If a Blog Falls In the Woods, and Nobody’s Around, Does It Make a Sound? (Part 2 of 2)

Previously on Chicken Shits…

“What are we dealing with, Army Doctor?”
“It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, Army General. It’s almost like it’s—out of this world.”

“Have we located the nuke, Scientist?”
“We have, Mr. President.”
“And?”
“And we’ve traced them back to this base.”
“Dear God.”

“Bruce, you can’t fly. Nature never intended man to fly. Come back to bed.”
“They said the same thing about pigs, Shannon. They said the same thing about pigs.”

“This is your last chance McStevensen. What’s it gonna be?”
“Noooooooo!”
*BOOM*

Nevada, as far as I could tell in hour fourteen of my trip (switching time zones complicates things. And math is hard), has very little worth mentioning. I’m sure that is a generalization. There is the Nevada Desert that probably deserves a mention at the very least—and that I made tinkle there.

Obviously, Nevada’s big attraction is Las Vegas. But before reaching Vegas, there are a bunch of little towns with lots of bright lights serving as fake outs. Either that, or they are the appetizers you eat while waiting for the entrée.

On a hot summer’s night, before you can even see Las Vegas, you can smell the sin excreting from the city. From the direction I was driving (left), I climbed over a hill, and on the other side waited a sea of lights. I always pictured Las Vegas to be somewhat small—usually consisting of the strip which houses all the big name hotels you’ve seen in the moving picture shows, and little else. But, no—Las Vegas is a sprawling landscape that cuts through the night sky like a knife through warm person. I was relieved to see Vegas has been rebuilt to its former splendor after the horrible attack made on her by Mars in 1996.

My time in Vegas was brief. I meant to stop and pay for my trip through roulette and VIP Room stripteases, but along the way, there were billboards advertising acts like Carrot Top and Kenny G, so I didn’t bother stopping or rolling down my windows. And here I thought they’d cleaned up Vegas (bah dum bum). Seeing Vegas at night is recommended. It has it’s own manmade grace—it’s a symbol of excess, greed, and nonsense. It’s American. Oh, and Siegfried and Roy are there.

This evening’s peradventures ended at one of those fake out towns on the outskirts of Vegas called Jean, Nevada. It was there I hung up my driving gloves and scarf for the evening, and parked my flivver at the Gold Strike Hotel and Casino. While waiting to receive my room’s keycard, through the landscape of neon lights and one-armed bandits, I spotted a single old woman, probably in her late-sixties, playing a slot machine all alone. By the way it looked, she had been there at least as long as I had been in my car driving across the country. This woman, probably someone’s wife, probably someone’s mother and another’s grandmother, sat at her stool, plunking coin after coin into that one slot machine over and over and over again. The scene was just as hypnotic for me to watch as it was for her to partake in over and over and over again. There is no anecdote or funny story to share. Of course, one can derive a lesson from this tale, but that’s not my intention. It was just one of those moments in life that occasionally pops up that captivates you for a few minutes and the rest of the world stops while you witness the human condition in action.

The clerk got me my keycard and I hauled my luggage up to my fifth floor room. The room was the average hotel room, with one exception—there were two chairs in the corner that had leopard skin print on their upholstery. It looked like someone skinned a stripper and used her pelt to create this chair. To be fair to the state of Nevada, I’m sure the stripper died of natural causes (AIDS or a barstool to the back of the head) and since Nevadans don’t believe in wasting any part of the stripper, they used what parts of the stripper they could on chairs for hotels the state over and their metal hips on slot machines, while the rest was rendered into hot dogs.

After roughly sixteen hours on the road and almost 1,000 miles covered, I hit the bed and didn’t hear or think another thing until the next morning. That’s not entirely true. Immediately after flopping out on the bed, I thought to myself, “How clean do you suppose these sheets are, me?” But before I could overreact, I passed out.