Las Vegas is the very best at showing the bipolar sides of vices, hopes, and broken dreams. Our old mayor even made a statement about how Vegas will basically find your weakness and expliot it. We're excess. We're a party town and a 24-hour city. We trash "history" by imploding the old casinos to build something shiny and new. Even if the casino isn't failing. We build and we build. We're a valley filled with foreclosed homes. Filled with "homeless camps." With the highest unemployment rate in the nation, and eye am sure that the rate is underestimated.
Casinos-in-progress with cranes STILL at the same spot as they were years ago. Jackpot winners to homeless-from-gambling, clubs to slobbering drunks, high-dollar escorts to bag whores, clean-cut dealers/runners to toothless junkie nodded out on the street, famous performer in Thunder to poor aspiring-singer waitress who'll NEVER be known, forever doomed to play in sparsely populated coffee shops (and boy do eye fear that the "music" part of me will also share a similar fate.) But who is the winner and who is the loser? Maybe that jackpot winner is a major business owner in debt and even with the winnings, he's going to still lose his business. Maybe the slobbering drunk begging for beer money WANTS to live that way. Or maybe he had to accept his fate and change his dream. Maybe he came here with high hopes and started to make something, only to be kicked down like this place will do to people, and now he has nothing.
LV is funny because in some ways is like any other bigger city, and in others like nowhere else. There's so much that people do not see beyond "the Strip" - the tourist area. But don't move here to see it - it's also AWFUL when you have no income, apparently we're between 5-10th worst economically of major metropolitan areas in the WORLD.
Eye moved here with a lot of ideas of how things were going to be. And in many ways, this city has let me down and eye'm disappointed. But eye'm not going to go away. Eye am determined to survive. ("If you can make it in _(city)_, you can make it anywhere.") Maybe eye have to put more effort into it than eye ever had, but it's worth it. Eye still have dreams of "how things can be." And every single time eye'm on The Strip, eye look around at the people rushing around, eye look at the shopping centers and up at the big, bright casino-hotels. And it fills me with hope, it fills me with energy. And once again, anything's possible.
heya lickster-
ReplyDeletedon't mean to pry here but are you from west coast Cali?
High desert Palmdale, CA. A couple hours NE of Los Angeles.
ReplyDelete"And once again, anything's possible."
ReplyDeleteNot for you. All you'll ever have is the life of a junkie. You'll never finish school, much less get a job.
So, is it that it's an opiate and that's what dooms a person to being nothing? In this regard, anyone on long-term heavy pain killers are resigned to a similar fate. Or is it that it's illegal, so eye must have imagined that successful car salesman who was also addicted to methamphetamine. Hm. Or is it just "EVERYONE" on heroin never will work. So, those people who work in IT and that girl with her own business, that can't be real. William Burroughs never wrote a book in his life!
ReplyDelete