What Happens Here Happens Everywhere
C.’s flight home from the Middle West was delayed due to some tornadoes that were tearing up Missouri, so I had time to kill at the Las Vegas airport, where it feels like being returned to a pleasant memory of 1987: corridors of neon, spaceship aluminum, slot machines, and burgundy carpet.
Eager tourists queued up to photograph themselves with the new Vegas slogan. A few years ago, Vegas decided to shake off the sleazy implications of What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. So they hired an advertising agency to drain the English language of any meaning until it became a cheap koan that belongs anywhere: What happens here, only happens here. I pondered this phrase until it became terrifyingly existential.
A tattered man settled into the bench next to me and surrounded himself with a fortress of plastic bags and the weather of the street. He launched into a litany of muttered theories about the government and a man named Bobby. I would have given him a dollar or two, but I never seem to have any cash these days. It might be worth carrying some for these moments. Because I’m goddamned lucky. A few tweaks in the timeline could have left me in his seat, haunted and alone. Hell, it could still happen. Two airport cops eyed the man for a while, then kept walking.
Time stretched into a crawl while my neighbor’s muttering downshifted into a snore. Eventually, the big screen said C.’s flight had landed, and I scanned the faces that passed by, each defined by the simple fact of not belonging to her. When I finally spotted her at the other end of the terminal, she gave a little wave, and time resumed again.
you know the saying “there but for the grace of god?” is there a non religious version?
Good question. I’ve been pondering this all day, but the best I can come up with is “luck.”
I had to kill some time at LAS a couple of decades ago and happened across an Area 51-themed gift shop. It was filled to the brim with alien and flying saucer-inspired memorabilia. There were TVs on the walls playing old X-Files episodes (assumedly on a loop). I bought a large snow globe that had a rocky landscape inside, with a crashed saucer and an alien poking out, happily waving. If you wound it up, it played “Fly Me To The Moon” music box style. Sadly the snowglobe got smashed to bits in my flight’s overhead compartment (what was I thinking?).
Is that store or anything like it still there?
Aw. That snow globe sounded delightful, and I’m sad to hear about its fate. I haven’t noticed an Area 51 shop at the airport but I’ll keep an eye out. I’m sure it’s still there.
Seems like there’s been an uptick in Area 51 kitsch shops and roadside “alien jerky” stands, not only around the margins of Vegas but even further into California. I feel like this energy used to belong solely to the Extraterrestrial Highway, esp. the town of Rachel, which has the Little A’Le’Inn.
I’m not sure if the increasing spread of alien trinkets offers any insight into the state of the nation’s psyche—or maybe just capitalism.