on a five-thousand room hotel - the
largest in the world, no less - that is painted exactly the shade of bright
green that you would not choose were you designing the largest hotel in the
world. It has lime-green neon trim around all the windows and giant yellow neon
letters depicting the name of the place, just in case you happen to overlook it,
which you might do were you to be looking out the starboard window of the plane
where you would see a gigantic black-marbled Egyptian Pyramid replete with what
appears to be a big white laser beam pulsing out the top, as though scanning for
sentient life-forms. Based on the near total state of gambling-induced apoplexy
in the woman from Tennessee that was sitting next to me on the plane, the laser
probe is unlikely to detect anything in the near future, but it's still there,
year after pointless year, pulsing away into the sky.
The upside
of this is that the light from the laser beam will eventually land on another
planet far out in space and alert them to our existence. The downside is that
you and I won't be around to see the extremely confused and fucked up look on
the alien archeologists' faces when they try to work out what a black marble
Egyptian Pyramid was doing a mile away from a Roman palace and how the canals of
Venice came to be in a place with four inches of annual rainfall.
In order
to make sense of all this, as soon as I touched down I went to one of the bars
in my hotel where Borg Drones (of the Star Trek kind) serve drinks called
“Warp Core Breaches”. Naturally, they arrive in large blue fish-bowl–like
glasses with steam bubbling out the top. Glowing under the UV lights and
containing an offensive amount of alcohol, the drinking of a Warp Core Breach
brings to mind the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster so very amply described by
Douglas Adams as “like having your brain smashed out with a slice of lemon
wrapped around a large gold brick”. It’s the singular way to make sense of
Las Vegas, since once you’ve consumed one everything starts to take on a
semblance of normality and the fact that your frontal lobe has twisted around
inside your skull, turned inside out, emitted a shrieking noise and made a run
for the back of your head no longer presents a problem. Finally, I felt equipped
to deal with the place. The first
thing to know about Vegas is that, geographically speaking, it's a big square
slab of bitumen and concrete in the middle of a desert waste-land. In order to
differentiate itself from the dozens of other square slabs of concrete that make
up this great nation, it has five billion light bulbs and nearly as many
buzzing, jingling and bleeping poker machines that surely use more electricity
than Africa and have the same effect on Elvis impersonators that fluorescent
tubes have on mosquitoes. In the ten
years beginning in 1990, the population of Vegas nearly doubled, which resulted
in all sorts of competition for those four inches of water.
Clearly, someone in the Nevada Electricity Authority left the porch light
on. The main source of the population growth (apart from the tripling in numbers
of people with large side-burns swinging their hips) appears to be retirees
arriving from various part of America where people have large butts, judging by
what I saw sitting in front of the acre-and-a-half of slot machines in my hotel.
Their bulbous posteriors appear to function in a similar way that humps do for a
camel, serving as a reservoir for the long stretches of time between drinks in
the desert, though the drinks here are mainly Bloody Marys and the distance
between bars doesn't seem to justify the size of their reserves.
Anyhow,
they're all here to escape the cold weather in their hometowns and cities, and
thus the arthritic effects that come with old age and a foot and a half of
snowfall. Up until recently the old duffers mostly moved to Florida for their
sunset years, but the simplicity of the Keno slips compared to the Florida
Butterfly Ballot in the 2000 election clearly has its attractions, not least of
which is that in an election you have absolutely no chance of winning your shirt
back and at the very least you know who you're working with when you gamble with
the Mob. The second
thing to know about Vegas is that culturally it's a wasteland in its own right.
There's a very good reason you've never heard of The Las Vegas Philharmonic
Orchestra - it's hard to take one of their performances seriously when the
entire brass section is made up of Bryll-creamed mustachioed men named Tony who
describe themselves as "entertainers" and spend most of their time in
lounge bars singing old Sinatra songs. [As an
aside, I feel compelled to point out that Frank Sinatra never wrote a song
called "Las Vegas, Nevada". He did write one called "New York,
New York" and in spite of (or perhaps, because of) the Pan-Galactic Gargle
Blaster still running through my veins I found myself humming it to myself as I
walked through the casinos each day. This was, perhaps, my subconscious S.O.S.
beacon vainly bleating away in the hope that someone would notice that I was
sentient and so would Medivac me out to safety. In fact, I would go so far as to
speculate that if there were a song named "Orange, New South Wales"
that would have had the desired effect, I would have been singing it in baritone
whilst affixing Bryll cream in my hair and growing long sideburns. But, I
digress...] The third
thing to know about Vegas is that varicose veins don't go with mini skirts. With
a world-leading surplus in retirees and President George II's world-leading
deficit of the economic-variety, lots of the old duffers that live in Vegas are
forced to work for a living. Vegas, in the heady days of the past, was famous
for scantily clad young women serving drinks in seedy cocktail bars. Today, they
are scantily-clad old women serving the drinks in seedy cocktail bars. I really
wanted to lean across the bar, give one a hug, slip her a twenty and tell her to
go back to the nursing home for an afternoon nap or some bingo. I have to get
some good Karma somehow. But in
spite of having experienced all this repeatedly over the last few years it's
only now in the relative safety of the mid-west that I came to ponder, and to
research, the history of Sin City USA. According
to the World Book Encyclopaedia, in the 1850s Brigham Young (the early leader of
the Mormons who led them through the desert to establish Salt Lake City) tried
to convert the local Indians living in the area that is now Las Vegas. He found
them so morally bankrupt that he retreated with his followers and all seven of
his wives to find somewhere comfortable to sit whilst forging the documents for
Utah's application to the US Congress for statehood. The area
was left alone for fifty years, until the turn of the last century when Las
Vegas proper was founded as a water stop for steam locomotives on the rail line
running between prosperous Los Angeles and Mormon Salt Lake City. In doing so,
Hollywood became fully connected to graft, corruption and sexual promiscuity
(thus explaining several future films involving Kevin Costner) but it would be
another forty years until these historically Mormon values were exported back
upstream to Las Vegas, thus saving the movie moguls the need to travel the extra
stop (and go without a drink) when coming up with a script for yet another
wholesome family movie. Finally,
sometime during the 50s city officials perfected the combined application of
modern technology (in the form of electricity) and Mafia marketing techniques to
gambling and created the post-modern form of crass that is the Las Vegas Strip
today. The next time you see a Mormon on Liverpool Street trying to hit you up
for a sermon or a donation, ask him to go to the Blackjack table with you at
Star City. He's sure to be 'connected'. So far all
this makes sense (through the lens of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, anyhow),
but there is one troubling anomaly: when you watch a Hollywood movie which is
set in New York you no doubt get the feeling that Hollywood has hammed things up
a bit. New Yorkers are nowhere near as rude as Hollywood depicts them (we're not
rude, just honest) and few people living in America are anything like Kevin
Costner (no, really). Vegas, however, is an exception.
It is
utterly everything that Hollywood depicts and more. It’s possibly the only
thing the moguls consistently understate. This could be self-censorship in
action so as not to dissuade America's youth from their belief that the world
really is like Fox News says it to be. Or perhaps it's an attempt to keep all
the good movie scripts from being discovered by someone else. I'm more for the
former theory, myself, but you'll have to make your own mind up on that, I'm
afraid. "I report, you decide. Fair and Balanced" - just like O'Reilly
says. But there
is one thing the alien archeologists won't be able to explain, no matter how
much carbon dating they do. By the pool, at the bar, in the airport, or next to
the fuel pump at the petrol station the slot machines (or as I prefer to think
of them: the "Karmic Stabilisers") ring, buzz, jingle and dazzle 24 by
7, reassuring me that the next time I come back to life, it'll be as an Elvis
impersonator. Or maybe even a cockroach. I'm bound to move up in the world
eventually.
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(c) Defenestration Magazine, 2004